-National Herald The plea says the Centre failed to “undertake timely and effective measures for containing transmission of disease within India” despite being notified about the same by WHO in January, 2020. Six retired bureaucrats have moved the Supreme Court seeking an independent inquiry by a Commission appointed under the Commissions of Inquiry Act, 1952, into the Central Government's "gross mismanagement" of the COVID-19 pandemic in India, legal news website LiveLaw.in has...

-The Indian Express For July 1, the normative minimum stocks to run the Targeted public distribution system (TPDS) and other welfare schemes, plus maintain a strategic reserve over and above that, are 27.58 mt of wheat and 13.54 mt of rice. Despite efforts at disposing of surplus foodgrains – including by distributing these free under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY) and a special scheme for migrant labourers returning to...

Poisonous snakebites have killed more than a million Indians in the last two decades, finds a recently published article entitled Trends in snakebite mortality in India from 2000 to 2019 in a nationally representative mortality study. Published in the open access journal elifesciences.org, the research-based study has found that the country accounts for nearly half the total number of annual deaths in the world caused by snakebite envenoming. Who are the...

-Newsclick.in Even the lifting of the lockdown hasn’t brought much solace to the workers who say that job opportunities in the market are next to none, while their already depressed wages are witnessing further cuts. Construction workers staged demonstrations across the country on Monday, highlighting their plight amid the COVID-19 pandemic with the lack of savings and absence of any social security measures. Led by Construction Workers’ Federation of India (CWFI), the workers,...

-Hindustan Times The World Health Organisation has estimated that between 81,000 and 138,000 people die from snake bites globally each year, and of these, nearly half are in India. Nearly 1.2 million people died from snake bite deaths in India between 2000 and 2019, and many of these fatalities can be avoided by adopting a series of Targeted precautions, a new study has pointed out. Published in the open access journal eLife, the...