-The Indian Express Innovation in vaccine production can have an impact only if it is accessible to all. Patents and access to life-saving drugs has always been an emotive and contentious issue. The right to healthy life is a moral minimum, and to find a rational basis to deny it is deeply offensive to the idea of life itself. At the same time, pharma corporations and institutions claim patents are a just...

With the rise in Covid-19 daily new cases and daily new deaths since March this year, media reports (please click here and here) on migrant workers returning back to their native places (i.e. places of origin) from migration destinations (i.e. workplaces likes cities and large industrial towns to where the informal and low skilled workers from the marginalised sections of the society migrate seasonally, and sometimes for a longer duration,...

-TheThirdPole.net Farmers and consumers are opting to grow coconut trees despite the national push for domestic palm oil production Jeyalakshmi Palaniappan, 55, planted one-and-a-half acres of oil palm in a village in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. But she found cultivating them financially unviable and, nine years later, she uprooted them. Now, she grows coconut trees on another piece of land in the same village, and these are bringing her...

-The Hindu Government hospitals in Dharmapuri and Krishnagiri have taken selective cover under the ICMR ‘Cause of Death’ protocol to undercount COVID-19 deaths DHARMAPURI/ KRISHNAGIRI: On Wednesday, the Government Dharmapuri Medical College Hospital administration was on a fire-fighting mode, fighting off queries on “rumours of 47 COVID deaths on a single day on Tuesday at the hospital.” It started off with an unverifiable WhatsApp message that was subsequently denied by the hospital administration....

-The Hindu The pandemic has highlighted the importance of expanding social security nets Pinki is a 28-year-old Dalit woman from Saharanpur, U.P. Her husband met with an accident during the national lockdown in April 2020. The two of them had to sell all their belongings for his treatment and subsequently became dependent on her parents. Such avoidable miseries were heaped on millions due to the unilateral national lockdown in 2020. The monthly...