-IndiaSpend.com The government has said that the economic impact from the second Covid-19 wave will be less than that of the first. But economists point to signs of a growing rural economic crisis, and call for urgent relief measures to ward off long-term damage. Siolim, Goa: Ramesh Ram, 31, is listed as a textile industry staff worker in the administration's database of migrant workers in south west Bihar's Kaimur district. But for...

-ThePrint.in A flawed procurement process has resulted in hospitals getting cheap ventilators, many of which are unusable, say doctors even in BJP-ruled states. Maharashtra was witnessing an alarming surge in Covid-19 cases and deaths when 150 ventilators arrived at the Government Medical College and Hospital in Aurangabad in the third week of April. The Union health ministry had sent them. The hospital further distributed the machines to other district and private hospitals in...

-The Hindu Official secrecy on pandemic policies aggravates a crisis In August 2020, the Modi government constituted the National Expert Group on Vaccine Administration for COVID-19 (NEGVAC) as a nodal agency on all matters related to vaccine administration and rollout. Asked under the Right to Information (RTI) Act for details of the NEGVAC’s meetings, the Health Ministry, which anchors the expert group, replied that it does not know where the concerned documents...

-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...

-IndiaSpend.com Where are nutrition programmes failing and why? To accurately understand this and for ideas on how to efficiently target the crisis of malnutrition among Indian children, it is necessary to collect and use data from villages, says a new study Mumbai: India must incorporate village-level data in its policies on child malnutrition to target beneficiaries and their specific needs more effectively, says a new study that analysed data across 597,121 census...