'...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.
'The Delhi Police’s First Information Report into one the most controversial deaths in the 2020 Delhi Riots omits any reference to the police’s alleged role in the incident. 23-year-old Faizan died in February this year, days after he was violently assaulted by uniformed policemen and forced to sing the national anthem. A video of the incident sparked outrage after it went viral online and was also carried by several news outlets.
'The Uttar Pradesh police has booked the executive editor and editor-in-chief of the news portal Scroll.in under various charges of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 and sections of the Indian Penal Code... Sharma recently wrote a series of reports on the poor state of affairs in Varanasi, which is also Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s parliamentary constituency.
'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.
'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.
'Sadaf Jafar, a member of the Congress Party, says that she knew that her name was in two First Information Reports in connection with the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in Uttar Pradesh, but the political activist recently found out that the UP Police had booked her in two more FIRs. Jafar says she is now booked in four FIRs containing 34 criminal provisions, with some of them common to all the FIRs. HuffPost India counted 20 separate crimes in the four FIRs...'
'If a prisoner in Maharashtra were to be infected with COVID-19, chances are that she would be tested only after her death. And on her death, the prison authorities won’t follow contact tracing exercises, nor conduct tests on people who could have come in close contact with those who tested positive. According to the affidavit prepared by the Maharashtra additional director general of police Sunil Ramanand, in all four deaths registered in three separate prisons, tests were conducted only after the prisoners died.
'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.
