When Chandu, a cloth merchant of Sant Hirdaram Nagar (old name Bairagarh) of Bhopal, got a message on his mobile phone informing him that he had been certified fully vaccinated for Covid-19 he was not very happy. The reason was that in reality he had not received even a single dose of vaccine till then. The message was a fake[Read More...]
Almost an hour from the bustling railway station of Madhupur in Jharkhand, beyond the vast green landscape and kuccha and pucca roads, lies the small and beautiful Santhal village of Fatehpur in district Deogarh. As you descend towards the village you are greeted by the strong nocturnal fragrance of ‘Raat ki Raani’ and blooming red ‘Jaba’ flowers, next to a[Read More...]
On 15 January this year Dinesh Uike (40 years), an agricultural labourer, committed suicide by consuming poison in Dapori Khurd village of Amravati district in Maharashtra. He was in critical condition by the time he was brought to the Amravati District Hospital and died during the treatment itself. According to his relatives Dinesh took this extreme step due to being[Read More...]
In the bustling roadside market around the small, quaint and laid-back railway station of Jharkhand’s Madhupur, where locals, passenger and express trains crisscross the railway tracks towards Asansol and Burdwan to Howrah, or beyond to Patna and Delhi, no one wears masks. It’s a predictable and typical syndrome in small-town India, as if this global pandemic has never existed. With[Read More...]
The ‘jheli’ is a wooden rake, popular in both rural and urban areas of Rajasthan and its neighbouring states, for its multiple uses as well as low cost. Since early 2020 though, with the arrival of the Covid pandemic, the market for this handy instrument has shrunk drastically threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of villagers in parts of Rajasthan who[Read More...]
Fishermen on the Maharashtra’s Konkan coast are set to lose their earnings for a second consecutive year due to the global Covid pandemic. The repeated lockdowns since early 2020 have inflicted heavy losses on them due to lack of transport and plummeting prices for their catch. Despite relaxation in the lockdowns in recent months, the fishermen have not able to[Read More...]
Uncertainty continues for thousands of information technology sector employees in Bangalore over when they will be able to return to their offices. Since the beginning of the Covid pandemic early last year staff of major IT companies have been working from home, which has resulted in a whole host of problems particularly for younger, entry-level employees. The fluid situation has[Read More...]
In March 2020, while activity of all kinds came to a standstill across the country due to the Covid lockdown, the impact was negligible on one industrial sector in Rajasthan – mining. After a 10 day shut down in April 2020 initially, the state government gave permission for mining, a sign of the enormous political and economic clout of[Read More...]
As the social life and businesses of people in Uttar Pradesh gradually recovers from the Covid-19 catastrophe a question on everyone’s minds is – will the pandemic influence the outcome of the oncoming assembly elections in March-April 2022. To probe this question, on behalf of the Covid Response Watch, we talked to a cross-section of people to get an idea[Read More...]
Rajasthan’s over 100 years old Pushkar Mela is one of the most famous and largest camel fairs in the world. Due to the Covid pandemic though, the event has taken a big hit with both low arrivals of camels for sales and plummeting prices for the animals. “ I have been coming to Pushkar fair continuously for 10 years. This is the first[Read More...]
