Lockdown Negatively Impacted Women’s Nutrition In India: Study

 

FILE PHOTO: Women wearing protective face masks commute in a suburban train in Mumbai

The nationwide lockdown in India in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic had a negative impact on women's nutrition in the country, according to a study conducted by a group of researchers in the US.

The study by Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition in four economically backward districts of Uttar Pradesh's Maharajganj, Bihar's Munger, and Odisha's Kandhamal and Kalahandi indicate a decline in household food expenditure and women's dietary diversity in May 2020 compared to May 2019, particularly for non-staples like meats, eggs, vegetables and fruits.

It occurred despite the special Public Distribution System (PDS), direct benefit transfer and ration from aanganwadis reaching 80 per cent, 50 per cent and 30 per cent of the surveyed households, respectively, said the study published in the latest issue of Economia Politica journal.

"Our findings contribute to the growing body of evidence of women's disproportionate vulnerability to economic shocks, the impact of a staple grain focused safety net programme, and restricted markets on the access and availability of diverse nutritious foods," says the paper which makes a case for policy reforms towards PDS diversification to include nutrition-rich foods and market reforms to remove supply-side bottlenecks and expansion of direct benefit transfers for healthy food access.

"Women's diets were lacking in diverse foods even before the pandemic, but COVID-19 has further exacerbated the situation," said Soumya Gupta, a research economist at TCI who co-authored the study along with Prabhu Pingali, TCI director; Mathew Abraham, assistant director; and consultant Payal Seth.

"Any policies addressing the impact of the pandemic on nutritional outcomes must do so through a gendered lens that reflects the specific, and often persistent, vulnerabilities faced by women," she said in a statement issued by the Cornell University.

Researchers said that policymakers should recognise the disproportionate impact of the pandemic and other disruptive events on women's nutrition by bolstering safety-net programmes to ensure that they meet the needs of women and other marginalised groups.

Pegasus Row “Non-Issue”: Minister Slams Opposition Protests In Parliament

 

Last week, opposition members raised uproar in both houses of Parliament and demanded a thorough probe into the charges of snooping on journalists, politicians, ministers, judges and others, using Israeli Pegasus spyware

As Opposition protests over alleged snooping using Pegasus spyware continue to disrupt Parliamentary proceedings, Union Minister Pralhad Joshi on Friday said the controversy was a "non-issue" and that the government was ready for discussions on people-related issues.

The Pegasus spyware issue has snowballed into a political controversy, disrupting Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha since the start of the Monsoon session on July 19. IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has given a statement on the issue in both the Houses but the Opposition parties are not satisfied and are demanding specific answers.

As yet another day of Lok Sabha proceedings were adjourned due to vociferous protests, Pralhad Joshi, the Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister, urged the protesting members to allow the House to function while speaking during the Question Hour.

While describing the Opposition's behaviour as "unfortunate", the minister said in the Lower House that the spyware issue was not a serious one.

Noting that the IT Minister has already given a detailed statement on the issue in both the Houses, Pralhad Joshi said the protests are over a "non-issue, non-serious issue".

"There are so many issues directly related to the people of India... government is ready for discussions," he said.

This week, the Lower House passed some bills without much discussion, amid the din.

"We don't want to pass bills without discussions," Pralhad Joshi asserted. Amid uproar, Lok Sabha proceedings were adjourned for the day.

Earlier, the House was adjourned for half an hour till noon.

As soon as the House met for the day, Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury sought to raise certain issues but was not allowed.

During Question Hour, Opposition members raised slogans and displayed placards as they protested on the Pegasus spyware controversy and other issues.

Goa CM Asks Parents Of Rape Victims Why Were Their Daughters Out So Late

 

Pramod Sawant said parents should not let their children, particularly minors, out at night

Under pressure from the opposition over the gang rape of two minor girls on a beach, Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant is facing flak for remarking in the state assembly that parents need to introspect on why their children were on the beach late at night.

"When 14-year-olds stay on the beach the whole night, the parents need to introspect. Just because children don't listen, we cannot put the responsibility on the government and police," Sawant had said on Wednesday, during a debate on a calling attention notice in the House.

Sawant, who also holds the home portfolio, had said parents have a responsibility to ensure the safety of their children and hinted that they should not let their children, particularly minors, out at night.

Goa Congress spokesperson Altone D'Costa on Thursday said the law and order situation in the coastal state has deteriorated.

"Why should we fear while moving around at night? Criminals should be in jail and law abiding citizens should be out freely moving around," he said.

Goa Forward Party MLA Vijai Sardesai said it is disgusting that the chief minister is making such statements.

"The safety of citizens is the responsibility of police and state government. If they can't provide it to us, the CM has no right to sit in the post," he added.

"It is shocking that @goacm is blaming parents for allowing their children to venture out in the night claiming that it is not safe. if State govt can't assure us our security, who can give it? Goa has a history of being safe state for women, that tag is being lost in @BJP4Goa rule," tweeted Independent MLA Rohan Khaunte.

"We directly blame police, but I want to point out that of the 10 youth who went to the beach for a party, four stayed on the beach the whole night and the remaining six went home," Sawant had said in the House.

"They were on the beach the whole night, two boys and two girls," said Sawant.

Teens, particularly minors, should not be spending the nights on beaches," he added.

Four men, one of them a government employee (a driver with the agriculture department), posed as policemen and raped the two girls after beating up the boys who were with the girls on Benaulim beach, around 30 km south of Goa's capital, on Sunday.

All the four accused have been arrested, Sawant told the Assembly.

During the discussion in the House yesterday, an MLA had claimed that an "influential person" was trying to protect the accused, while another opposition member had alleged that a minister was calling the police and trying to influence the investigation.

Speaker Rajesh Patnekar had expunged the remarks from the proceedings.

 

Unravelling Air Pollution In Asian Countries

FILE PHOTO: A man rides a bicycle on a smoggy morning near India Gate in New Delhi

 

When Trisha Mahajan was growing up in the northern Indian city of Amritsar, air pollution was never on her mind. By contrast, now as a mother to a two-year-old daughter living in one of the world’s most polluted cities, Gurgaon, in the outskirts of the capital Delhi, she is worried enough to be considering relocating to a smaller city with cleaner air.

Mahajan’s concern for the health of her daughter has grown with the mounting evidence of the impact that air pollution has on the lungs of the region’s youngest citizens. Breathing polluted air could lead to serious long-term and permanent health issues that include reduction in lung capacity and the possibility of developing cardiovascular disease later in life.

In recent years, research into the links between air pollution and health has thrown up other terrifying results. Air pollution has been linked to not just a higher risk of respiratory issues but also of several types of cancer, early mortality and both miscarriages and stillbirths.

The majority of the world’s most polluted cities are concentrated in South Asia, according to a 2020 report by Swiss air quality technology company IQAir. Bangladesh, India and Pakistan were together home to 42 of the world’s 50 most polluted cities.

For a long time, scientists blamed the pollution on the region’s topography. Many major cities are located on the Indo-Gangetic plain, with the Hindu Kush Himalayan mountain range to their north and the Deccan Plateau to the south. The mountains block the flow of air, turning the plain into a gas chamber, some experts argued.

But the latest research proves otherwise. The cities in the region are generating their own pollution, and the mountains might have taken more flak than they deserve for their role in trapping airborne pollutants.

“Residential emissions definitely stood out as the dominant source [of pollution],” said atmospheric scientist Erin McDuffie, a visiting research associate at Washington University in St. Louis who led a 2021 global study looking at the sources of air pollution in 204 countries and 200 sub-national regions. While the exact percentage varied depending on the city, in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region roughly 25-30% of air pollution was coming from kitchens.

