-TheWire.in As her mother lay in the ICU, a young woman fought harder than a government representative to enforce the state’s price cap order for COVID cases. She won the battle, but lost her mother. New Delhi: On June 24, when Mayanka Sanghotra learned that her mother, Narender Kaur, had tested positive for COVID-19, she was naturally alarmed. She could not get through to any of the government helpline numbers listed online,...

-The Indian Express Floods might be as old as Assam, but fighting a pandemic in these swirling waters is a whole new challenge for even the most seasoned health worker. GUWAHATI: It is the wind that has helped Pratima Barman plan her day as an accredited social health activist (ASHA) in Assam’s Dibrugarh district for seven years now. In the sapori (island) village where Barman lives, a strong gusty wind, coupled with...

-The Hindu There is a resonance between Saramago’s literary world and the migrant labour distress in contemporary India The novel, Blindness, by Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago, is strikingly prescient about a sweeping illness. The plot revolves around a mysterious epidemic because of which people suddenly turn blind. The thread It starts with a person driving his car who turns blind while waiting at a traffic signal. He pleads to be taken home and...

-Scroll.in The council chief wrote to 12 institutions asking them to enroll participants in the trials by July 7. Four days after India’s first indigenous vaccine candidate for Covid-19 was granted approval for human clinical trials by the drug regulator, the Indian Council of Medical Research on Thursday said that it wanted to “launch the vaccine for public health use latest by August 15”. On July 2, the council’s director-general Balram Bhargava wrote...

-Scroll.in A doctor looks at the pattern of Covid-19 cases in Rajasthan. On March 25, India went into a nationwide lockdown that had been imposed with only four hours notice. The clampdown on travel resulted in millions of migrant workers being trapped in cities that, even at best of times, are hostile to their needs. Faced with starvation and separation from families, lakhs of workers started walking or cycling hundreds of kilometres back...