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Hello,
With the second wave of Covid proving to be more rampant and deadlier than the first, India’s medical infrastructure is being stretched to the point of collapse. Reports of shortages of everything abound - hospital beds, oxygen, critical drugs, and tragically even spaces for cremations.
Mojo Story brings you heart-rending and tragic scenes from a cremation site in Gujarat’s Surat. With over 100 cremations in a single day, the site has run out of space, and furnaces have melted, unable to take the incessant load. The Mojo story also talks to the families of the victims who tell the tale of woefully inadequate facilities at the government hospitals, including basic equipment like CT scans.
The suffering of the second wave could have been avoided, says The India Forum, by anticipating the second surge and speeding up the roll-out of vaccines in January this year. The government could have roped in supplies, either from overseas or by encouraging more domestic players, including the public sector. This they failed to do.
It is precisely on this point of bringing the PSUs into the vaccine stream that a special investigation by Down to Earth finds India has been found woefully wanting. In the past decade, India’s vaccine manufacturing capacity has been steadily going downhill with seven PSUs capable of producing vaccines in limbo. Last week, in view of the surge, there was a renewed effort to revive three of the dormant PSUs, but the fear is that, while it may be a step in the right direction, it may also be a case of too little, too late.
With casualty rates climbing, almost inevitably come a fresh bout of recommendations for alternate “remedies” which promise to counter the virus. Alt News fact-checked and found that not only are these not based on the dictates of science but may actually endanger the very lives they are ostensibly seeking to protect.
The Bastion reports that despite several interventions of the courts to address the issue of forest fires in Uttarakhand, the forest department persistently passes the buck for the forest fires on to the forest dwellers - Van Gujjars - making no effort to douse the flames. This “colonial” attitude restricts the forest communities and their livestock from accessing the areas earmarked for them and disrupts their traditional way of making a living off the forest.
For a selection of stories from our grantees this week, please read on.
Warmly,
Sunil Rajshekhar
IPSMF
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