The use of firewood or coal for household cooking and heating was the dominant source of pollution, the study found. Fuel combustion for energy generation, industrial processes, and dust generated by human activities were other dominant sources of air pollution.

While conceding that the region’s topography does play a part, “by looking at all of the sources combined you can get a sense for the breadth of the sources of air pollution, and that gives you a sense of the multiple ways to tackle this problem,” McDuffie told The Third Pole.

A lack of granular data on both health and air pollution is a key gap that gets in the way of more localised research.

Lack Of Local Level Health, Air Pollution Data

Abid Omar grew up in the Pakistani megacity of Karachi, and would often visit Lahore where his grandmother lived. Around a decade ago, when winters started to turn so foggy in Lahore that flights had to be cancelled, Omar grew suspicious. Foggy winters weren’t a part of his memories of the city.

At that time, Pakistan’s environment agencies did not release data about air pollution. Some data about rainfall was in the public domain, but most of what people knew about air pollution came from international reports found on the internet, Omar explains.

In 2016, during his time working in China’s capital Beijing for a Swiss textile company, Omar could appreciate people’s awareness of the issue of local air pollution. International reports said Pakistan’s cities were just as polluted, but locally little attention was being paid to it. On one of his visits to Karachi, he took a USD 300 air quality monitor from Beijing. Since then, the citizen-driven Pakistan Air Quality Initiative (PAQI) he founded has expanded to include over 50 monitors, most of them hosted by concerned citizens in urban centres across the country.

“One of the myths that was easy to debunk was that Pakistan’s air pollution problem was due to trans-boundary pollution coming in from India,” Omar said. The monitors have shown that all major cities have high pollution levels. “In winters the numbers are off the charts.”

This data has allowed Omar and his colleagues to improve awareness about air pollution in Pakistan, and has also caught the media’s attention. Citizen groups like ‘scary ammis’, which translates as ‘scary mothers’, have gone on to force local authorities to shut down schools in Lahore when air pollution levels peak. Omar said that the data provided the foundation for this kind of advocacy.

But while the scientific consensus is that air pollution is dangerous to people’s health, granular information on specific health impacts is harder to find as most countries in the region have paid little attention to data on deaths, including recording the cause of deaths. In the absence of reliable national level data, researchers rely on smaller studies and other sample surveys.

“We have a basic issue where we’re not always documenting deaths in a way that allows us to capture what the cause was,” said Pallavi Pant, senior scientist at the Boston-based Health Effects Institute. Even when this data exists, it is not in electronic format, Pant said.

The potential benefits of improving air quality in the region are not restricted to public health. Addressing air pollution would go a long way in helping the region with climate change mitigation.

Dual Benefits: Health And Climate Change

Nepal’s capital city Kathmandu lies in a valley and is thus very sensitive to air pollution due to restricted movement of air. Lots of the sources of pollution are right here, within the valley, said Bhushan Tuladhar, who chairs the Nepalese non-profit Environment and Public Health Organization (ENPHO).

Much conversation in both Nepal and Pakistan is centred around pollution coming in from India, but Tuladhar said that air pollution travelling across a city or across a regional border within a country is as much of an issue. This also highlights the need for greater national and intra-national collaboration.

Many of the gases and particulate matter responsible for air pollution also cause the earth to warm, pushing up global temperatures. Acting to reduce air pollution will not just improve the health of the local population, but will help countries take steps towards climate change mitigation, a benefit policy-makers haven’t completely caught on, according to experts.

“What the policy-makers [in developing countries] do is they almost play the victim card,” said Tuladhar. While the West is largely responsible for high carbon emissions, especially when historical emissions are taken into account, emissions in developing countries are also growing which will have an impact on local citizens. “Climate change mitigation is really about us doing something about the health of our own people.”

On the transport side, improving the public transport system – including more electric buses – controlling the number of vehicles on the road and insisting on regular maintenance are some of the solutions, Tuladhar said. Finding alternative cooking fuels by promoting either LPG cylinders or electric cooking are other ways to curb pollution.

But transboundary pollution remains a problem, not just that coming over from India but also pollution coming into Kathmandu from other parts of the country. “Last year, when we had a very dry winter, there were a lot of forest fires all over Nepal as well as western India. That smoke was coming into Kathmandu as well. We could see through satellite data that a big chunk of that pollution [was from] forest fires.” With climate change set to worsen such extreme events, he says, this problem is set to intensify.

Governments in the region continue to look at air pollution and climate change issues in silos. For instance, the ministry of environment and climate change usually operates separately from the government’s pollution watchdog (or agency).

In terms of which sources are worse for public health, current evidence is patchy.

Any Reduction Will Have Positive Results

Studies looking at the health impacts of air pollution tend to assume that every single source is equally bad for public health, said Pant. But “the research has not really shown that one source in particular is really bad for you versus another source.”

This means that solutions can target any sector and there will be positive health outcomes. “You can pretty much tackle any sector, and that should reduce your overall air pollution, but again, you’ll get the most benefit by tackling the largest source,” McDuffie said.

Air pollution also raises concerns around equity. Over 90% of deaths linked to air pollution occur in poor and developing countries, according to the World Health Organization. Even within a city, pollution affects poor and marginalised populations, like those living on the streets, disproportionately more.

As governments fail to act fast, citizens are doing what they can to cope. Trisha Mahajan and her family leave the Delhi area for a less polluted location during the winter months when the pollution peaks. When at home, they use indoor air purifiers and house plants to improve air quality.

“I am not going to rely on the government to do anything in the near future,” said Mahajan.

Tuladhar offers a simple solution to begin with. Holding regional summits to discuss cross-border air pollution, and improving data collection and data sharing are some of the ways countries could start to work together. “The issues happening in Lahore and Delhi and Dhaka are very much similar, and maybe we can talk to each other.”

TheThirdPole

Tractor Parade In Delhi On Independence Day: Rakesh Tikait

 

FILE PHOTO: Farmers gather to take part in a tractor rally to protest against farm laws on the occasion of Republic Day at Singhu border near Delhi on January 26, 2021

Calling the farmers of Jind (Haryana) revolutionaries, Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) leader Rakesh Tikait has hailed their decision of taking out a tractor parade in protest against the Centre’s farm laws on Independence Day.

Addressing the media near a protest site in Delhi, Mr Tikait said a tractor rally is not a “bad thing”, and driving tractors with a national flag will increase the spirit of nationalism in people.

“Carrying out tractor rally is not a bad thing. People of Jind (Haryana) are revolutionaries. They’ve taken the right decision of carrying out the tractor parade on August 15. I don’t know what Samyukta Kisan Morcha will decide…It will be a moment of pride to see the tractor parade with national flags mounted on them. It builds a spirit of nationalism.”

Calling on the Haryana government to let the farmers hoist the flag in Jind on Independence Day, the BKU leader said, “If they have said they won’t let ministers unfurl the national flag in their villages, then they won’t. What will the ministers do by hoisting flags? Let the farmers do it on August 15.”

Mr Tikait informed that a “jatha” of farmers from Moradabad, Hapur and Amroha will come to the protest site in Delhi and carry out a tractor parade on the roads on August 15.

“Next ‘jatha’ with tractors will come from Moradabad, Hapur and Amroha on August 14, and on August 15, they will unfurl the national flag here (protest site), followed by a tractor parade on the roads,” he added.

Earlier, on January 26, protesters broke barricades to enter New Delhi and clashed with police in several parts of the national capital during the “tractor rally” protest organised by farmers. They had also entered the iconic Mughal-era Red Fort and unfurled their flags from its ramparts.

Farmers have been protesting on the different borders of the national capital since November 26 last year against the three newly enacted farm laws: Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020; the Farmers’ Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act 2020 and the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020.

Farmer leaders and the Centre have held several rounds of talks but the impasse remains.

