-TheNewsMinute.com The Union government has been blamed for sitting on a pile of essential medical tools such as ventilators and oxygen concentrators while daily thousands of COVID-19 patients hustled for oxygen cylinders and hundreds died gasping for breath. Days after the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) stated that COVID-19 relief aid was being distributed effectively in response to concerns raised by media reports, The Reporters’ Collective has found that...

With the rise in Covid-19 daily new cases and daily new deaths since March this year, media reports (please click here and here) on migrant workers returning back to their native places (i.e. places of origin) from migration destinations (i.e. workplaces likes cities and large industrial towns to where the informal and low skilled workers from the marginalised sections of the society migrate seasonally, and sometimes for a longer duration,...

-CaravanMagazine.in On 20 April, Rajesh Pandit, a 40-year-old owner of a meat shop, returned from Ludhiana to Patna by train. He was running a steep fever. He spent that night at the Patna station, for lack of transport, but was not screened for COVID-19 by the state’s authorities. The next day, he took a bus from Patna’s Mithapur bus stand and reached Baruna Rasalpur village, in Samastipur district. He was not...

-Livemint.com A section of the BJP’s own supporters, and its vocal middle class base appears opposed to the controversial farm laws In 2015, the first Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) central government unveiled an ambitious reform to overhaul India’s land acquisition laws that would have enabled corporations easier access to land across the country. But faced with intense protests from Opposition parties, the changes were rolled back. In 2020, the second Modi-led...

-The Hindu 12-member team to go beyond present crisis, prepare road map for transparent budgeting with States The Supreme Court has constituted a 12-member National Task Force to streamline and ensure the “effective and transparent” allocation of liquid medical oxygen on a “scientific, rational and equitable basis” to States and Union Territories fighting COVID-19. The apex court had expressed its dissatisfaction at the Centre’s earlier “oxygen-for-bed” formula. This “rough-and-ready” arrangement, as the court...