-Livemint.com India has had the seventh-longest school closure in the world, affecting over 300 million school-children. Underprivileged students without access to smartphones and computers have been hit hardest For most people across the world, how much they earn is determined by how wealthy and well-educated their parents were. But the degree of ‘persistence’ in incomes across generations is much higher in India than in other developing countries, a team of World Bank...

-The Hindu Paediatric wards connected to central oxygen pipeline in view of third wave warnings The tribal-dominated Banswara district in southern Rajasthan has taken the lead in creating first-of-its-kind paediatric COVID-19 care facility as part of preparations for a possible third wave of infection. Beautified with colourful drawings and cartoons depicted on the walls, the dedicated wards will cater to children with different stages of coronavirus infection. The district administration identified the buildings...

-Newsclick.in Finance ministers from G7 countries have agreed on a deal to check tax avoidance by the biggest multinational conglomerations. How the G20 reacts to this accord and how these plans are implemented, remains to be seen. A recent report by ProPublica has revealed how multibillionaires from the US, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, among others, have managed to avoid paying federal taxes...

-The Hindu Official secrecy on pandemic policies aggravates a crisis In August 2020, the Modi government constituted the National Expert Group on Vaccine Administration for COVID-19 (NEGVAC) as a nodal agency on all matters related to vaccine administration and rollout. Asked under the Right to Information (RTI) Act for details of the NEGVAC’s meetings, the Health Ministry, which anchors the expert group, replied that it does not know where the concerned documents...

-The Hindu The court quoted from a National Statistics Office survey of 2018 which said that around four per cent of the rural households and 23% of the urban households possessed a computer Taking a dig at the Centre’s argument that the poor and marginalised can lean on friends to register online for vaccination, the Supreme Court has said even the digitally literate are finding it hard to get vaccine slots on...