In Assam, ATMs Purify Arsenic-Laced Water

The water-dispensing plant sits on the border of Kothora and Barigaon villages (Image: Sashanka Bezbaruah)

 

 At least twice a week, Monika Deka makes a trip to the 30-foot-tall, bright blue water ATM on the border of the villages of Kothora and Barigaon in Assam, northeast India. Rubbing sanitiser over her hands, she swipes a prepaid card on the screen of the water-dispensing machine.

A firm push of the button, and 20 litres of water flows down from one of the three outlets into a container she has brought. “I cannot do without this water. I even carry it with me while visiting [others],” said Deka, who is the head of the gram panchayat (locally elected village administration) in Barigaon.

The water ATM was installed in 2017 by Gramya Vikash Mancha (GVM), an NGO, in collaboration with the Tata Water Mission (TWM).

Before the installation of the water ATM, Deka’s water came from a tube well. This pumped up groundwater contained dangerously high levels of arsenic.

Arsenic is a threat to public health across Assam, affecting over 1.6 million people, according to the Ministry of Jal Shakti, which oversees water and sanitation. Contaminated wells are marked with red paint to warn people, but without alternative water sources people like Deka have to continue using them.

Over the years, warts developed across the palms of Deka’s hands. She experienced stabbing chest pains, and started taking Omez and Pan-D – medicines to help with gas and digestion – almost daily. On some days, when the medicines didn’t help, she had to rest and avoid household activities. People in her community were diagnosed with cancer; one with oral cancer and three with gallbladder cancer. Warts on palms, abdominal pain and cancer are all conditions caused by arsenic poisoning.

ARSENIC IN ASSAM'S AQUIFERS

Water that contains arsenic at a concentration above 10 micrograms per litre should not be drunk, according to the World Health Organization. Surveys conducted by GVM found that tube wells in and around Barigaon contained 240 micrograms of arsenic per litre.

In February, Rattan Lal Kataria, the minister in charge of water resources, told the state assembly that there are 1,247 arsenic-affected habitations in 12 of Assam’s 34 districts. (The Indian government defines a habitation as a group of 10-100 households.) Nalbari district, where the villages of Barigaon and Kothora are located, is the most affected by arsenic poisoning in Assam, with a total of 454 habitations.

Arsenic occurs naturally in Assam’s aquifers. The Brahmaputra carries iron oxide particles chemically bound to arsenic down from the Himalayas. “The iron oxide particles are broken down by microbes as they scavenge iron, releasing arsenic into the groundwater,” said Achintya Bezbaruah, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the North Dakota State University in the US.

COMMUNITY IN CHARGE OF WATER ATM

 

Bhaben Deka, a villager from Barigaon, is one of the 16 members of a water management committee. Once a month, the committee assembles to resolve issues regarding the distribution of water.

Users of the water ATM can choose to pay 30 Indian rupees (USD 0.4) for 20 litres, or a flat monthly fee of INR 210 (USD 2.82). The price was reached by consensus. “We asked the villagers on the price that suited their budget,” said Bhaben Deka. There are six poor families that do not have to pay to use the ATM; one family lost their breadwinner to cancer.

Bhaben Deka also arranges for water to be delivered to the homes of those who have difficulty transporting it or who live further away.

Every day, the ATM produces 4,650 litres of safe water, serving five villages within 3-4 kilometres of the machine. Most days, 250 villagers can be counted queuing up for the ATM.

As villages emerged as second-wave Covid-19 hotspots, Jiban Kalita, another committee member, took the initiative to open the unit from 7am to 6pm. Previously, it was open from 8am to 10am and 4pm to 6pm; the longer opening time helped to ease crowding.

The ATM is maintained by caretaker Sashanka Bezbaruah. It uses a nanotechnology-based ion exchange resin to remove iron and arsenic from groundwater. Every day, Bezbaruah washes out the pollutants gathered by the machine.

“If you don’t clean these resins, the system will lose its efficacy. Discoloured water may emerge, and traces of removed arsenic may slink back,” said Rohit Sar, a former Tata Water Mission consultant who worked with GVM and the local community to identify alternative sources of clean water.

The land the ATM sits on was lent by Bipul Deka, a farmer from Barigaon. The committee spends INR 10,000 (USD 134) of the money raised from users to pay Bezbaruah’s monthly salary, INR 800-1,200 (USD 11-16) on electricity, and the rest on chemicals to clean the water and the annual maintenance charge.

CAN THE SUCCESS OF BARIGAON'S WATER ATM BE REPLICATED?

Barigaon’s ATM was the first of its kind in the state. Five more have been installed, although only three of those are operational. A GVM staff member told The Third Pole that work was underway to repair the mechanics.

Achintya Bezbaruah said that the state government has plans to install 172 similar ATMs to prevent arsenic poisoning in Assam, following the success of the model in Barigaon.

The main challenge is not technology, but cooperation. The sustainability of such initiatives is dependent on whether local institutions support them or not, said Eklavya Prasad, managing trustee at Megh Pyne Abhiyan, a public charitable trust working on water stress in eastern India.

PIECEMEAL SOLUTIONS AND LACK OF POLITICAL WILL

Tube wells in Assam were installed in the late 1990s, in an effort to combat cholera and diarrhoea. However, for years they were not tested for arsenic or fluoride. In 2004, AB Paul, a former chief engineer in Assam’s Public Health Engineering Department (PHED), detected arsenic for the first time.

Since 2019, the central government has partnered with the states to implement the Jal Jeevan Mission, which aims to provide potable tap water to every rural household in the country by 2024. Habitations affected by arsenic and fluoride contamination are to be prioritised. Unfortunately, the discrepancy between data provided by state and central governments on arsenic-affected habitations and mitigation makes a mockery of this.

The 2015 report of the Inter-Ministerial Group for Arsenic Mitigation puts Assam as having taken mitigation measures in 2,212 out of 2,571 arsenic-affected habitations either through piped water supply schemes or newly dug wells. Only 359 habitations remain to be covered. By contrast, 2017 data by the Assam PHED states that 4,523 habitations out of 6,681 habitations are yet to receive any mitigation measures.

Some years ago, Paul discovered a pipe four kilometres from Barigaon that was connected up but not in use. He flagged this to the government, but no remedial action was taken. Paul told The Third Pole that the pipe supplying groundwater could have easily supplied enough water for 4,000 people.

Paul suggested there is a discrepancy between schemes on paper and benefit on the ground. Pipes are laid down. Contractors and suppliers get paid. On paper, the affected area is presented as covered. However, in reality the pipes are not being put to use. “There are 100 such unused pipes across Assam that could have easily benefitted neighbouring villages,” Paul said.

CLIMATE CHANGE ADDS TO THE CHALLENGE

Bipul Deka, a farmer, grows a variety of crops including cabbages, cauliflowers, leafy greens, gourds and onions. This year, he says, drought has reduced his crop yields to a sixth of what he expected. There is little he can do, except supplement his farming with daily wage labour. A 2011 study predicted a 25% increase in drought weeks due to climate change during the monsoon months in parts of Assam.

Droughts have a deeper effect. Hotter months lower the groundwater table, resulting in more dissolved iron and arsenic content. “The ATM is designed to filter up to a certain concentration, [beyond this concentration] it is bound to malfunction,” said Rohit Sar, a consultant with TWM.

Though the water ATM in Barigaon fortifies community cohesion, it uses groundwater. Already, overexploitation of groundwater – releasing arsenic into the aquifers – is happening under the government and private water supply schemes in Assam. Opting instead for surface water – still expensive – would guard against this.

Achintya Bezbaruah, the professor at North Dakota State University, suggested that tapping the Brahmaputra for water might be the way forward. “Even if 135 litres of drinking water from the river were to be supplied every day, we would be using only a fraction of its dry-weather flow,” he said.

