In the month of April this year, there has been an unprecedented upsurge in daily new cases and daily new deaths in the country due to Covid-19. States, which reported large increases in daily new cases and daily new deaths, are Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, to name but a few.   Data accessed from https://www.covid19india.org/, which is a crowdsourced platform and an independent aggregator of daily Covid-19 figures and...

-Medianama.com Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised India’s handling of the second surge of the COVID-19 pandemic. These tweets, which are now inaccessible to Indian users of the social media website, include posts by Revanth Reddy, a sitting Member of Parliament; Moloy Ghatak, a West Bengal state minister; actor Vineet Kumar Singh; and two filmmakers, Vinod Kapri and Avinash Das. MediaNama has seen public disclosures...

Although services provided by the gig and platform workers touch the lives of each one of us, we have little knowledge about the role of digital labour platforms in transforming the world of work. Such digital labour platforms have created unprecedented opportunities for workers, businesses and society. However, they also pose serious threats to decent work and fair competition. A recent report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) shows that the...

-Press release by International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems dated 30th March, 2021 * New report sounds alarm on control of food tech, farming data, and corporate takeover of UN multilateral agencies. * Civil society  and social movements can fight back, boosting post-pandemic resilience, slashing agriculture’s GHG emissions by 75%, and shifting $4 trillion to sustainable food and farming. The future planned by agribusiness giants could accelerate environmental breakdown and jeopardize...

-The Hindu Nearly 24 hours after the Centre’s request, the label remains. The government does not have the power under the Information Technology Act to direct Twitter to remove the ‘manipulated media’ tag from certain tweets, experts said. They say the Centre’s move raises concerns of censorship and view the action as “needless interference” in implementation of the terms of service of a private company conducting business in India. The government on Friday had...