-The Indian Express In a nation where access to education remains a fundamental issue and where an individual’s success largely depends on access to resources, shaped by socio-economic and caste advantages, 'merit' is just another form of discrimination. While a public health crisis grips the nation, the recent incident at IIT Kharagpur where a professor named Seema Singh at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences allegedly made casteist slurs during a...
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Shot in the dark - Koustubh Panda
-The Telegraph The government and its health administrators have bungled the roll out of the Covid vaccine but it's the citizenry that will have to play a huge role in controlling the second killer wave This fight against Covid-19 is admittedly the most unprecedented and unpredictable battle that the human race has ever fought against a common enemy; it is not only invisible but also frustratingly elusive. That is why the strategy...
More »The second wave and the Indian State -Yamini Aiyar
-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...
More »Supreme Court forms National Task Force for transparent oxygen allocation -Krishnadas Rajagopal
-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...
More »India learns a bitter lesson for disregarding crucial warnings and recommendations on Covid-19
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...
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