(The Third Pole)

 

 

The Girl Who Was Killed For Wearing Jeans

 

While it may seem bizarre and rare, taking someone's life on grounds of sartorial policing is neither new nor sporadic. Denying women agency over their choice of clothes and by extension, over their bodies, is the oldest weapon in the arsenal of patriarchy

On July 19, a girl was killed in Uttar Pradesh's Deoria for wearing jeans.

Yes, you read that right. Killed for wearing jeans, the hapless 17-year-old suffered this fate at the hands of her own grandfather and uncles.

Her 'crime': on moving to Punjab, where her father is employed, the teenaged girl developed an affinity for 'Western' clothes and took to wearing them, even after returning to UP and despite being told to stop doing so by her relatives, according to news reports.

After a violent argument in which she hit her head on a wall, collapsed and began bleeding profusely, her grandfather and uncles got alarmed and tried to make it look like an accident. They attempted to achieve this by throwing her jeans-clad body off the Patanwa bridge on Kasya-Patna highway.

But in a final act of defiance, the teenager's body got stuck on the metal grille of the bridge and dangled from there for a few hours, before someone informed the police and investigation commenced.

If you are shocked by this, even mildly, you are not alone. Yet, the truth is that the mentality that leads to such incidents prevails across a great swathe of our society.

After reading about the incident described above, I was reminded of a remark by a friend's father who told her "tujhe nanga karke chaurahe par khada kar doonga" (I'll strip you naked and make you stand on the road crossing) because she wanted to wear pants and not traditional clothes, as a 13-year-old, living in the capital of a northern state.

I am privy to incidents in which male cousins have molested their female relatives, who, oblivious to such a possibility, would sleep on the terrace of their ancestral homes during hot summer months. Even at that age -- 20 years ago -- these female cousins of mine knew that nothing will come off raising the issue with their family. And so, they quietly suffered and tried to push such incidents to the back of their mind.

Judging women for wearing certain type of clothes -- conveniently branded 'Western' -- is nothing new. Any woman who has been born in or has lived in South Asia has been privy to casual derogatory remarks, carefully-planned ogling and touching in public spaces and institutional denial of such occurrences.

While it may seem bizarre and rare, taking someone's life on grounds of sartorial policing is neither new nor sporadic. Denying women agency over their choice of clothes and by extension, over their bodies, is the oldest weapon in the arsenal of patriarchy.

From an early age, girls are forced to consider the effect their clothes might have on 'others' (read: mainly male relatives, friends, passersby). Sometimes, this is achieved by female relatives criticising their sartorial choice. At other times, the obnoxious remark or lecherous look of a passerby produces the same effect. Mostly, however, it is a woman's in-built sense of 'inviting as little attention as possible towards herself' that guides her choice of clothes, in public and in the privacy of the home.

Last month, the Prime Minister of Pakistan caused a stir by linking women's clothing choices to sexual violence, for the second time in a row. He is not alone -- as the head of a government and occupying a public position with immense influence -- to hold such controversial (to put it mildly) views.

Asha Mirje, an NCP leader in Maharashtra (and a woman, to boot), Abu Azmi and Ramashankar Vidyarthi, affiliated with the Samajwadi Party and Mohan Bhagwat, RSS chief -- these are a few prominent names in India that readily come to mind when dealing with the issue of assigning blame for sexual (and non-sexual) violence on sartorial choices.

Showing exemplary insensitivity and callousness, Asha Mirje said that rape victims may have invited attacks by their clothes and behaviour.

Abu Azmi took it up a notch by saying: “Such incidents (like the Nirbhaya gang-rape) happen due to influence of Western culture.” He was joined in this chorus of the morally-hideous by Ramashankar Vidyarthi who held the opinion that: "Men and women are built differently so they should dress up accordingly. They should dress in such a way as to not appear obscene. Rapes would continue till obscenity isn't put a check on."

However, taking clothes-bashing to the next level, in 2013, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat had said, "Such crimes hardly take place in Bharat (rural India), but they occur frequently in India (urban areas)." Lacking any evidence to back his claim or perspective, Bhagwat was quoted as saying, "You go to villages and forests of the country and there will be no such incidents of gang-rape or sex crimes. They are prevalent in some urban belts. Besides new legislation, Indian ethos and attitude towards women should be revisited in the context of ancient Indian values."

Evidently, if this is the gamut of opinions held by public figures, political leaders and people in influential positions, is it any wonder that so little progress has been made on this issue?

But then, it's easier to pin the blame of the assault on the victim. It's not so easy (or at all) to confront and punish the ugliness, depravity and evil that drives people to commit such acts.

The fact that sartorial picks have nothing to do with sexual violence and persecution has been sought to be highlighted in India in the past. In 2017, tired of women's clothing being blamed for rape and molestation, a Mumbai-based photography and videography startup designed a hard-hitting photo series to highlight that it's not the victim's clothing that's responsible.

A deep-rooted malaise, this practice of linking women's clothing choices with psychological, physical and sexual violence against them, points at the glacial pace of progress in attitudes towards women. It is also indicative of the position and play of power associated with patriarchy that is still exercised and is a huge factor in our country.

Let's hope and pray that incidents that the Nirbhaya case and the one involving the girl who was killed for wearing jeans become scarcer. It is also reasonable to think that only a cataclysmic event will bring about any permanent change in the status quo.

Until that happens, let’s aid the cause by not shying away from wearing what we want to wear — ‘Western’ or traditional, in ‘Bharat’ and in ‘India’. Defiantly, let us make our clothes define us and boldly face upto the consequences that might follow from our sartorial choices.

 

 

Dalai Lama's Advisers, NSCN Leaders Potential Targets Of Pegasus Spyware

 

FILE PHOTO: The Dalai Lama at Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, after receiving the US Congressional Gold Medal (Photo Credit: AFP)

The top ring of advisers around the Dalai Lama and several leaders of the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN) are among those listed as potential targets of Israeli spyware Pegasus, an international media consortium reported on Thursday.

In the continuing series of reports on revelations from the international collaborative journalistic investigation called the Pegasus Project, The Wire has reported that phone numbers of multiple people close to Dubai Princess Sheikha Latifa, who was captured by Indian soldiers in 2018, were added to a list of potential targets for surveillance.

According to a report in The Guardian, the phone numbers of the top ring of advisers around the Dalai Lama are believed to have been selected as those of people of interest by government clients of NSO Group.

"Analysis strongly indicates that the Indian government was selecting the potential targets. Other phone numbers apparently selected by Delhi were those of the president of the government-in-exile, Lobsang Sangay, staff in the office of another Buddhist spiritual leader, the Gyalwang Karmapa, and several other activists and clerics who are part of the exiled community in India," it claimed.

"Senior advisers to the Dalai Lama whose numbers appear in the data include Tempa Tsering, the spiritual leader’s long-time envoy to Delhi, and the senior aides Tenzin Taklha and Chhimey Rigzen, as well as Samdhong Rinpoche, the head of the trust that has been tasked with overseeing the selection of the Buddhist leader’s successor," the report added.

The Pegasus spyware was created by Israeli technology firm NSO.

The government has dismissed the reports on the use of Pegasus software to snoop on Indians, saying the allegations levelled just ahead of the monsoon session of Parliament are aimed at "maligning Indian democracy".

In a separate report by The Wire, the phone numbers of several top leaders of the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak Muivah) - NSCN (I-M) - were added to a list of numbers of persons of interest believed to be generated by an Indian client of the Israeli spyware company.

"In the aftermath of the August 2015 framework agreement, which is intended to resolve the six-decade-old Naga political issue, the NSCN (I-M) has been in talks with the Modi government to flesh out the details of a final settlement. Among the top leaders of the NSCN (I-M) whose phone numbers have been found in the leaked database are that of Atem Vashum, Apam Muivah, Anthony Shimray and Phunthing Shimrang."

