-Hindustan Times The Centre and states are at war, but India urgently needs a coordinated response. It’s not too late. But soon it will be In an influential paper published over a decade ago, the economist Lant Pritchett described India as a “flailing State” — in which the head, that is the elite institutions at the national level (and, in some cases, state level) remained sound and functional but was no longer...

-The Hindu 12-member team to go beyond present crisis, prepare road map for transparent budgeting with States The Supreme Court has constituted a 12-member National Task Force to streamline and ensure the “effective and transparent” allocation of liquid medical oxygen on a “scientific, rational and equitable basis” to States and Union Territories fighting COVID-19. The apex court had expressed its dissatisfaction at the Centre’s earlier “oxygen-for-bed” formula. This “rough-and-ready” arrangement, as the court...

-CaravanMagazine.in A series of interviews with over a dozen Bharatiya Janata Party Leaders, mahants of the Akhil Bharatiya Akhara Parishad and various officers associated with the Haridwar Mahakumbh revealed that the former chief minister of Uttarakhand Trivendra Singh Rawat was fired overnight in March 2021 for insisting that Mahakumbh should be restricted. At least five mahants and two BJP Leaders confirmed that the ABAP, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and some Uttarakhand...

India is facing a second and worse wave of Covid-19 pandemic. At this time, the country requires journalism to tell the stories of courage, of loss and grief, of the state of preparedness and about the efforts being made by communities, individuals, civil society and government. Journalists are needed to document with rigour the gaps and lacunae in governance when it appears. At the same time, journalists need to be vigilant about...

In the month of April this year, there has been an unprecedented upsurge in daily new cases and daily new deaths in the country due to Covid-19. States, which reported large increases in daily new cases and daily new deaths, are Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, to name but a few.   Data accessed from https://www.covid19india.org/, which is a crowdsourced platform and an independent aggregator of daily Covid-19 figures and...