View Articles

The officials of the Election Commission supervising and monitoring the assembly elections to five states probably are from some other planet else how could they impose their irrational and whimsical orders mandatory for entering into counting centres on May 2?

Even though the world is into the deep crisis of Covid pandemic, the situation in low and medium economic group of countries with limited resources is precarious. For the first time there is a realization that we need huge resources and meticulous planning for universal healthcare system where each section of the society in all the countries around the globe gets required facilities and we do not suffer inequity in healthcare. High cost of care is affecting the availability of oxygen and medicines to the economically moderate and poor sections. Black marketing is making it worse. There is a situation like health anarchy in the country with people running from door to door for want of required medical assistance including oxygen and medicines. Over and above the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh has warned of strict action even NSA against those who create panic over oxygen. Insensitivity can be gauged easily when the Chief Minister of Haryana says that we should not talk of the dead because they will not come back. Now there are reports that less than 20% of the declared number of oxygen plants under the PM Cares Fund were installed in last one year.

Recently, India fell by 28 positions to 140 out of 156 countries in the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Gender Gap report. The report identifies the decrease in women’s participation in the labour force, from 24.8 percent to 22. 3 percent, as one of the major drivers of the fall. The share of women in technical roles declined further by 29.2 percent.

The crisis is immense, with multiplicity in character, but agenda has been set with only one point, and that is promoting the process of financialisation, and the only way it goes is through destruction. There is no other way to explain the context. Covid 19 is here. We have arrived at the highest, a little more than million new cases and every day going up. Oxygen, the lifeline of any living being, has vanished from public domain. Covid 19 plays its game over lack of oxygen. There is criminal interruption in its supply. The killing disease has become the call of the ultimate. The spectacle of cruel death, staring at innumerable number of victims, who face a terrible end straining to get a single gasp of breath, there is no accountability for the greatest tragedy for years to come. Stormy surge in the number of patients leave a silence aflame with anger and frustration, while hospitals shut their doors in pathetic helplessness. Ambulances carrying the dying patients keep running all night on quiet streets, without reaching anywhere.

The ferocious rise in the second wave of Covid-19 infections and deaths in India has made the working class suffer the most, and hence the May Day 2021 is going to be different. Trade Unions of the country, while demonstrating solidarity of the working class, will also be expressing solidarity with the common people who have become victim of the deplorable callous attitude of the Modi government.

The Covid-19 tragedy that is unfolding in India is of truly epic proportions. There is the scandal of people dying because of lack of oxygen in hospitals; there is the scandal of lack of hospital beds and medicines; there is the scandal of deaths due to Covid being covered up and there is the scandal of the vaccine shortage and profiteering sanctioned by the government. But the biggest scandal of all is the Modi government itself.

The world has already lost 7,000 health workers since the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic and about 136 million health and social care workers are at great risk of contracting the infection while braving the disease to help others survive. However, the tremendous pressure of handling the patients day and night has adversely affected their mental health. One in five healthcare workers globally has reported depression and anxiety symptoms.

Each Mann ki Baat broadcast of Narendra Modi involves elaborate preparations. Often, work on two broadcasts goes on simultaneously. All those who are familiar with television and radio shows know this. But for the average Indian, Modi speaks his mind out every time he airs his Mann ki Baat show on an ‘as is where is’ basis. In fact, the nation was waiting to hear with bated breath what the Prime Minister was going to say in his latest Mann ki Baat on April 25 on the unprecedented crisis in the national capital and elsewhere, in which relatives of Covid-affected patients were running from pillar to post in search of a hospital bed with oxygen facility or even to lay hands on an oxygen cylinder that would save the lives of their near and dear ones. The optics were indeed heart-breaking: patients gasping for breath in the hands of their relatives, doctors breaking down on live news channels saying they have run out of oxygen, hospitals turning away desperate people bringing their near and dear ones, oxygen being administered to patients on the road, in vehicles and amidst the most unlikely settings.

LUCKNOW: More than 125 teachers, shiksha mitra and instructors have died in the past 10 days while performing their duty in the panchayat poll, which is proving to be super-spreader.

In a Manichean world darkened by narrow binaries, Maulana Wahiduddin Khan often stood as a source of light and hope. With his passing away, India and the world have lost a remarkable religious and Islamic theologian, who tried till the very last to bridge the difference especially among the believers of different faiths. A Padma Vibhushan awardee, the Maulana was unfairly caricatured theologian (a Sanskrit Musalam, so to say), nothing can be further from the truth.