-Citizens for Justice and Peace and The Wire Data suggests that areas in eastern Uttar Pradesh, especially PM Modi’s Lok Sabha constituency of Varanasi, had 60% Excess Deaths during the pandemic relative to 2019. The Wire is grateful to Murad Banaji for his help with preparing this report. Data collected and analysed by Citizens for Justice and Peace, a human rights organisation, and independent experts shows deaths in the Purvanchal region of eastern...

-TheWire.in A bench comprising Justices M.R. Shah and B.V. Nagarathna said that state governments cannot say that fraudulent claims are being made by families of COVID-19 victims. New Delhi: The Supreme Court highlighted that official statistics on COVID-19 deaths, released by states, were “not true” and directed state governments to pay compensation to relatives of deceased people who have applied without rejecting the claims on technical grounds. “Official statistics are not true on...

-TheWire.in/ The Reporters' Collective * Excess Deaths in Rajasthan, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh were over 12-times the corresponding official COVID-19 death toll until early January 2022. * Data from across the country suggests governments are undercounting COVID-19 deaths by the lakhs, possibly to avoid the charge of epidemic mismanagement. * As a result, facilitated by disparate protocols, poor record-keeping and red-tape, thousands of families haven’t received the compensation they are due. Last year, just as...

In the month of January this year, more than 100 homeless persons died (please click here and here to access) in Delhi-NCR due to cold wave like conditions. Although a Delhi-based non-government organisation (NGO) Centre for Holistic Development (CHD) made that claim, and therefore asked the Chief Minister of Delhi to make proper arrangements for the homeless poor during winters, the officials of the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB)...

-TheWire.in In an interview with Karan Thapar, the epidemiologist said the reason the WHO doesn’t trust India’s COVID-19 death count is because the undercounting is substantially greater than in other countries. Prabhat Jha, one of the world’s most highly regarded epidemiologists, has said that the World Health Organisation (WHO) does not trust India’s COVID-19 death figures and, therefore, when it made its first estimate of global deaths, it did not include India’s...