Innholdsfortegnelse for October 19, 2020 i India Today

CHARGE-SHEET RATE IN CRIMES AGAINST DALITS HAS COME DOWN FROM 88.5% IN 2009 TO 78.5% IN 2019; WITH 81.8%, UTTAR PRADESH MAINTAINS A BETTER RECORD THAN THE NATIONAL AVERAGE 11% of rape victims in 2019 were Dalits 94% of cases under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 are pending at different stages of trial/ investigation TRIAL BY ERROR While the conviction rate in all IPC cases has steadily grown in the past decade, the conviction rate in cases of atrocities against Dalits and rape of women has dipped since 2014, the year the BJP-led central government came to power…

The Covid ward at Delhi’s Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital has seen a number of recommended drugs enter and exit their registers. Back in March, doctors here were handing out anti-HIV medication to their patients before the highly-debated hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) entered the scene, which was followed by a variety of steroids and antibiotics, and then, finally, convalescent plasma. After six months of trial and error, doctors say they are both hopeful and sceptical. “The number of recoveries, as compared to deaths, is up and we aren’t getting as many serious cases as we were at the onset of the pandemic,” says Dr Suresh Kumar, director, LNJP Hospital. “But we still do not have a guaranteed Covid treatment. We try various combinations based on individual symptoms.” With a total of…

People have noticed the gender bias in the NCB’s investigation and the agency, keen to redeem itself, has revealed that it will soon be questioning three male actors Bollywood is currently going through a PR crisis, one that it didn’t see coming. It began on June 14 when actor Sushant Singh Rajput died by suicide—a conclusion that Mumbai Police arrived at long ago and one that the All India Institute of Medical Sciences recently confirmed. There was shock; condolences were expressed, as were regrets about being too occupied with one’s own affairs. But, along with grief, came a torpedo of accusations against the “movie mafia”, “nepo gang”, and a “drug nexus” within the film industry. Never has the industry faced such large-scale contempt, as a result of which it is…

BEST CHARITY HOSPITAL COMBATING COVID-19 WINNER: CMC, VELLORE For Christian Medical College (CMC), Vellore, a 3,000-bed tertiary care teaching and charitable hospital, providing Covid care involved many challenges. Infection control and triaging protocols were put in place in January 2020 and teams created in March worked tirelessly to prepare for the worst and to allay staff and patient anxieties. CMC began by allocating 150 beds in March and currently has 924, including 96 ICU beds, for Covid patients. “A dedicated faculty who led the infection control, engineering and triaging initiatives, backed by a proactive administration, helped us weather this storm,” says medical superintendent Dr K. Prasad Mathews. A Covid Command Centre (CCC) with 70 staff from various departments was set up early on. “The staff had to be trained overnight:…

BEST CORPORATE CONTRIBUTION FOR SOCIAL IMPACT DURING COVID-19 WINNER: RELIANCE FOUNDATION The Reliance Foundation set up India’s first dedicated Covid-19 facility in Mumbai, at the SevenHills Hospital, in collaboration with the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation. The 100-bed hospital was scaled up to 250 beds within two weeks. The foundation provided mobile medical units at the doorstep of patients, raised Covid awareness in rural areas and built an isolation centre in Lodhivali, Maharashtra. At the time of assessment by the jury, the foundation had spent Rs 790 crore on combating Covid-19, including a donation of Rs 500 crore to the PM CARES Fund. The foundation mentored self-help groups and village institutions to produce masks for community and frontline workers and farmer producer organisations to alleviate farmers’ distress during the lock-down. Reliance Nutrition…

CELEBRITY WHO HAS DONE EXEMPLARY WORK DURING COVID-19 WINNER: SONU SOOD While most of his peers used the lockdown to take a sabbatical and stayed indoors, Sonu Sood stepped up and emerged a hero, a role that Bollywood hasn’t often entrusted him with. The actor’s charitable work during the pandemic has been so effective that he has become a helpline of sorts. It all began with him helping the daily wage workers who, stranded in cities with no work, negligible savings and desperate to return to their hometowns, began making their way home, covering hundreds of kilometres on foot. April saw him start a food and ration drive, ‘Shakti Annadanam’, under which 45,000 people stranded on roads and highways in Mumbai were fed. He also opened the doors to his…

The young protagonist of Karishma Dev Dube’s short, Bittu, is a nonconformist. Getting into trouble comes easy to this eight-year-old girl and is ultimately what saves her from a tragedy. Shot in the remote village of Koti, near Dehradun, the film thrives on Dube’s affecting storytelling, her sister Shreya Dev Dube’s beautiful camerawork and the bonhomie between the two young, non-actor leads—Rani, 9, and Renu, 6. Bittu recently won the Student Academy Award for Best Narrative presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences which also presents the Oscars. The honour makes Bittu eligible for the Academy award for best short (live action). After playing at Telluride and Palm Springs film festivals, the film will be available on the BFI Player until October 16 as a selection of…

The race for Bihar has suddenly opened up, just weeks ahead of a three-phase assembly election, which gets under way on October 28. The NDA alliance is officially riven, with Chirag Paswan of the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) deciding to categorically back the BJP even while declaring war against Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) or JD(U). The BJP is officially going into the election with Nitish as the chief ministerial candidate and yet has not only humoured Chirag’s belligerence vis-à-vis Nitish but also had independent talks with the LJP president in the national capital. There is no official word on what transpired in the talks, but it has been enough to sets tongues wagging. It may even have given the opposition a fighting chance. Just consider the dichotomy…