"The leaked records also show that N. Kitovi Zhimomi, convenor of the Naga National Political Groups (NNPGs), with which the Modi government is also in parleys to find ‘one solution’ to the Naga issue since end 2017, was selected as a possible candidate for surveillance towards the end of 2017," The Wire report said.

In another report, The Wire said, after princess Sheikha Latifa fled Dubai – where her father, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, is the ruler – her closest relatives and friends had their telephone numbers added to a list of potential targets of a military-grade spyware.

"Latifa's own number was added just before she fled but she had ditched her phone in Dubai before slipping across to Oman. While the UAE authorities had multiple methods of surveillance at their disposal, the analysis of a leaked database highlights how her escape seems to have coincided with the inclusion of several numbers related to Latifa appearing on a list of potential Pegasus targets," the report said.

The reports have been published by The Wire in collaboration with 16 other international publications including the Washington Post, The Guardian and Le Monde, as media partners to an investigation conducted by Paris-based media non-profit organisation Forbidden Stories and rights group Amnesty International.

The investigation focuses on a leaked list of more than 50,000 phone numbers from across the world, that are believed to have been the target of surveillance through Pegasus software, created by Israeli surveillance company NSO Group.

 

200 Farmers Reach Jantar Mantar For Protest Against Farm Laws

 

An elderly farmer blesses a policeman as farmer leader Rakesh Tikait and others leave for the Kisan Sansad from Ghazipur border, in Ghaziabad on July 22, 2021 (Photo Credit: PTI)

A group of 200 farmers reached Jantar Mantar in central Delhi on Thursday to protest against the Centre’s three contentious farm laws as the monsoon session of Parliament was underway.

Police threw a ring of security around central Delhi and kept a tight vigil on the movement of vehicles.

Delhi Lt Governor Anil Baijal has given special permission for demonstration by a maximum of 200 farmers at Jantar Mantar, a few metres from the Parliament Complex, till August 9.

The 200 farmers, wearing identification badges and carrying flags of their unions, travelled to Jantar Mantar from their Singhu border protest site in buses with a police escort.

The protest was to start at 11am, but the farmers reached the venue only by 12:25 pm.

Farmer leader Shiv Kumar Kakka said police stopped them at three places en route and their Aadhaar cards were checked.

Upon reaching Jantar Mantar, farmers raised slogans, demanding the government scrap the three laws.

The protesting farmers have been restricted to a small section of Jantar Mantar, with police putting up barricades on both sides.

Several teams of the Delhi Police manned the roads leading to the protest venue, while personnel of the Rapid Action Force, a specialized unit of the Central Reserve Police Force, stood guard at the site, carrying riot shields and batons.

A water cannon and metal-detector gates have been deployed at the site. Two tankers carrying drinking water have also been stationed there.

The Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM), an umbrella body of farmer unions spearheading the protest against the three farm laws, has been asked to give an undertaking that all COVID-19 norms would be followed and the stir would be peaceful.

Although the SKM had said that their protest at Jantar Mantar would continue till the end of the monsoon session of Parliament on August 13, the Lieutenant Governor has given permission for protest only till August 9.

This is the first time since the violence in the national capital during a tractor rally on January 26 that the authorities have granted permission to the protesting farmer unions to hold a demonstration in the city.

Gathering for protests is currently not allowed in the national capital in view of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to an order by the Delhi Disaster Management Authority.

Thousands of farmers from across the country have been agitating at three Delhi border points — Singhu, Tikri and Ghazipur — against the three farm laws that they claim will do away with the minimum support price system, leaving them at the mercy of big corporations.

Over 10 rounds of talks with the government, which has been projecting the laws at major agricultural reforms, have failed to break the deadlock between the two sides.

Jeff Bezos’ Comments On Workers After Spaceflight Draw Rebuke

 

Jeff Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO earlier in July, allowing him more time for side projects including his space exploration company Blue Origin. He has said he finances the rocket company by selling $1 billion in Amazon stock each year (Reuters)

The world's richest man wanted to say thanks to the people who made his brief trip into space Tuesday possible. But for some, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' expression of gratitude went over like a lead rocket.

“I want to thank every Amazon employee, and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all this," the 57-year-old Bezos said during a news conference on Tuesday after becoming the second billionaire in just over a week to ride in his own spacecraft.

Bezos built Amazon into a shopping and entertainment behemoth but has faced increasing activism within his own workforce and stepped up pressure from critics to improve working conditions.

Labor groups and Amazon workers have claimed that the company offers its hourly employees not enough break times, puts too much reliance on rigid productivity metrics and has unsafe working conditions. An effort to unionize workers at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama failed earlier this year.

Robert Reich, former secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton and a professor of public policy at University of California, Berkeley, wrote on Twitter that Bezos has crushed unionizing attempts for decades.

“Amazon workers don’t need Bezos to thank them. They need him to stop union busting — and pay them what they deserve," Reich wrote.

Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO earlier in July, allowing him more time for side projects including his space exploration company Blue Origin. He has said he finances the rocket company by selling $1 billion in Amazon stock each year.

After the spaceflight, Bezos awarded $100 million donations to both D.C. chef Jose Andres and CNN contributor Van Jones to put towards any charity or nonprofit of their choice.

Nevertheless, Rep Earl Blumenauer, who is on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, proposed on Tuesday legislation that would tax space travel for non-scientific research purposes.

“Space exploration isn’t a tax-free holiday for the wealthy," said Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat. “Just as normal Americans pay taxes when they buy airline tickets, billionaires who fly into space to produce nothing of scientific value should do the same, and then some."

Others tied his spaceflight to reports that Bezos hasn't paid his fair share of taxes. According to the nonprofit investigative journalism organization ProPublica, Bezos paid no income tax in 2007 and 2011.

“Jeff Bezos forgot to thank all the hardworking Americans who actually paid taxes to keep this country running while he and Amazon paid nothing," Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., tweeted.

Allen Adamson, co-founder of marketing consultancy Metaforce, says it's challenging for Bezos to say where the money from the space trip is coming from without being offensive. He says he should have left out those comments and focused on thanking the Blue Origin team.

“For people who have an issue with inequality and his compensation versus the average employee compensation, this was rocket fuel," Adamson said.

 

 

 

India's Daily Covid Tally Lowest In 125 Days

 

A decrease of 15,535 cases has been recorded in the active COVID-19 caseload in a span of 24 hours

India recorded 30,093 new coronavirus infections, the lowest in 125 days, taking the total tally of COVID-19 cases to 3,11,74,322, according to the Union Health Ministry data updated on Tuesday.

The death toll climbed to 4,14,482 with 374 daily fatalities, the lowest in 111 days, while the active cases have declined to 4,06,130, the lowest in 117 days.

The active caseload comprises 1.30 per cent of the total infections and the national COVID-19 recovery rate stands at 97.37 per cent, the data updated at 8 am showed.

A decrease of 15,535 cases has been recorded in the active COVID-19 caseload in a span of 24 hours.

As many as 17,92,336  tests were conducted on Monday, taking the total cumulative tests conducted so far for detection of COVID-19 in the country to 44,73,41,133.

The daily positivity rate was recorded at 1.68 per cent. It has been less than three per cent for 29 consecutive days, the ministry said, adding the weekly positivity rate has declined to 2.06 per cent.

The number of people who have recuperated from the disease surged to 3,03,53,710, while the case fatality rate stands at 1.33 per cent, the data stated.

Cumulative vaccine doses administered so far have reached 41.18 crore under the nationwide vaccination drive.

