-Hindustan Times The second wave will deepen inequality. Expand support to states, universalise PDS, and ramp up MGNREGS now Abandoned by the State that insisted on locking down, refusing to recognise the damage done to their livelihoods, India’s workers asserted their rights and made themselves heard by walking home in March 2020. The long march home was emblematic of the suffering and hardship unleashed by the first wave. A year later, it is...
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‘Where Does All the Grief Go?’ 1,621 UP Teachers Die In Panchayat Polls -Aliza Noor
-Article-14.com Despite appeals not to deploy them for election duty in the midst of a pandemic, teachers were made to work, as the government went back on promises of safety. We spoke to families of nine dead teachers, dealing with the loss of wage-earners, grief, anger and fear Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh): “I lost my wife and my baby, who would have come into this world soon.” The voice of Deepak Agrahari, 30, was...
More »Riverside graves of the Covid dead tell a story of the media’s failure -Kalpana Sharma
-Newslaundry.com And of a crisis of economic distress and hunger that’s gone largely unreported. The defining image of this second wave of the pandemic in India has now become the hundreds of shallow graves along the Ganga and other rivers, replacing the searing images of burning pyres. These graves are a stark reminder not just of the discrepancy in death data between the official and the actual, but they also hint at...
More »Why ‘excess mortality’ figures for Covid must be calculated -Chinmay Tumbe
-The Indian Express They will not only help capture the true scale of the tragedy, but will also help in planning better for the next waves of the pandemic. In his memoirs, the writer Suryakant Tripathi (1896-1961), better known as Nirala, described the river Ganga as “swollen with dead bodies” when the deadly second wave of the influenza pandemic struck India in 1918. The pandemic was a deeply traumatic experience for him,...
More »ICMR unlikely to commission new serosurvey -Jacob Koshy
-The Hindu Vaccination drive likely to throw up erroneous inferences, experts The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) is unlikely to immediately undertake a fourth national serology survey to estimate the extent of exposure to the coronavirus since January. Officials told The Hindu that though discussions were still on, undertaking such a study presented newer logistical challenges and the ongoing vaccination drive could read to erroneous inferences. The ICMR has conducted three national...
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