In the month of April this year, there has been an unprecedented upsurge in daily new cases and daily new deaths in the country due to Covid-19. States, which reported large increases in daily new cases and daily new deaths, are Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, to name but a few.   Data accessed from https://www.covid19india.org/, which is a crowdsourced platform and an independent aggregator of daily Covid-19 figures and...

-Press release by Common Cause dated 19th April, 2021 New Delhi: There are silences and gaps in the law that the questionable elements in the police take advantage of and undermine the rule of law, said Justice Madan B Lokur, former Justice of the Supreme Court of India. Delivering the Keynote Address on ‘Is the Rule of Law Backsliding in India?’ at the launch of the Status of Policing in India Report...

-The Hindu They were “harassed, abused and traumatised” and disparagingly called ‘coronavirus,’ says study A study commissioned by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) on racial discrimination and hate crimes against people from the northeast States found that the “northeast India seamlessly fits [an] Indian’s imagination of a Chinese person”. The study found that 78% of the people from the region who were interviewed believed that physical appearance was the most...

-The Indian Express Hypothetically, if Ashok Kumar had been a conductor on any of the other 20 buses except the one the victim travelled in, he would not have even been an accused. On one of these bleak, foggy mornings that make for reflection, my mother wondered aloud how my life might have turned out if we hadn’t moved from Bombay to Delhi when I was a teenager. Not fundamentally differently, I...

-The Indian Express Nearly three-fourth of the population depends on government facilities; of the 2.60% who suffer from chronic illnesses, most have diabetes. # Two lakh children remain “out of school”, including 64,813 due to “financial constraints”. # Over six lakh between 0-6 years are outside the net of anganwadis, which cover less than half of Delhi’s pregnant women. # Over 63% people use buses for commuting, while only 6% depend on the flagship...