COVID Response Watch

SATHI, a Pune-based NGO, has brought out a compendium of 23 testimonies from patients or their kin, documenting price gouging by private hospitals in Maharashtra. The report, ‘Patients’ voices during the pandemic: Stories and analysis of rights violations and overcharging by private hospitals’, documents the fact that hospitals blatantly disregarded government price capping, and regulatory bodies seemed all to have[Read More...]

  For the world’s vulnerable populations already reeling from one of the worst economic shocks and an unprecedented hunger and livelihoods crisis resulting from the Covid-19 lockdowns, Russia’s war in Ukraine poses an existential threat. In this two part series researcher Sajai Jose looks at the way food production across the globe is set to fall due to supply chain[Read More...]

The Modi government’s indifference to the plight of the poor is now pathological. The Indian government’s rhetoric about ‘Amrit Kaal,’ an era of plenty, masks a consistent denial of the fact that the country is caught in a spiralling hunger and livelihoods crisis, the worst in its independent history, and one largely created by official policies. The 2022-2023 Union Budget[Read More...]

The Covid-19 pandemic spurred a rush in the Indian middle class to get health insurance policies. The Indian government too came up with some new health insurance instruments exclusively to address Covid care—but they remained tokenistic in nature and were nowhere near the scale of response required to tackle the health care challenges posed by the pandemic.  Health insurance in[Read More...]

In November last year the Indian government launched its ‘Har Ghar Dastak’ Covid-19 inoculation campaign to increase vaccination coverage nationwide. Under the campaign health workers would go door-to-door to vaccinate people eligible for the second dose and also those who have not taken the first dose. The idea was to cover all those Indians who had been left behind in earlier vaccination[Read More...]

The Covid-19 pandemic spurred a rush in the Indian middle class to get health insurance policies. The Indian government too came up with some new health insurance instruments exclusively to address Covid care—but they remained tokenistic in nature and were nowhere near the scale of response required to tackle the health care challenges posed by the pandemic.  Health insurance in[Read More...]

Even while a draconian lockdown was underway in late March 2020, and as thousands of migrant workers and their emaciated families escaped the pandemic in a helpless long march on miscellaneous highways, hungry and thirsty and holding tattered sacks as their only belongings, and even as the upper and middle classes in the affluent zones of Noida and Delhi, or,[Read More...]

In March 2020, just before the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, all that 16-year-old Zubeida Ali, a student in Lalwadi village of Rajasthan’s Tonk district wanted most was to be the first in her family to pass the 10th class exam and become a teacher. Little did she know that her life goal would have to be put on pause. A[Read More...]

A sense of complacency has crept in the hearts and minds of people who otherwise have been wary of contracting COVID in the last three years. People are setting out for travel, arranging and participating in social functions and, in a nutshell going about their normal lives. In the meanwhile, speculations are also rife about an impending fourth wave of COVID. Chandrakant Lahariya, vaccines, public policy and[Read More...]

  It is the largest employer in India and eighth largest in the world. It is also the fourth longest railway network in the world sprawling out to a total length of 70,000 kms. It runs 21,000 trains and carries 23 million passengers and 3 million tonnes of freight per day. What was the multi-faceted impact of the Covid pandemic[Read More...]