-The Hindu Figures corroborate Telangana High Court’s concerns with drastic undercounting of COVID deaths. Hyderabad: The number of “excess deaths” registered in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) ever since COVID-19 hit (from April 2020 to May 2021), is over 10 times the officially recorded figure of 3,275 deaths for the corresponding period in the entire State of Telangana. There were an estimated 32,752 “excess deaths” — 18,420 between April and December...

-The Hindu A takeaway from the pandemic is that India needs to revisit and refurbish its health infrastructure in the rural areas The two consecutive waves of COVID-19 and Mucormycosis have left us shattered. Multiple bruises have been caused to us. But during the second wave of the pandemic, it is our rural people who are struggling the most. They are struggling to get prompt and quality health care. The key role...

-The Hindu The court quoted from a National Statistics Office survey of 2018 which said that around four per cent of the rural households and 23% of the urban households possessed a computer Taking a dig at the Centre’s argument that the poor and marginalised can lean on friends to register online for vaccination, the Supreme Court has said even the digitally literate are finding it hard to get vaccine slots on...

A recent report by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) states that the countrywide lockdown imposed on 25th March, 2020, which was extended for nearly two months in phases, affected the food and nutritional status of vulnerable sections of the Indian population. It says that a programme like the Mid-Day Meal Scheme covers four-fifth of primary-school-aged children in the country that helps in improving not only nutrition but also...

With the rise in Covid-19 daily new cases and daily new deaths since March this year, media reports (please click here and here) on migrant workers returning back to their native places (i.e. places of origin) from migration destinations (i.e. workplaces likes cities and large industrial towns to where the informal and low skilled workers from the marginalised sections of the society migrate seasonally, and sometimes for a longer duration,...