India’s COVID-19 tally had crossed the 20-lakh mark on August 7, 30 lakh on August 23, 40 lakh on September 5 and 50 lakh on September 16. It went past 60 lakh on September 28, 70 lakh on October 11, crossed 80 lakh on October 29, 90 lakh on November 20 and surpassed the one-crore mark on December 19.

India crossed the grim milestone of two crore on May 4 and three crore on June 23.

“Wonderful Person, Great Respect For His Work”: Bombay High Court On Stan Swamy

 

The HC bench also said it had ensured to remain fair while passing orders on Stan Swamy's medical bail plea

The Bombay High Court, while hearing posthumously the appeals filed by late Jesuit priest Stan Swamy in the Elgar Parishad-Maoist links case, on Monday said he was a wonderful person and the court had "great respect" for his work.

The observations were made by a bench of Justices SS Shinde and NJ Jamadar that had also presided over Stan Swamy's medical bail plea on July 5, when the HC was informed about the 84-year-old priest's death at the Holy Family Hospital in Mumbai that day following a cardiac arrest.

"We don't have time normally, but I saw the funeral service (of Swamy). It was very gracious," Justice Shinde said. "Such a wonderful person. The kind of service he has rendered to society. We have great respect for his work. Legally, whatever is there against him is a different matter," he said.

The bench also referred to the criticism that the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and the judiciary had received following Swamy's death.

It expressed regret over how, in several cases, undertrials languished in prisons waiting for the trial to begin.

The bench, however, also said it had ensured to remain fair while passing orders on Stan Swamy's medical bail plea, as well as on the pleas filed by his co-accused in the Elgar Parishad-Maoist links case.

"You came to us with his medical bail plea on May 28 and we acceded to every prayer, every time," the court said to Swamy's advocate, senior counsel Mihir Desai.

"Outside, we are speechless. Only you (Desai) can clarify this. You have said it on record that you have no grievance with this court in the matter," the HC said.

The HC further said nobody mentions that this is the court which granted bail to (co-accused) Varavara Rao, despite vehement opposition.

"We allowed (Rao's) family to meet as we thought human angle has to be seen. In another case (Hany Babu), we sent (him) to a hospital of his choice (Breach Candy Hospital-a private medical facility)," the HC said.

"We never anticipated this will happen (Swamy's death in custody). What was on our minds, we can't say now as we couldn't pronounce our order," the HC said, referring to the pending medical bail plea of the late Jesuit priest.

Swamy was arrested by the NIA in connection with the Elgar Parishad-Maoist links case from Ranchi in October 2020. The tribal rights activist, who was suffering from Parkinson's disease and several other ailments, spent most of his time in custody in the Taloja prison's hospital in neighbouring Navi Mumbai.

He was admitted to the state-run J J Hospital in Mumbai on two occasions and was shifted to the Holy Family Hospital, a private medical facility, on May 28, following the intervention of the bench led by Justice Shinde.

On July 5, the bench was informed by the hospital authorities that Swamy had suffered from a cardiac arrest two days prior and was put on ventilator support.

He never regained consciousness and was declared dead by the hospital authorities about an hour before Swamy's medical bail plea was taken up for hearing by the HC, it was informed at that time.

On Monday, following the HC's observations on it having passed fair orders, Desai said, "Let me say on record that I am extremely happy with various benches of the HC that heard this matter."

Desai, however, urged the HC to let Swamy's aide and another priest, father Frazer Mascarenhas, to participate in the magisterial inquiry that was initiated under Section 176 of the CrPC following the undertrial's death.

He also urged the High Court to direct the magistrate conducting the inquiry to adhere to the UNHRC guidelines on such inquiries, and to ask for a report of the probe to be submitted in the HC.

Desai was Swamy's counsel in the appeals challenging a special court order denying him bail on both medical grounds and merits.

Swamy had also filed a plea in the HC just weeks before his death, challenging section 45-D of the stringent Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), that barred grant of bail to any person accused under the Act.

Advocate Sandesh Patil, who appeared for the NIA, on Monday said the central agency was objecting to Desai's request since the HC was hearing appeals challenging a bail order and issues related to the inquiry could not be raised on the same pleas.

"Time and again it is projected that the NIA is responsible for whatever has happened, and that jail authorities are responsible too," Patil told the HC.

The bench, however, told him there could be "no control on who says what outside on the matter".

"You take instructions on how many witnesses, how long will the trial take. We have to look at it practically," the HC said to the NIA counsel.

"The concern is that for how many years can people be asked to languish in jail without a trial. Not only in this case, but the question will arise on other cases also," it said.

The HC will continue hearing the pleas on July 23.

The Elgar Parishad case is related to inflammatory speeches made at a conclave held in Pune on December 31, 2017, which, the police claimed, triggered violence the next day near the Koregaon-Bhima war memorial located on the outskirts of the western Maharashtra city.

The police had claimed the conclave was organised by people with alleged Maoist links.

The NIA later took over the probe into the case.

Amid Ethnic Tensions With Indians, Ramaphosa Dispatches Top Officials

 

Ramaphosa asked police minister Bheki Cele and Premier of KwaZulu Natal province Sihle Zikalala to address the situation in the suburbs of Phoenix and Pietermaritzburg

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Friday said he has dispatched his police minister and premier of KwaZulu Natal province to a township in Durban amid escalating tensions between the Indian and Black African communities there.

The tensions between the two communities in the Indian township of Phoenix and surrounding areas have been sparked by social media posts in which there are calls for action against each other's communities following the violence over the arrest of former President Jacob Zuma on July 7.

Ramaphosa was briefly in Ethekwini, a metropolitan municipality that includes the city of Durban and surrounding towns, to assess the situation following the continuing violence and looting in the region. However, he did not visit the suburbs of Phoenix and Pietermaritzburg, the provincial capital of KwaZulu-Natal, that have been most affected. Durban is the largest city in the KwaZulu-Natal province.

Ramaphosa asked police minister Bheki Cele and Premier of KwaZulu Natal province Sihle Zikalala to go to these areas to address the situation.

"The Minister of Police was on his way to Phoenix. Our local leaders—the Premier, the MEC's (Members of the Executive Committee of the City)—are going to have to deal with that type of situation," the president said.

"I wanted to go myself, but time now is of the essence. We are going to have a Cabinet meeting later, so I'm going to have to go back to Gauteng (province), but I'm here now, encouraging and holding the hands of both our people on the ground and also directing the security forces and getting them to go to those areas that are volatile at the moment," Ramaphosa said.

Concerned over the widespread violence and rioting in South Africa, India's External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar on Wednesday spoke with his South African counterpart Naledi Pandor, who assured him that her government was doing utmost to enforce law and order and an early restoration of normalcy was the overriding priority.

Phoenix and Chatsworth are the two sprawling townships created to forcibly rehouse the thousands of Indian citizens of the region under the draconian apartheid-era policy of separate development. Phoenix is now surrounded by several Black African townships.

There has also been widespread social media sharing of edited posts of Ethekwini Mayor Mxolisi Kaunda, which were manipulated to create a highly inflammatory message suggesting that he was calling for Indians to be killed.

In the original post, Kaunda quoted someone else to call for all to reject the message and exercise restraint, appealing for calm to prevail. "We are continuing a series of engagements with communities, especially where the issues of racial tension have been cited," Kaunda said.

Kaunda said that besides Phoenix, there were also initiatives in other areas of the city, including the huge Indian suburb of Chatsworth, south of the city.

Meanwhile, images of some Indian residents of Phoenix, many heavily armed, who claim to be protecting their lives and property and making inflammatory anti-Black remarks, have been flashed on social media, getting fellow incensed residents to join vigilante groups.

But some groups have pointed out that a few rogue vigilante elements in the community, who were receiving huge publicity while making racist remarks and threats to African people, have been tainting the efforts of many others who have mobilised to protect their assets and stop looters.

