-Newslaundry.com The Hindi newspaper has aggressively spotlighted the ground realities that governments tried to hide from the public. In the afternoon on April 10 this year, the editorial team of Divya Bhaskar in Ahmedabad gathered in the office to plan the next day’s edition. One news item caught the attention of the paper’s Gujarat editor, Devendra Bhatnagar. The state BJP president, CR Patil, had claimed that he would be giving away 5,000...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Riverside graves of the Covid dead tell a story of the media’s failure -Kalpana Sharma
-Newslaundry.com And of a crisis of economic distress and hunger that’s gone largely unreported. The defining image of this second wave of the pandemic in India has now become the hundreds of shallow graves along the Ganga and other rivers, replacing the searing images of burning pyres. These graves are a stark reminder not just of the discrepancy in death data between the official and the actual, but they also hint at...
More »Why ‘excess mortality’ figures for Covid must be calculated -Chinmay Tumbe
-The Indian Express They will not only help capture the true scale of the tragedy, but will also help in planning better for the next waves of the pandemic. In his memoirs, the writer Suryakant Tripathi (1896-1961), better known as Nirala, described the river Ganga as “swollen with dead bodies” when the deadly second wave of the influenza pandemic struck India in 1918. The pandemic was a deeply traumatic experience for him,...
More »The scale of Gujarat’s mortality crisis -Aashish Gupta & Murad Banaji
-The Hindu Analysis of excess deaths from the civil registration system spotlights the systematic obfuscation in official statements By all accounts, the mortality impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been exceptionally large. Crematoria, burial grounds, and, in some places, even riverbeds are full. Tragically, almost everyone has lost at least one person close to them. Given this reality, few people have much faith in official COVID-19 death counts. How many COVID-19 deaths...
More »Agri Ministry’s New App Gives Microsoft Access to Millions of Farmers’ Personal Data -Sashwata Saha
-TheCitizen.in ‘The whole process is faceless’ As the managing director of CropData Sachin Suri explained to Microsoft’s news desk last year, the abstract looking artwork behind him is not a painting. “This is actually a spectral analysis satellite image of farms. Each tiny spot, or a geo-spatial tile, is an actual field in Punjab and the different colors denote the stress levels in individual farms.” That frame is the crux of what CropData,...
More »