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Hello,
Even as the media’s attention is focussed on The Wire expose’ on the use of spying software to snoop on journalists and opposition leaders, another report by grantee Article 14 analyses the potential violation of fundamental rights to privacy and free expression, faced by 60,000 employees of NTPC, where facial-recognition technology is proposed to be installed to monitor them. The data of the employees, which will be recorded and stored by NTPC, is open to misuse and surveillance as India still does not have a data protection law in place.
As the Covid second wave ebbs, mathematical modelling done by ICMR and the Imperial College, London, reveals that the third wave of the pandemic is likely to hit India by August-end. While not predicted to be as lethal as the second wave, it could still inflict enormous fatalities. Mojo Story discusses how India can lessen the impact, given the shortage of vaccines.
As sexual crimes and abuse against women surge in Kashmir, a young Srinagar based lawyer Badrul Duja’s activism has single-handedly led to the establishment of sexual harassment committees in more than 70 government departments across the Valley. Kashmir Observer chronicles the effort.
EastMojo reports on a heroic effort by the local community in Arunachal Pradesh’s Siang district, who came together to build a 30-metre rope-suspension bridge after a major portion of the Pangin-Pasighat highway was washed away in the monsoons.
And, Down To Earth delves into the past to report that while the scale of the human tragedy in a pandemic is incalculable, the quarantines have also spawned some of the greatest works in arts and sciences. Leonardo Da Vinci’s masterpiece on urban planning – ‘Ideal City’, Isaac Newton’s concepts on gravity and calculus, and William Shakespeare’s classics Macbeth and King Lear, for instance, were all products of periods of forced lockdowns during the plagues in Europe.
For more from our grantees this week, please read on.
Warmly,
Sunil Rajshekhar
IPSMF
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