How India’s Covid Crisis Got Out of Control | WSJ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZMcBXyY4XA India's Covid-19 crisis has resulted in record numbers of cases and deaths. WSJ breaks down the chain of events that led to the fastest-growing wave of infection since the pandemic started, and what it means for the world. 

Congress Party Briefing by Supriya Shrinate at AICC HQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7as3F2TxFY 

in English: https://youtu.be/V7as3F2TxFY?t=968

मोदी के जयकारे वाले अखबारी विज्ञापन और ज़मीनी हालात का फर्क ? Ajit Anjum  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHLPzOZGABs Jun 30, 2021

Political effort to depict current government in a certain way: Times Now 27 may2012 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jat4s_sYNZM 
there is a difference between the political imagery that has been concocted by the estern Media in addition to Local Opposition and the actual governance record out there.

COVID-19: EAM Jaishankar Slams Opposition Over 'Its Political Efforts To Show Govt In Different Way' Republic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ErVF32c3Uw
Concocted? Free food was given last year to as many as 800 million people. Money into Bank accounts of 400 millions. And there was no discrimination

S Jaishankar: Political Effort To Depict Our Government In A Certaihttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3ZhDS1Ae58
Tarneja BJP spokseman says  Opposition parties are using the International media.. the attacks are political in nature.

Riverside graves of the Covid dead tell a story of the media’s failure by Kalpana Sharma  https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/05/27/riverside-graves-of-the-covid-dead-tell-a-story-of-the-medias-failure From journalists going around in a car, filming these graves and recording what people have to say, such as Barkha Dutt, to mainstream regional media outlets like Divya Bhaskar and Sandesh in Gujarat refusing to obfuscate and telling the story as it is, to young women journalists like Shivangi Saxena and Akanksha Kumar from Newslaundry, such documentation will form an essential part of the history of these terrible years..

...Besides the story about inaccurate data on Covid deaths, the saffron shrouds on those shallow graves are obscuring another story that we in the media need to be reporting. That of immense economic distress and hunger that is leading families to abandon their loved ones in these shallow graves rather than conducting the ritual cremation. It is not difficult to imagine the extent of poverty and desperation if people cannot rustle up a few thousand rupees to buy wood and pay a priest to conduct the ritual. ..

Beyond Covid: We must address the hunger crisis in India  https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/coronanvirus-india-second-wave-hunger-index-poverty-migrant-crisis-7323648/ Anshu Gupta, founder of the organisation Goonj emphasises
For millions, still suffering from the after-effects of the first Covid wave, 'dal-chawal' is the oxygen needed to survive. ... But for most lower-income families in cities, their oxygen is dal chawal. They don’t have anywhere to access food because the issue of hunger has been completely ignored. Not just in villages, but in cities as well. Many of the migrant workers who had come back from the villages after the first lockdown was lifted can no longer afford to go back.

We know now that part of the reason for the spread of the disease to rural areas was because the system of quarantining returning migrants last year was not implemented this time around. As a result, they brought back the infection.

https://scroll.in/article/995298/invisible-in-the-pandemic-fires-a-slow-burn-of-hunger-and-distress-in-india 

This year, there has been no national lockdown. But localised shutdowns now cover virtually the entire country. All of India’s large cities, which run on the labour of rural migrants, have restrictions in place. In Mumbai, it is the sixth week of lockdown; the fifth in Delhi; the third in Kolkata; and the second week in Chennai.

Yet, barring extra food rations, which have been unevenly distributed, governments have barely announced any economic support for the working-class. If the lockdown last year came down as a hammer, this year, it feels like a thousand cuts.

It was the factory workers, the shop assistants, the daily wager earners who were facing an income wipeout. Most workers seemed reconciled to not getting wage payments from their employers. “Only when work happens can they pay, where will they generate money from,”

"COVID Baad Me Maarega, Bhookh Se Pehle Marenge" | Auto Drivers Face Difficulty To Sustain Families https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MYWF7C5uSY  Mojo Story's Madan Lal reports from Delhi and talks to several auto rickshaw drivers who are finding it difficult to even arrange meals for themselves.

"Govt of India Owes Answers To The People" | Priyanka Gandhi Questions Centre Over Vaccine Shortage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agXnhEsLXNg Congress General Secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra

What S Jaishankar’s New York visit says about Indo-US ties . C. Raja Mohan says "new synergy and commitment to deepen the strategic partnership — at the bilateral, regional and global levels.  https://youtu.be/hffFc_1bggU  The terrifying April surge of the virus certainly set back India’s own Vaccine Maitri initiative and the collective plans of the Quad. As the second wave begins to recede and India’s vaccine production revives, Jaishankar and his American interlocutors must now plan to reboot the strategy to vaccinate the Indo-Pacific.

Beyond the regional, there is much that Delhi and Washington could do by pooling their resources and strategies in boosting the global resilience against the pandemics and framing new international norms to combat it.

The Modi regime is directly responsible for the current bloodshed. But the road here was paved by all who came before them, those who, since the 1980s, eagerly complied with the IMF’s structural adjustment programs and destroyed India’s life-making institutions and infrastructure. 

Reducing the fiscal deficit, the holy grail of neoliberalism, in reality opened up “a revenue deficit,” as the rich were relieved of taxation and the state, while increasing military expenditure, slashed public sector investment and social spending. I want to emphasize that not just the Congress or the BJP but every ruling coalition, at the state and federal level, followed this trajectory, including the Stalinists in power in my home state of West Bengal, whose most celebrated effort was to dispossess peasants from their land in order to build a car factory.

the government needs to invest money in vaccine production immediately and take steps to make vaccines free and universal. The differential pricing of these drugs, instituted by corporations like SII, needs to be scrapped and vaccines made free for all, and with distribution according to vulnerability, and not wallet size or ability to push to the front. 

the international Left, especially in the global North, has a vital role to play: we need to pressure our own ruling classes to stop hoarding vaccines. Vaccine imperialism may work for the rich countries in the short term, but it allows the virus to mutate in the parts of the globe without the vaccine and eventually return to strike the hoarders. Internationalism in this case is not just a political principle, it is a public health necessity.

http://emeets.lnwr.in/index.php/covid/594-union-must-persuade-all-capable-manufacturers-in-inda-to-prduce-covaxin 

http://emeets.lnwr.in/index.php/covid/589-tthe-health-system-has-not-crumbled-only-because-of-the-pandemic 

For other posts in this blog: http://emeets.lnwr.in/index.php/covid