'Fifty IRS officers in a report suggested raising the tax rate to 40% for those with income above Rs 1 crore and levy of wealth tax for those with over Rs 5 crore annual income... The CBDT on Sunday said an inquiry is being initiated against 50 IRS officers of the I-T department who have penned an unsolicited report on revenue mobilisation to fund COVID-19 relief measures and made it public without permission.
'Patients labelled as ‘suspected Covid’ during admission to hospitals here are not being tested for the novel coronavirus even after death in a bid to dress up infection figures, charged opposition leader Devendra Fadnavis on Tuesday. He said at least 44 bodies of ‘suspected Covid’ patients have been released from the civic-run Nair Hospital — a dedicated Covid-19 facility now — without the coronavirus test. There are several such instances from other hospitals too, said Fadnavis, who tweeted details of the letter he’s sent to chief minister Uddhav Thackeray...'
'...South Asia’s low Covid-19 cases have led experts to offer several theories. One of them is the Bacillus Calmette-Guerin vaccine, used against tuberculosis. The BCG vaccination is universal in South Asia and has been connected, by some studies, to low instances of Covid-19. Similarly, some studies also show that heat could adversely affect the virus. Experts, however, advise caution on how much these two factors can be credited for low numbers in South Asia given what is known currently...
'India is currently in the early stages of a three-week lockdown imposed by the Modi government to control the covid-19 pandemic. National and state borders have been sealed and swathes of the economy shut down.footnote1 Workers have been laid off and day labourers have lost their incomes. Sanitation workers and other key employees are struggling to get to work without public transport. Those in the informal sector have been particularly hard hit.
'A national task force on COVID-19, comprising 21 leading scientists from across the country, which was supposed to advise the Narendra Modi government on its response to the pandemic, did not meet even once in the week preceding the announcement to extend the nationwide lockdown, according to four members of the group of experts. In a national broadcast on 14 April, Modi announced the decision to extend the lockdown till 3 May. The government did not consult the team of experts before taking the decision.
'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.
'A decision by the government of Madhya Pradesh to convert the state capital’s Bhopal Memorial Hospital and Research Centre into a COVID19-designated facility has had a devastating effect on one of India’s most vulnerable communities. The BMHRC is a 500-bed super-speciality hospital, which was set up to care exclusively for the first-, second- and third-generation survivors of a chemical disaster that is commonly known as the Bhopal Gas Tragedy of 1984.
'On 7 April, Preeti Pandey, the wife of an Indian Administrative Services officer Rajkumar Pandey, released a video that went viral across Madhya Pradesh, and Bhopal in particular. In it, Preeti, looking grim and visibly anxious, methodically explained how her husband, who worked for the National Health Mission, contracted the COVID-19 virus in one of the meetings he had with his colleagues. The cruel irony of Rajkumar’s case is that the government officials had convened the meeting to prepare a strategy to combat the pandemic.
'...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.
'After Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s video conference with the chief ministers on April 2 to tackle COVID-19 epidemic, the Centre has approved for the release – in advance – of Rs 1,611 crore to Maharashtra under the State Disaster Risk Management Fund (SDRMF) to fight the disease as it has reported the highest number of such cases so far. According to a news report in The Hindu, however, Kerala, which has registered one of the highest number of coronavirus cases across the country, has been allocated only Rs 157 crore – much less than most states...'