"The community members who have come forward to work lawfully alongside security forces for this purpose have even been publicly lauded by both President Ramaphosa this morning and the Minister of Police yesterday," said Shaun Naidoo, who was speaking on behalf of a group controlling access at one of the entry points into Phoenix.

This small group of rogues in both the Indian and African communities are misusing the looting and rioting situation and unfortunately, this is now getting entire communities very angry, flaring up into the explosive situation that we now find ourselves in, said Abdul Khan, who was also part of the group.

Police minister Cele said he was confident that with the deployment of soldiers, law and order would be restored in Phoenix. Cele attributed the situation to criminals and not to those who are protesting the imprisonment of former president Zuma, which sparked the initial mass action that quickly devolved into massive looting and arson across the country.

Zuma started a 15-month sentence last Wednesday after the country's apex court found him guilty of contempt of court as he refused to appear before the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture, where he has been repeatedly accused of involvement in corruption by witnesses.

Floods In Europe: Search For Missing Goes On As Toll Tops 90

The area around a building is flooded following heavy rainfalls in Erftstadt, Germany (Reuters)

The death toll from devastating floods across parts of western Germany and Belgium rose above 90 on Friday, as the search continued for hundreds of people still unaccounted for and officials warned such disasters could become more common due to climate change.

Authorities in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate said 50 people had died there, including at least nine residents of an assisted living facility for people with disabilities. In neighboring North Rhine-Westphalia state, officials put the death toll at 30, but warned that the figure could rise further.

Some 1,300 people in Germany were still reported missing, though authorities said efforts to contact them could be hampered by disrupted roads and phone connections.

In a provisional tally, the Belgian death toll has risen to 12, with 5 people still missing, local authorities and media reported early on Friday.

The flash floods this week followed days of heavy rainfall which turned streams and streets into raging torrents that swept away cars and caused houses to collapse across the region.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Joe Biden expressed their sorrow over the loss of life during a news conference at the White House late on Thursday.

The long-time German leader, who was on a farewell trip to Washington, said she feared that “the full extent of this tragedy will only be seen in the coming days.”

Rescuers were rushing on Friday to help people trapped in their homes in the town of Erftstadt, southwest of Cologne. Regional authorities said several people had died after their houses collapsed due to subsidence, and aerial pictures showed what appeared to be a massive sinkhole.

Three people were rescued from the Wurm River in Heinsberg county late on Thursday.

The governor of North Rhine-Westphalia state, Armin Laschet, has called an emergency cabinet meeting on Friday. The 60-year-old's handling of the flood disaster is widely seen as a test for his ambitions to succeed Merkel as chancellor in Germany's national election on September 26.

Malu Dreyer, the governor of neighboring Rhineland-Palatinate state, said the disaster showed the need to speed up efforts to curb global warming.

“We've experienced droughts, heavy rain and flooding events several years in a row, including in our state,” she told the Funke media group. “Climate change isn't abstract anymore. We are experiencing it up close and painfully.”

She accused the Laschet and Merkel's center-right Union bloc of hindering efforts to achieve greater greenhouse gas reductions in Germany, Europe's biggest economy and a major emitter of planet-warming gases.

The German army has deployed 900 soldiers to help with the rescue and clear-up efforts.

Thousands of people remain homeless after their houses were destroyed or deemed at-risk by authorities, including several villages around the Steinbach reservoir that experts say could collapse under the weight of the floods.

Across the border in Belgium, most of the drowned were found around Liege, where the rains hit hardest. Skies were largely overcast in eastern Belgium, with hopes rising that the worst of the calamity was over.

In the southern Dutch province of Limburg, troops piled sandbags to strengthen a 1.1 kilometer (0.7 miles) stretch of dike along the Maas river and police helped evacuate some low-lying neighborhoods.

Caretaker Prime Minister Mark Rutte said on Thursday night that the government was officially declaring flood-hit regions a disaster area, meaning businesses and residents are eligible for compensation for damage.

Meanwhile, sustained rainfall in Switzerland has caused several rivers and lakes to break their banks. Public broadcaster SRF reported that a flash flood swept away cars, flooded basements and destroyed small bridges in the northern villages of Schleitheim und Beggingen late on Thursday.

'Highest Number Of Unvaccinated Kids Worldwide Are In India’

 

FILE PHOTO: A homeless boy feeds his sister inside a sports complex turned into a shelter, during a 21-day nationwide lockdown to slow the spread of the coronavirus disease in New Delhi

India has the highest number of under-vaccinated or unvaccinated children worldwide at 3.5 million, an increase of 1.4 million from 2019, amid the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, the UNICEF said.

It also noted that over 3 million of zero-dose children in 2020 lived in India.

At nearly 4.4 million, South Asia recorded the highest number of children having failed to receive any routine vaccination in the past ten years, in 2020.

“More than 3 million of these ‘zero-dose children’ in 2020 lived in India,” the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) said in a statement.

Globally, the UNICEF said the data shows that just 10 countries account for 62 per cent of all under- or unvaccinated children globally.

India – particularly hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic – had the highest number of unprotected children worldwide at 3.5 million, an increase of 1.4 million compared with 2019, when the number of unprotected children was 2.1 million, the children’s body said.

Unprotected children are those who are unvaccinated (no vaccine) or under-vaccinated (incomplete vaccination), that is, any child who has not received any or few doses of their due vaccination.

Pakistan had 1.3 million unprotected children in 2020, an increase of 0.4 million, the statement said.

“Most of these children did not receive a single vaccine during the year, an indication that the most vulnerable, hard-to-reach children are paying the steepest price for pandemic-related disruptions to vaccine access,” the statement said.

Noting that the majority of countries in South Asia experienced drops in childhood vaccination rates, the UNICEF said the rates for diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP3) vaccine reduced by 9 per cent points in Nepal; 7 per cent points in Pakistan; 6 per cent points in India; 3 per cent points in Sri Lanka; and 2 per cent points in Bhutan and Afghanistan.

“However, robust recovery efforts mounted in many countries towards the end of the year helped to blunt the impact of overall declines. In India, for example, vaccination drives in remote areas are helping to reach missed children,” the statement said.

Yasumasa Kimura, Officer-in-Charge and Deputy Representative programmes, UNICEF India said, “While the health systems are strained by the COVID-19 response, we must be cautious in our fight against the pandemic so as not to interfere with decades of gains against other preventable diseases. We cannot afford to lose out on routine immunisation and letting vaccine-preventable diseases endanger children’s health.”

UNICEF is partnering with the Government of India to support the continuity of essential health and immunisation services through planning, implementation and monitoring of various strategies to identify and vaccinate missed children. We also support generating awareness and confidence among communities to vaccinate their children and strengthening the cold chain for routine immunisation, he said.

CRPF Sniffer Dog Dies In Jharkhand IED Blast, Saves Lives of Commandos

 

Jawans of 203 Cobra-CRPF unit pay tribute to Drone, a sniffer dog who was killed in an IED blast during an anti-Maoist search operation, in the Gumla district of Jharkhand (ANI)

Drone, a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) sniffer dog, died on Tuesday in an improvised explosive blast triggered by Maoists at Marwa forests in Jharkhand's Gumla district while his handler Vishwajeet Kumbkar was injured, a top police official said.

Drone, however, did not die in vain, as the blast he triggered while searching for explosives saved the lives of the crack CoBRA commandos with whom he was serving.

The sniffer dog had, in the past too, saved a whole team of CoBRA commandos of the CRPF from a similar bomb attack by sniffing out explosives.

Jharkhand police spokesperson and Inspector General of Police (Operations) A.V. Homkar said the injured jawan, Vishwajeet Kumbkar, was airlifted from the spot and admitted to Ranchi's Medica Hospital.

