-The Telegraph If the estimates are correct, it would become the country with the highest death toll, well ahead of around 800,000 deaths so far in the US and 600,000 in Brazil India’s Covid-19 mortality is six to eight times higher than official counts, research released on Wednesday has estimated, reinforcing through a novel methodology earlier suggestions that undercounting had masked the true ferocity of the second wave. The study has estimated that...

-Scroll.in At a time when upper classes continue to thrive on waves of profit maximisation, the social and economic safety net of the poor has been gradually eroding. Amidst all the talk on two Bharats, are we seeing a time horizon where India’s elite may abandon the country’s poor and vulnerable? This is a question I have been contemplating about for a few months now. My curiosity peaked days after the recent Union...

-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...

-The Hindu Its lustre is fading as there are threats from emerging social and environmental risks, but the question is how Kerala has long been recognised to have done many things right. For years the darling of development experts, non-governmental organisations and social activists, the ‘Kerala Model’ seemed to show that impressive levels of human development indicators — in Health, education and quality of life, comparable even to some rich countries —...

-The Hindu Negotiations are at a “critical and sensitive” stage in Geneva, say sources India runs the risk of being excluded from a proposal it co-authored at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations, in 2020, to “temporarily waive” intellectual property rights (IPR) held, by primarily Western countries, on vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics for covid-19. Geneva Health Files, a Switzerland-based newsletter portal that tracks developments in intellectual property, first reported on Friday that “a...