-TheNewsMinute.com The scientists said that they have received partial funding and permission for implementing systematic surveillance of new variants of Coronavirus. Over 300 scientists from across India, including renowned names like Prof LS Shashidhara (Professor of Biology, IISER Pune and Ashoka University) and Prof Partha Majumder (National Science Chair, Government of India), have requested Prime Minister Narendra Modi to take steps to open access to various data in order to transparency in...

-The Hindu The government’s tendency to be opaque and blame states is not new Last month, the Code on Social Security; the Code on Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions; and the Code on Industrial Relations were passed in Parliament with little debate. In August 2019, the Code on Wages was passed. The four codes together subsume more than 40 labour laws. The mission statement from the Ministry of Labour and Employment reads:...

Poisonous snakebites have killed more than a million Indians in the last two decades, finds a recently published article entitled Trends in snakebite mortality in India from 2000 to 2019 in a nationally representative mortality study. Published in the open access journal elifesciences.org, the research-based study has found that the country accounts for nearly half the total number of annual deaths in the world caused by snakebite envenoming. Who are the...

-The Telegraph The pandemic has given surveillance tools legitimacy in the eyes of civil society which at other times might have been more concerned about privacy issues Among the “seven” to-dos that Prime Minister Narendra Modi listed for the country on April 13 while announcing the extension of a nationwide lockdown was a call for citizens to download the ‘Aarogya Setu’ app. It would help “prevent the spread of [the] corona infection,”...

-ICF Team/ Newsclick.in At the moment, the looming NPR process betokens a loss of liberty to Indians whether through their inclusion as citizens or their exclusion as illegal immigrants. Dismissing Amit Shah’s statement that the process for the registration of citizens is yet to be worked out, Prof Faizan Mustafa warns that the data collected for the National Population Register (NPR) under Census 2020 will later be used for the National...