-Press release by Right to Food Campaign, Jharkhand chapter, dated 26th May, 2020 Following the first round of quick survey of essential facilities in rural areas of Jharkhand that was conducted during the first week of April 2020, a second round of survey was done in the second and third week of May this year by members (called "observers") of the Right to Food Campaign, state chapter. Like the previous one,...

-The Telegraph The pandemic has given surveillance tools legitimacy in the eyes of civil society which at other times might have been more concerned about privacy issues Among the “seven” to-dos that Prime Minister Narendra Modi listed for the country on April 13 while announcing the extension of a nationwide lockdown was a call for citizens to download the ‘Aarogya Setu’ app. It would help “prevent the spread of [the] corona infection,”...

-The Indian Express As the national lockdown entered its second week, The Indian Express travelled across four states to track this unprecedented exodus, examine what social distancing and isolation means in towns and villages off camera and off the highway — and what could await the first COVID-19 patients here. Morena (Madhya Pradesh): They built homes, offices, even cities. They worked in technology companies. They cooked the food we ate, cleaned the...

-Newslaundry.com It’s a repository of public datasets on Indian agriculture and socioeconomic indicators and, going forward, on financial inclusion and rural development. Data, they say, is the new oil. It undergirds much of the modern economy and, increasingly, the polity. There’s hardly a socioeconomic sector that big data doesn’t drive today, from the cutting edge of scientific research and technology to the mundane chore of buying groceries. The sheer volume of...

-The New Indian Express The Survey of India plans to use drones to create a high-resolution map of every inch of India. It comes with unprecedented privacy and security challenges The Survey of India (SoI) has embarked upon an ambitious project of using drone imaging to create an ultra-high resolution spatial and topographic map of India. Professor Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary, Department of Science and Technology, calls it the biggest endeavour in Indian...