'On rare occasions, the Indian government—which prides itself on visions of universal digital literacy, online services, and biometrical identity schemes—still conducts certain official communications by radiogram. An operator sitting at a radio transmitter taps out a message, and then a receiver spits out the transmission in another part of the country, generating an instant legal document.
'The sun had already set on March 7 when Nooh Pullichalil Bava received the call. “I have bad news,” his boss warned. On February 29, a family of three had arrived in the Indian state of Kerala from Italy, where they lived. The trio skipped a voluntary screening for covid-19 at the airport and took a taxi 125 miles (200 kilometers) to their home in the town of Ranni. When they started developing symptoms soon afterward, they didn’t alert the hospital.
'...Officials predicted that if all 171.3 million households participated, the loss of load could be 12,452 MW. The actual total demand drop recorded during the event turned out to be 31,089 MW – more than twice as high! This implies that in order to save the grid and keep voltages and line loads within permissible limits, engineers turned off select transmission lines. This in turn means large areas were without power before and during the event, and so compliance was not totally voluntary.
'India has had a Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund (PMNRF) since 1948. In recent years, that fund has emerged as the primary focal point for the mobilisation of public donations in the wake of natural disasters like floods and earthquakes. On March 24, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a national lockdown, the Union home ministry issued a notification declaring the COVID-19 epidemic in India to be a ‘natural disaster’ and invoking the provisions of the National Disaster Management Act to give the government coercive powers.
'Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced a complete lockdown of the country for a period of twenty-one days. All work, except that of essential service providers, is to be stopped. Daily wage workers nationwide are suffering under the lockdown because of the nature of their work. Hunger and poverty are looming over their heads. The prime minister’s Lok Sabha constituency, Varanasi, is no exception. On Wednesday, a group of children were seen sitting cross-legged and eating grass, called “akri” in the local language.
'Did Prime Minister Narendra Modi see the pictures of the long lines of men, with bags and bundles, making their way along the edges of national highways out of New Delhi? Did he hear the young man, sobbing because there was no way home, and no way to escape police batons who asked, “How will we go, we can’t go by flight, can we?” If Modi did, there was no sign that he considered their circumstance to be of any consequence.
'In his new book, Sebastian & Sons, TM Krishna tells of Parlandu, the “greatest mrdangam maker ever”. Parlandu was Dalit, as all makers of the mrdangam, a percussion instrument made with cow hide which is integral to Carnatic music, are. He was employed by Vaidyanatha Ayyar and, later, by his legendary pupil, the revered Carnatic musician Palghat Mani Iyer. Both teacher and disciple, as almost all mrdangam players, were Brahmin.
'Those in quarantine in government facilities will soon get some reading material to keep them company. One of these will be a collection of speeches of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “We regularly distribute the copies of these speeches to various dignitaries, as well as to schools and colleges on various occasions,” said a source aware of the development. The source said these could also be distributed at all the quarantine centres across the country...'
'The Narendra Modi government is in the final stages of creating an all-encompassing, auto-updating, searchable database to track every aspect of the lives of each of India’s over 1.2 billion residents, previously undisclosed government documents reviewed by HuffPost India establish. If the plans of Modi’s bureaucrats and advisors are realised, this system will automatically track when a citizen moves between cities, changes jobs, buys new property, when a member of a family is born, dies or gets married and moves to their spouse’s home.
'Joe Biden's presidential campaign has appointed a former aide to Hillary Clinton as senior advisor on Muslim American engagement following revelations that his predecessor has close ties to India's right-wing Hindu government. The appointment of Farooq Mitha, a longtime Biden supporter and former Muslim advisor to the Clinton campaign in 2016, comes after weeks of pressure to remove Amit Jani as coordinator given his strong ties with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party...'
