'A Mumbai resident was moved to a quarantine facility despite an absence of symptoms or medical history but based on an alert the state government received from none other than the Prime Minister’s Office, The Indian Express reported on Sunday. Officials of Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), who along with police had arrived at the woman’s Kalina residence on Thursday, informed her that she, along with her husband would have to be transferred to a quarantine facility in Santa Cruz, leaving their daughter behind.
'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.
'In an unusual bail condition, the Jharkhand high court granted bail to a former Bhartiya Janata Party member of parliament and five others and asked them to deposit an amount of Rs 35,000 each into the PM-CARES fund. The order, uploaded on LiveLaw, states that the accused would have to download the Aarogya Setu app after getting released, along with contributing the bail deposit to the PM-CARES fund...'
'Even as the Prime Minister himself remained silent on the communal hate being spread against Muslims in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, some from his party continue adding fuel to the fire. In Maharashtra, a BJP MLA has ‘demanded’ that the Indian Army be deployed in Satranjipura, a Muslim-dominated area in Nagpur. East Nagpur BJP MLA Krushna Khopde claimed that “a lot of coronavirus cases” had been reported from that area and the residents were “not cooperating with civic officials and police” towards the containment efforts.
'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.
'Lawyer and activist Prashant Bhushan and former Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer Kannan Gopinathan booked were booked by Gujarat police over their social media posts on Sunday. While Bhushan was charged for allegedly using objectionable tweet against the Ramayana, Kannan Gopinathan was booked for using government orders on social media to mislead people...'
'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.
'Two days after the video of a vegetable seller being beaten up with a stick by a man who asks for his ID surfaced online, Delhi Police tracked down the accused and arrested him. The accused, Praveen Babbar, is a resident of southeast Delhi’s Badarpur Extension and runs a tour and travel business. In the video, Babbar can be seen hitting the vegetable seller with a stick. After that, he asks for his ID, starts hitting and abusing him. “…tum logo ne jihad macha diya hai,” he can be heard saying...'
'Officials with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) have suggested that camera networks performing facial recognition and temperature checks in public places could be a game-changer for the country’s coronavirus containment efforts, Outlook India reports, though experts suggest such a system would need to be carefully considered to avoid excessive surveillance or violations of privacy. The UIDAI currently holds images and contact details for 1.23 billion people, according to the report.
