-Frontline.in The government uses specious arguments on COVID deaths and recoveries in comparison with other countries to cover up for its ill-thought-out strategies. On June 1, while briefing the media, the Joint Secretary (Health), Lav Agarwal, presented several PowerPoint graphs showing how India’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic was on a par with, if not better than, many countries vis-a-vis mortality and recovery rates. This was on a day when the number...

-The Hindu The AAP will hope that the Assembly polls are a referendum on its government’s work Delhi, the Union Territory (UT) that hosts India’s capital city, might lag behind several States in total population and in area, but it enjoys outsize significance in terms of media and political attention. With 1.47 crore electors spread across the largely metropolitan national capital region and its pockets of rural voters in some suburbs, Delhi...

-The Hindu The campaign to end open defecation can succeed only if it takes communities with it India’s declaration on the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi that its rural areas are now open defecation-free will be acknowledged around the world as a milestone in its developmental journey. Cleanliness and sanitation were central to Gandhi’s concerns for his vast number of impoverished countrymen, and should ideally have been pursued zealously by governments...

-TheWire.in The budget does little for the most vulnerable populations such as women working in the informal sector or their young children. Just by looking at the numbers, the Budget for health seems promising. The total allocation for the department of health and family welfare (HFW) has increased by about 16%, which could be seen as a substantial hike considering there was hardly any year-on-year expansion during the previous term of this...

-TheWire.in While no one can argue that India may moving in the right direction in terms of sanitation, all is not well. Despite increasing focus by the government and programmes such as the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, unsafe sanitation work, loosely captured under the catch-all phrase manual scavenging, still exists in India. There are five million people employed in sanitation work of some sort in India with about two million of them working...