THE Left Democratic Front (LDF) government in Kerala has been re-elected to office with a big mandate. This is a significant election in many respects. The first significant aspect of the election is that this is the first time after 1977 that an incumbent government has been re-elected in Kerala.
OF all the decisions taken by the Modi government the most mindless has been the so-called “liberalisation” of vaccine distribution. Originally, the central government was the sole buyer from the two producing firms at a fixed price of Rs150 per dose, and then, while itself distributing them free to the people,also usedother channels for distribution, including private hospitals (who however charged Rs250 per dose because they had to pay...
ON Earth Day April 22, this year, US President Joe Biden hosted a summit of world leaders to address climate change, something he had promised he would do during his presidential campaign, to once again establish US leadership on this vital global issue that former US President Trump had abandoned four years ago. The summit was attended by 40 countries including most developed countries and other nations with large national emissions such as China, the world’s largest emitter,...
INDIA is in the midst of the world’s worst outbreak of Covid-19 cases. It is a dystopian nightmare. The new cases and death toll are continuously rising. The medical response is hampered by shortages of oxygen, drugs, and hospital beds. According to experts, “The significant inefficiency, dysfunction and acute shortage of healthcare delivery systems in the public sector...
THE incompetence of the Modi government is starkly visible in its handling of the current crisis. It fares even worse on the vaccine front. Its belief in the ideology of free-market capitalism is that the market will magically produce whatever we need. This is why it starved the seven public sector vaccine manufacturing units (Down To Earth: COVID-19 vaccines: Waiting for advantage...
THE Covid-19 pandemic that has India in its deathly grip, is nowhere near its end. India is now registering numbers that have broken all “records”. Currently more than half of all new cases per day in the world are from India! While the number of daily new cases have started to show a slow decline, it is accompanied by a drop in the number of tests conducted....
ON this May Day, working class of India is reeling under the brutal onslaught of the Covid-19 pandemic which has so far taken over lives in India and affected a staggering number of person since last year. While the deadly disease can affect anybody, it has had the most catastrophic effect on poorer sections of society. With over three fourths of the Indian healthcare system in...
THE G7 foreign ministers of G7 countries met in London this week and issued a joint statement painting Russia as a malicious actor and China as a bully. It had little substance in its communique, apart from ticking all the “right” boxes in its anti-China and anti-Russia campaign: Uyghur’s, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Crimea, Ukraine. It ended with arrogating to itself the mantle of being the “rules-based international order”,...
THE joint platform of Central Trade Unions and Federations has urged prime minister, Narendra Modi to cement a proactive unity of all people and to meet the challenge posed by the calamity of the second wave of COVID-19.
THE All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA) has condemned the post-election violence that has reached terrifying proportions in West Bengal since the state assembly election results were declared on the evening of May 2. It said that 12 people have already been killed in the state, whatever may have been their political colour.
