-Press release by World Meteorological Organization (WMO) dated 18 May 2022 Geneva, 18 May 2022 (WMO): Four key climate change indicators – greenhouse gas concentrations, sea level rise, ocean heat and ocean acidification – set new records in 2021. This is yet another clear sign that human activities are causing planetary scale changes on land, in the ocean, and in the atmosphere, with harmful and long-lasting ramifications for sustainable development and...

-The Telegraph  Jon Wakefield picks holes in Narendra Modi government’s twin claims Jon Wakefield was disappointed. India’s health ministry had issued a statement decrying the methodology adopted by the World Health Organisation to estimate excess deaths worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. The exercise indicated 4.7 million excess deaths in India, 9.8 times the country’s official COVID-19 death toll. The ministry statement itself didn’t surprise Wakefield. Five times since July 2021,...

-The Telegraph Union health ministry asserts that Civil Registration System figures should be considered 'authentic' A table on “estimated deaths” is missing from India’s annual birth-and-death report for 2020. The absence has fuelled fresh questions about how the Union health ministry calculated that authorities had registered 99.9 per cent of the country’s deaths in 2020, the COVID-19 outbreak’s first year. A 99.9 per cent registration level would mean the country had recorded almost all...

-The New Indian Express The government needs to understand that better official statistics are required not just to counter estimates by global agencies. It is required for better policymaking. The government is upset with the estimates of the World Health Organisation (WHO) about how many Indians died because of the pandemic. India’s official COVID-19 death count in 2020 and 2021 is 481,000. The WHO puts India’s death toll at 4.7 million till...

-TheWire.in/ Undark.org Under the pretext of COVID-19 safety, employers have tightened restrictions on live-in domestic workers in India. On a typical humid Sunday afternoon in July, Soni Tirki would be polishing off the chicken and rice that her mother makes every time the 20-year-old returns home. “I sit at ease and enjoy my meal,” Tirki says. “I eat however much I want. Nobody can stop me. Nobody can judge me.” But on this...