'A woman constable in Gujarat has been transferred to the police headquarters after she reportedly had an altercation with the son of a Bharatiya Janata Party legislator for violating lockdown rules in Surat, The Indian Express reported on Sunday. An inquiry was set up after the purported audio and video clips of the incident was widely circulated on social media. Prakash Kanani, son of Varachha Road MLA and Minister of State for Health Kumar Kanani, had an argument with constable Sunita Yadav, who pointed out that he and his friends were out during curfew hours.
'IN THE arms of a young girl, three years old, is another child that isn’t yet one. She struggles with his weight, slight as he is, trying to feed him out of a bottle. It is a burden that is heavy to bear. But the fight against hunger for children of the Musahari tola in Badbilla village of Bhagalpur has been a daily challenge. In this lockdown, that burden has only become heavier. A microcosm of Bihar, Bhagalpur is the focus of a month-long series by The Indian Express to understand the pandemic’s effects in smalltown India.
'What started off as a normal work day for 31-year-old Bennix, the owner of a mobile phone shop in Tamil Nadu’s Thoothukudi district, turned out to be the starting point of a fatal ordeal. On Friday, June 19, around 8 pm, Bennix was in his shop near the Kamarajar statue in Sathankulam town when his friend rushed to him with the news that his father Jayaraj had been picked up by the police. Worried about his 58-year-old father, Bennix rushed to the Sathankulam police station only to be called in by the police officers there for an ‘inquiry’.
'Two government-appointed committees have flagged concerns about the reliability and capability of 10,000 low-cost ventilators, ordered by the Narendra Modi government as part of India’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, according to documents reviewed by HuffPost India. In a clinical evaluation report dated June 1, 2020, a committee of doctors said that the Modi government could buy these ventilators, made by Indian startup AgVa Healthcare, but added that AgVa’s Covid-model ventilators “should not be considered as a replacement for high-end ventilators in tertiary care ICUs”.
'...Initially isolated from the epidemic that has swamped the capital New Delhi and financial center Mumbai, rural areas were exposed when millions of migrant workers who lost their jobs in the cities when the government implemented a strict nationwide lockdown on March 25 went home. The states of Bihar, Assam, Jharkhand, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh received the most number of returning laborers — now they are also witnessing the sharpest rise in new cases in the two weeks to June 8, according to internal government estimates seen by Bloomberg.
'Fifty-seven minor girls have tested positive for the novel coronavirus at a state-run children’s shelter home in Kanpur district of Uttar Pradesh, with five of them found to be pregnant and one HIV positive. Since the information was confirmed, the UP administration has gone into a frenzy, even as officials said the pregnancies began before the lockdown. The shelter home has been sealed, and its staff quarantined.
'On June 16, BMC admitted that it had not reported 862 Covid-19 deaths in Mumbai, and added the figure to the official toll. This took the city’s fatality rate from 3.7 to 5.2 per cent — almost double the national average. The Indian Express has now accessed medical records of a few more deceased Covid-19 patients or those suspected to have been infected, which are yet to be reported by BMC officially as Covid-19 deaths, an indication that there could be many more like them.
'Even as CM Rupani promotes Rajkot-based private company’s ‘breathing apparatus’, Gujarat’s largest Covid-19 hospital urgently seeks full-fledged ventilators from Centre. Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani has not left his citadel in Gandhinagar and visited Ahmedabad, the worst-hit corona-affected city in the State. But Rupani did so on April 4 when he inaugurated Gujarat-made ventilators at Ahmedabad Civil Hospital.
'Early on 9 May 2020, as the world stayed home to stay safe from the Covid-19 pandemic, the residents of Ratahara neighbourhood in central India’s Rewa city woke up to a loudspeaker telling them to leave their homes. They had one hour before their homes would be demolished, a man was saying on the loudspeaker.
'Ashwini Saini is a contributor to a Facebook page that publishes news on the Mandi district of Himachal Pradesh. Saini, who also works as a freelancer for the Hindi daily Dainik Jagran, filed a video report for the page, called ‘Mandi Live’, on April 8. The report highlighted the failure of the district administration in supplying rations to migrant workers stranded in the district’s Sundernagar sub-division.
