'There has been a sudden spurt in the number of burials in Muslim graveyards in Indore, the hotspot of the Covid-19 pandemic in Madhya Pradesh. At least 183 bodies were buried in five Muslim graveyards in Indore in the first nine days of April, records available with the officials of graveyards show. In a majority of the cases, the records cited high blood pressure, diabetes and other ailments as the cause of death...'
'A few days before the nationwide lockdown was announced, 30-year-old Sanjeev Das was diagnosed with terminal stage cancer at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi. His old parents had suffered a lot — a piling debt, being abandoned by their other son, sleeping hungry for days together — just to see Sanjeev get better. They had one last dream. Whatever little time Sanjeev had left, they wanted to spend it together back at their home in Bihar's Banka district.
'It is 7AM in the morning. The roads are empty. Beside a clogged sewer, a man in his 50s holding a long rod changes to his uniform— a pair of torn shirt and trousers. Rajan*, a sanitation worker in the “Second Best” realty city of India, goes down the sewer everyday with nothing but a rod and a handkerchief on his face. The foul smell emerges from the deep sewer and soon his whole body is covered in black fluid which is the toilet waste of the nearby high class housing societies. He opens the lid of the manhole he is about to crawl into.
'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.
'An ICMR study of patients admitted with Severe Acute Respiratory Illness (SARI) showed that 93% of those who tested positive for Covid-19 and for whom data on exposure was known had neither travelled abroad nor had any contact with a person known to be infected...'
'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.
'Aarogya Setu, a Government of India app to track the real-time movements of citizens to determine if they have been in the proximity of COVID-19 patients, vastly expands the surveillance capabilities of the state with few explicit safeguards warned privacy experts and cybersecurity analysts.
'The health ministry, citing the Covid-19 pandemic, has suspended until June 30 rules governing the law that bans prenatal sex disclosure, stirring concerns that this could be misused by unscrupulous clinics and exacerbate selective abortion of female foetuses. The ministry in an April 4 notification suspended certain rules under the Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Rules, 1996, until June 30 this year, citing the “emergency situation” due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the nationwide lockdown...'
'A Dubai resident has blamed ‘coronavirus paranoia’ for his father’s death in Madhya Pradesh, India, last week. Moeen Ali, 39, said his father Sayyed Aashiq Ali, 65, was suffering from breathlessness caused by a heart ailment yet no private hospital in his hometown would admit him over coronavirus fears.
'Like the rest of the world, India is battling the coronavirus pandemic. However, here the public conversation over the past week has focussed inordinately on only one facet of the disease: its link with the Tablighi Jamat, a Muslim religious group. A Tablighi Jamat event, held in early March in Delhi, was attended by foreign delegates from South East Asia as well as members from all over India. A few attendees, it later turned out, were coronavirus carriers. When the event finished, many people went back to their home states, carrying the virus with them.
