-Hindustan Times The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has witnessed the sharpest year-on-year increase in employment generation in its history in April 2021, government data shows, in a sign that the second Covid wave has caused major reverse migration adding to rural economic distress. According to rural development ministry data, around 22 million households have got work under the job guarantee in the month of April 2021, which is...

-PTI/ NDTV.com Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged people take precautions against the coronavirus and warned against its spread in rural areas. New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said the coronavirus pandemic is rapidly spreading in rural areas, as he urged citizens to take precautions, wear masks and maintain social distance to check spread disease that has claimed at least 2.6 lakh lives. The government, he said, is working on "war footing"...

-The Hindu Government hospitals in Dharmapuri and Krishnagiri have taken selective cover under the ICMR ‘Cause of Death’ protocol to undercount COVID-19 deaths DHARMAPURI/ KRISHNAGIRI: On Wednesday, the Government Dharmapuri Medical College Hospital administration was on a fire-fighting mode, fighting off queries on “rumours of 47 COVID deaths on a single day on Tuesday at the hospital.” It started off with an unverifiable WhatsApp message that was subsequently denied by the hospital administration....

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,...

-The Indian Express This initiative, officials said, is part of a wider effort on their part to work towards containing the pandemic in rural areas, with the situation beginning to come under control in urban parts of the district. Gurgaon: With Covid cases emerging from the district’s rural areas during the second wave of the pandemic, the Gurgaon administration has begun setting up isolation centres in villages as well. “Although the first wave...