Dear Express reader, Covid continues to dominate the headlines so much so that news developments such as the escalation in violence on Gaza have been pushed to the international pages. If the first wave of the pandemic had largely restricted itself to crowded urban areas, evidence, anecdotal and otherwise, suggests that the current phase has engulfed rural India. The corpses floating in the Ganga and Yamuna are a terrible reminder of the tragedy unfolding. On Saturday, the Indian Express family lost a dear colleague, Sunil Jain, managing editor of The Financial Express, to COVID-19. He was not just a fine editor and sharp commentator but also a wonderful person who always loved a good debate. We will miss you, Sunil. The raging pandemic attracted the maximum number of commentaries, ranging from the defence of government action by a senior Cabinet minister, to suggestions on revamping COVID containment strategy by a former chief minister and an open letter to BJP cadres on why they need to ask difficult questions to their party leadership at this time. Public health specialist Chandrakant Lahariya chose to address a subject that was top of the mind for most people — the oxygen shortage in hospitals across the country. The shortfall caused numerous deaths, forcing the Supreme Court to set up a 12-member National Task Force (NTF) to guide, inter alia, the central government allocation of medical oxygen to the states. Lahariya wrote: “The shortage of medical oxygen in the Covid-19 response reflects insufficient planning, delayed procurement, and weakness of supply chain management — issues which plague medicine supply in the public healthcare sector in India… The root cause of this situation is the insufficient capacity of state health departments in planning, procurement and supply of medicines, an issue which is widely known. This is further aggravated by insufficient government funding.” In short, the oxygen crisis was the inevitable outcome of years of neglect of public health. Apar Gupta and Anushka Jain wrote on the digital architecture for vaccination and found that “in the absence of the internet and without knowledge of how the portal functions, the majority of India’s rural population is being discriminated against and a form of technical rationing is being implemented by CoWin based on broadband connectivity and digital literacy.” CoWin, according to them, falls short of expectations on data protection and cyber security. The verdict was: “The technocratic approach in using digital systems has prioritised data collection and efficiency over vaccine equity. It disregards the experience of public healthcare and digital rights experts. The present deployment of CoWin, rather than augmenting the right to health, is undermining it.” T M Krishna’s anguish at the failure of the political leadership in combating Covid led him to put the following questions to the BJP cadres: “If Modi belonged to any other political outfit, would you have stood by in silence as he forced thousands of migrant workers to walk and cycle across the country for weeks, without even food, just to get back home? Would you have not accused the prime minister and his government of utter mismanagement and inept planning? Would you have not asked questions of a prime minister under whose watch the vaccination programme has been stuttering, leaving the people at the mercy of a few private companies? Would you not have been aghast that oxygen is unavailable in the capital city? Would you not have been shocked that the Supreme Court has had to direct the central government to supply oxygen?” Union minister Prakash Javadekar, however, had a different take. He said “a myth is being circulated that the central government dropped the ball on Covid management after the first wave and left it entirely to the states for the last few months. Nothing is further from the truth.” The central government, according to him, has been proactive in Covid management as a pandemic requires national-level coordination and substantial resources. It continues to lead from the front and provide considerable support and guidance to states, he argued. Then there was Gaza. As the Palestinians observed the anniversary of Nakba, violence escalated with rockets and missiles clouding West Asian skies. The deaths included numerous children in Gaza and an Indian nurse, Soumya Santosh, 32, in the Israeli city of Ashkelon. Pratap Bhanu Mehta predicts that “the dominant response is going to be a moral indifference”. He wrote: “We all avoid the moral questions the oppression of Palestinians poses by comforting ourselves that in this conflict we can distribute rights and wrongs equally. There is Israeli terrorism, and there is Hamas terrorism. There is the spectacle of civilians on both sides living in terror. Missiles raining down on Israeli cities on the one hand, and the sheer brutality of Israeli defence forces operations on the other. There is the fanaticism of the Israeli right wing and there is the fanaticism of Hamas and Fatah, with bumbling politicians on both sides. There is the sheer geo-political opportunism about the Palestine issue.” In the Indian context, the conflict is increasingly viewed in communal terms, forgetting the secular history of Palestine’s struggle to be recognised as a nationality. India’s long-standing commitment to the Palestine cause was centred on it being “the symbol of the unfinished tasks of decolonisation, and a human rights catastrophe”, as Mehta wrote. The past week saw the passing of the iconic Communist leader and administrator, K R Gouri Amma at the age of 102. In her obituary, J Devika spoke for scores of people who admired Gouri Amma. Devika wrote: “The passing of her body leaves us stranded in a strange isle of grief. On the one hand, one cannot help wailing: Will there be another like her ever? We grieve not only for her body, we also lament for this society, the future of which seems bleak, incapable of producing yet another like her. Will there be a woman politician whose male peers cannot trample upon, who cannot be exclusively corralled into “womanly” concerns like public health or social welfare? Will there be another of her kind who will be entrusted with Revenue, Civil Supplies, Sales Tax, and Excise portfolios? Will there be another woman who will be chosen to pilot historic, landmark legislations in the history of Kerala? Will there be another woman politician who will both survive the perils of marriage and separation and thrive afterwards? Will there be another woman who the dominant left in Kerala will project as the next Chief Minister in an election campaign?” Thank you. Stay well. Amrith | 
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment