-Newslaundry.com Media employees are under pressure on the frontlines, often without protective gear or enough support from their employers. As cases of the novel coronavirus began appearing in Dharavi — where some 8.5 lakh people reside on a patch of land measuring 2.4 sq km — news channels and photographers from Mumbai scrambled to capture stories of the chaos and the challenge of preventing transmission in Asia's largest slum. Please click here to...

-Committee to Protect Journalists On March 26, two days after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a national lockdown to control the spreading of COVID-19, Hindi-language daily Jansandesh Times reported that a tribe in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh state, didn’t have enough to eat due to the sudden announcement and that children were eating grass. The same day, the magistrate of Varanasi district, Kaushal Raj Sharma, sent a legal notice to the...

-The Indian Express The impact of the lockdown may make social issues more prominent again in terms of class, at the expense of caste as well as religious identities and communal tendencies. When interviewed by Journalists, several migrant workers badly affected by the COVID-19-related lockdown admitted that they had voted for the BJP in 2019. Indeed, the party attracted poor voters in large numbers during the last Lok Sabha elections, especially among...

-The Hindu They amount to an inhuman and illegal treatment, say Journalists’ bodies A public interest petition was filed on Thursday in the Supreme Court that certain media organisations have issued termination notices, imposed wage cuts and unpaid leave to their employees during the COVID-19 pandemic. A joint petition filed by National Alliance of Journalists, the Delhi Union of Journalists and the Brihanmumbai Union of Journalists said this amounted to an “inhuman and...

-The Hindu The Kerala government has been successful in putting the public health sector back on the rails Every year after the Union Budget, newspapers carry articles critiquing the abysmal allocation for the health sector. As the COVID-19 threat looms, doctors, healthcare professionals and state institutions have been regularly issuing guidelines on the precautions to be taken. However, the ubiquitous fault lines of India’s public healthcare infrastructure are being laid bare as...