-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...

-The Hindu Current price negotiated through bulk orders may not be replicable: Finance Secy The first lot of vaccines were procured by the Centre using PM CARES funds at a higher rate than the subsequent rounds paid for by budgetary allocations, The Hindu has learnt from the response to a Right to Information request by a transparency activist. The Health Ministry response said that the initial 5.6 crore doses of Covishield were bought...

-Article-14.com As the Supreme Court demands an oxygen-supply plan from the Centre, caught off guard by an exploding pandemic, the Collector of a remote, tribal district tells us how he set up five oxygen plants ahead of the second Covid wave. New Delhi: In a hearing on 5 May 2021, the Supreme Court asked the Centre to, within a day, present a plan to provide hospitals of Delhi the 900 metric tonnes...

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...

-Newsclick.in According to CMIE data, the national unemployment rate in April registered a four-month high of 7.97% – with urban and rural joblessness at 9.78% and 7.13% respectively – as against the previous month’s figure of 6.50%. The recent surge in COVID-19 cases has sent the pandemic spiralling anew in the country, with its impact visible not just on the already strained healthcare infrastructure but also on the economic front – particularly...