-The Indian Express While the Sikkim government has launched the Sikkim Edutech App to help students from Class 9-12 cope with the learning loss, it's the junior students and those in far flung areas who were left with little support. Sometime in April, with COVID forcing schools shut, Indra Mukhi Chhetri, a maths and science teacher in a rural area of South Sikkim district, began worrying about her students. While schools were...

-Livemint.com/ howindialives.com The recovery of India’s foreign trade from the pandemic is patchy. But it’s better in exports than in imports On 15 Aug, standing on the Red Fort ramparts, Prime Minister Narendra Modi reiterated his government’s economic vision of self-sufficiency, adding that India would aim to become the supplier to the world. A day earlier, India had reported its latest trade numbers, and for the second successive month, India’s goods exports...

-PTI/ The Telegraph The bench noted that while Maharashtra police had acted mechanically in the case, the state government had taken steps under ‘political compulsion’ Bombay High Court has said the government made scapegoats of the foreign nationals who attended the Tablighi Jamaat in Delhi in March by accusing them of spreading COVID-19, and that there was a “smell of malice” in the action taken against them. “A political government tries to find...

-The Hindu The resultant distress in India has exacerbated pre-existing structures of disadvantage based on social identity In his book, The Great Leveler, Walter Scheidel, the Austrian economic historian, argues that throughout human history, there have been four types of catastrophic events that have led to greater economic equality: pandemic, war, revolution and state collapse. Currently, the world is going through one of them: a massive COVID-19 pandemic. In Scheidel’s analysis, the...

-The Hindu 2 companies that got ₹22 cr. advance in May later dropped from Ministry list. Two firms given purchase orders for indigenously manufactured ventilators for COVID-19 treatment funded by PM-CARES have failed a clinical evaluation by the Health Ministry’s technical committee, according to information accessed through the Right to Information (RTI) Act. The firms — Jyoti CNC Automation and Andhra Pradesh MedTech Zone (AMTZ) — had already received ₹22.5 crore in advance...