"In an unfortunate incident, a sniffer dog belonging to 203 CoBRA,CRPF was martyred in an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) Blast triggered by Maoists during an operation in Gumla district," a statement from the police headquarters said.

"Aged 6 years and 9 months, Drone, a male Belgian Shepherd dog of the Malinois variety, had been serving with 203 CoBRA since December 27, 2015," the statement said.

"He had participated in 83 operations in almost all parts of Jharkhand state. One of his great achievements was on April 7, 2016 in Parasnath area, where he found four containers of 40 kgs explosive each. That also contained detonators, cortex, mobile phone, walky talky, GPS, which helped in avoiding any mishap and saved valuable lives," it said.

"He was part of an operation in Gumla, where with his bravery and sacrifice he saved a whole team of CoBRA commandos from a powerful IED blast around 0730 am but was himself martyred in the process," the CRPF statement said.

"His selfless sacrifice will never be forgotten and will always be remembered as an act of valour. Shaheed Drone was cremated with a guard of honour and as per laid down procedure of the force," the police said.

Earlier, the headquarters had said that extremists had laid vast traps of IEDs in the entire area and a few villagers had died while grazing cattle in similar IED blast traps laid by extremists in the forests.

In May this year, security forces had neutralised an extremist in an encounter in the same forest and recovered a stolen police pistol, .303 rifle, 63 live cartridges and 24 can-bombs.

 

India's First Covid-19 Patient Tests Positive For Coronavirus Again

 

A woman medico, who was India's first COVID-19 patient, has tested positive again for the virus, health authorities said in Kerala's Thrissur today.

"She is reinfected with COVID-19. Her RT-PCR is positive, antigen is negative. She is asymptomatic," Thrissur District Medical Officer Dr KJ Reena told news agency Press Trust of India.

"Her samples were tested as she was prepared to go to New Delhi for study purposes. Then the RT-PCR result turned out to be positive," she told Press Trust of India.

The woman is currently at home and "she is OK," the doctor told PTI.

It was on January 30, 2020, that the third year medical student from Wuhan University tested positive for COVID-19, becoming India's first COVID-19 patient, days after she had returned home following semester holidays.

After nearly three weeks of treatment at the Thrissur Medical College Hospital, she had tested negative twice for the virus, confirming her recovery, and was discharged on February 20, 2020.

Meanwhile, giving rise to fresh worries about the COVID-19 pandemic rearing its head again, the R-value for the coronavirus, which denotes the speed at which the infection is spreading, has gone up for the country, revealed researchers at the Chennai-based Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc).

The mathematical representation that acts as an indicator for how fast the infection is spreading shows it has gone from 0.78 on June 30 to 0.88 in the first week of July.

This is despite the nationwide tally of new cases remaining low and comes amid the unlocking process begun by many states trying to restore a semblance of normalcy as the deadly second wave, which infected lakhs and killed thousands during its peak in April-May, shows signs of ebbing.

IMA Says No To Re-Opening Tourism Due To Covid Threat

 

Tourists can be seen at the Taj Mahal in Agra after Covid restrictions were lifted (Reuters)

Opening India’s tourist destinations and allowing pilgrimage travel could act as COVID-19 “super spreaders” of a third wave of infections, the country’s top doctor’s body warned on Monday.

After a catastrophic second wave, driven largely by the more infectious and dangerous Delta variant, ravaged the country’s health system, India is now reporting roughly a tenth of its peak daily numbers in May.

But experts worry that a third wave of infections is not far off as travel restrictions are eased in various parts of the country.

On Monday, the Indian Medical Association, India’s top doctor’s body, appealed to state governments and citizens to not lower their guard against COVID-19, saying a third wave was inevitable.

“It is painful to note, in this crucial time… in many parts of the country, both government and public are complacent and engaged in mass gatherings without following COVID protocols,” the IMA said in a press release.

The comments from the IMA echoed those from senior government officials, who have urged citizens to avoid crowding at tourist places and cautioned that the second coronavirus wave is not yet over.

“Tourist bonanza, pilgrimage travel, religious fervour are all needed, but can wait for few more months,” the IMA said, adding that opening up for these rituals and enabling unvaccinated people to go to these mass gatherings are “potential super spreaders for the COVID third wave.”

India on Monday reported 37,154 new COVID-19 cases and 724 new deaths in the last 24 hours, Health Ministry data showed, compared to the peak of over 400,000 infections a day in May.

The country has reported a COVID-19 death toll of over 408,000, the third highest in the world.

The pace of India’s vaccination drive has also slowed down, with roughly 8% of the 950 million eligible adult population fully vaccinated. The country had vaccinated 3.7 million people on Monday as of 1240 GMT. (Reuters)

Blacklisted Vlogger's Wife Moves Delhi HC Against Centre's Decision

 

YouTube vlogger Karl Edward Rice with his wife Manisha Malik (via Karl Edward Rice, Twitter)

YouTube vlogger Karl Edward Rice's wife has approached the Delhi High Court, challenging the central government's alleged "arbitrary and unreasonable" decision to blacklist him and deny a visa to enter India.

The petitioner said by virtue of denying visa to her husband, who has been "arbitrarily blacklisted" by the respondents (Centre), she is deprived from living with him, thereby violating her fundamental right to life and dignity as guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution.

The plea, which is likely to come up for hearing next week, said petitioner Manisha Malik and her husband, popularly known as Karl Rock, are YouTube vloggers and have visited most of India to capture its beauty and contribute to the promotion of tourism here.

It said the authorities have not communicated the grounds of blacklisting Rice even though several representations have been preferred by him and his wife, which has led to the separation of a married couple, lack of any opportunity or notice to them to indicate any violation of visa conditions and denial of issuance of visa to him.

Terming the Centre's move an arbitrary abuse of power, the plea said it violates the petitioner's rights under Article 19 (protection of certain rights regarding freedom of speech) of the Constitution.

Union Home Ministry officials had on Friday said the New Zealand national has been restricted from entering India till the next year for violating terms and conditions of his visa.

He was found to be doing business activities on a tourist visa and also violating other visa conditions, they had said without specifying.

The plea said since their marriage in 2019, the couple has been living in Delhi and Rice has not been able to return to India from New Zealand since October 10 last year. "The petitioner's husband, Karl Edward Rice, has a dual nationality of New Zealand and the Netherlands, and has been visiting India since 2013 strictly abiding by the laws of the country and the conditions of visa. During the entire period since 2013, while the petitioner's husband has been granted Indian visa on various occasions, there hasn't been even a single allegation against the petitioner's husband," the plea, filed through advocate Fuzail Ahmad Ayyubi, said.

Subsequent to their marriage, Rice was granted an X-2 Visa (meant for spouse/children of an Indian citizen) which had a validity period of May 2019 to May 2024, and one of the conditions in the visa for him was to exit India every 180 days or to intimate the Foreigner Regional Registration Office concerned.

"Complying with the aforesaid condition of exiting the nation, while Rice left India on October 10, 2020, he has not been able to return to India because any application for issuance of an Indian visa is being rejected by the respondents. While the petitioner has been running from pillar to post and no reasons are communicated to either Karl Edward Rice or to the petitioner herself as to on what basis her husband's request for issuance of visa have been rejected," the petition said, adding that Rice was only verbally informed that he has been blacklisted and therefore he is not permitted to enter into India.

The plea sought direction to the authorities to call for records pertaining to the cancellation of visa and unilateral blacklisting of Rice and also sought to review or quash the decision blacklisting him and allow him entry to India.

As an alternative, the plea sought to direct the authorities to grant a meaningful hearing to the couple on the sudden blacklisting of Rice.

The petition has arrayed the Centre, through the Ministry of Home Affairs, FRRO and Bureau of Immigration as parties.