The first wave of Covid in India revealed that those running the government were clueless. The second was exposed their sheer incompetence. And now, during the ongoing third wave of the pandemic, it is becoming very clear that those at the top of the governance pyramid have become supremely indifferent to the plight of the public. This is at least[Read More...]
It has been 37 years since the deadly killer gas, methyl isocyanate, spread from the Union Carbide factory like a suffocating blanket of death across the old city of Bhopal, killing thousands of people on that night, and, then, slowly, over a long period of time. The disaster shocked the country and the entire world. It was then called the[Read More...]
“In the first and second wave of the Covid pandemic, ministers and MLAs were sitting in their homes. They avoided common people and crowds. Had virtual meetings. Continued their rhetoric via Twitter and Facebook. Not one rupee was deducted from their salaries. Whereas, we government employees worked round the clock. We did not get time to go home, could not[Read More...]
On 28 October, over a 100 interns at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Bhopal went on a day and night hunger strike. They were demanding that the hospital management pay them the Rs.1000 for every 8 hours of overtime duty promised to them at the peak of the Covid pandemic earlier this year. A promise that was never[Read More...]
After making losses on their vegetable crops throughout the Covid period farmers in Madhya Pradesh are making big losses due to falling prices of cotton. Vegetable crops have been destroyed for two years in a row due to Covid, because the market was closed. Prices had fallen so low that paying for wages and freight charges to the mandis was[Read More...]
With 22 million passengers every day the Indian railways is second only to China globally in terms of the number of people transported. Since the onset of the Covid pandemic in early 2020 however, hundreds of train services have been shut down and traffic plummeted with big revenue losses. While this has not made much difference to the India’s urban[Read More...]
Bhopal: Sundari, a wind-instrument is held in high regard among musicians of Maharashtra, as the younger sister of the better-known Shehnai. But sadly, the Sundari-organists in Solapur, are still reeling from the consequences of the pandemic trying out odd jobs to make ends meet after COVID-19 took a toll on their livelihood. “I tried to become an auto-driver a few[Read More...]
“I am unable to face hunger, future, illness, fee debt, house rent and unemployment” said the four page suicide note. On the night of 27 August 2021 Ravi Thackeray*, an engineer in Bhopal’s Sahara township, aided by his wife Ranjana*, slit the throats of their young son Chirag* and daughter Gunjan* with stone cutters. Soon after, the couple consumed poison[Read More...]
On August 18 as members of the Movement against Unemployment hit the streets of the Madhya Pradesh capital Bhopal they were brutally caned by the police as they tried to move towards the Chief Minister’s residence in a bid to gherao it. Cases were also filed against many of the protestors, who were demanding jobs and the filling up of vacant[Read More...]
In the midst of the gloom caused by the Covid pandemic there is a uniquely inspiring story from Madhya Pradesh. It is about how a group of villagers smartly leveraged the ongoing vaccination drive to win their long running battle against corruption in a prestigious government scheme. The story starts in the pre-Covid period, when the villagers of Dularia gram[Read More...]