On September 29, the Central Bureau of Investigation’s (CBI’s) enquiry into the death of actor Sushant Singh Rajput crossed a major milestone. A seven-member panel of doctors from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) submitted a forensic report to the CBI, concurring with the assessment of doctors from Mumbai’s RN Cooper Municipal General Hospital—that Rajput’s death was a case of suicide, and not murder. From June 14, when Rajput’s body was discovered at his home in Bandra, news reports and social media have been saturated with conspiracy theories, suggesting everything from poisoning to strangulation to bullying by Bollywood bigwigs as the cause of Rajput’s ‘murder’. Though the initial investigation by the Mumbai Police found no signs of foul play, the sordid speculation—by media houses desperate for TRPs, politicians…

ON October 3, the heart of Kolkata was besieged by thousands of Trinamool Congress (TMC) supporters decrying the alleged gang-rape and torture—and eventual death—of a Dalit woman in Hathras, in BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh, and the state machinery’s perceived apathetic handling of the case. Leading the protest—her first in six months since the Covid outbreak—was West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee. Marching to the cries of “BJP Sorkar Aar Nei Dorkar (No More of BJP government)”, Mamata came across as a fiery national opposition leader determined to hold the ruling party accountable. The BJP is the “biggest pandemic” and is torturing Dalits, she declared. Just two weeks ago, on September 20, when eight opposition MPs in the Rajya Sabha, including two of the TMC, were suspended for ‘unruly conduct’ during the…

BEST STATE COMBATING COVID-19 WINNER: Kerala With an overall score of 94.2 out of 100, Kerala emerged as the best state in Covid management. So far, the state has one of the lowest fatality rates in India—0.38 per cent compared to the national average of 1.58 per cent. As on October 1, the state had reported 204,241 cases with 131,052 (64.16 per cent) recoveries and 771 deaths. Firm action, people’s participation and excellent healthcare delivery have been the main weapons in Kerala’s armoury against Covid-19. Kerala was where Covid first landed in the country on January 30. With around 1.9 million Keralites working abroad, thousands of students studying in foreign universities, more than a million foreign tourists visiting the state every year and a floating population of 900,000 migrant workers,…

BEST PRIVATE HOSPITAL COMBATING COVID-19 JOINT WINNER: MEDANTA HOSPITAL, Gurugram With the Covid pandemic and the sudden decline in demand for in-patient and out-patient care—even surgeries shrunk in numbers—Medanta scaled up its technology-based services. Telemedicine consultations saw a 700 per cent growth since before the pre-Covid era and downloads of their app crossed the 100,000 mark. Ensuring that Covid treatment wards are completely separate from non-Covid ones helped build patient trust and confidence as lockdown restrictions began to be lifted. The hospital hasn’t laid off a single employee and mass training campaigns were organised for staff through training modules and awareness sessions. All the staff who were infected by Covid-19 were treated by the hospital which helped boost trust. “Our goal was to provide reliable Covid care to patients but…

BEST TESTING FACILITY FOR COVID-19 WINNER: NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF VIROLOGY, Pune Since confirming in end-January that the novel coronavirus had arrived in India, the National Institute of Virology has been on a mission to enhance testing capacity, provide training and develop new test kits. Through its efforts, the country now has 107 virus research and diagnostic labs, 935 government hospital labs and 1,500 private labs for Covid. NIV Pune director Dr Priya Abraham started forming teams of scientists from mid-January for the battle ahead while the National Influenza Centre, located inside NIV, began dummy runs of lab corona primers. In the initial days, the NIV bore the entire cost of shipment of samples, deploying staff at airports even at midnight to bring them to the institute. “We worked at high…

BEST INNOVATION FOR COVID-19 RELATED ACTIVITY WINNER: MYLAB DISCOVERY SOLUTIONS PVT. LTD. On March 18, virologist Minal Dakhave Bhosale, Mylab's research and development chief, submitted two key proposals—one to the National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune, and the other to the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO)—for approval on a new RT-PCR Covid diagnosis kit. India was conducting only 1,000 tests daily at the time—a far cry from the 1.5 million being conducted daily as of September 25—and lack of test kits was a major reason why. The Mylab kit became the first domestically-manufactured Covid diagnosis kit that not only reduced the margin for error significantly, but also ensured India could scale up testing. “When we launched the kit in March end, most kits in the market were expensive. Ours…

Filmmaker Hansal Mehta thrives on true stories. Two of his most acclaimed films, Shahid and Aligarh, are hard-hitting character studies of real men on the fringes. For his digital debut, he cast his eyes on Harshad Mehta, the mastermind of the Rs 5,000 crore stock market scam which was brought to light in 1992 by the dogged journalism of Sucheta Dalal. The exposé brought about a change in the way stock market is regulated in India. Hansal Mehta had read the book, The Scam, authored by Dalal along with Debashis Basu, and even pitched a film on it, only for it to be rejected time and again. “Possibly because I was in a low phase professionally,” says Mehta. “But I have never been more glad of a film not being…

Indian Air Force (IAF) transport helicopters, gunships, transport aircraft and fighters, including the newly inducted Rafales, were speedily deployed in Ladakh to support the Indian Army in May this year, when New Delhi realised the state of play—China’s game-plan of a coercive military deployment along the LAC (line of actual control). Now, as IAF aircraft and bases remain in a state of high alert along the entire 4,400 km disputed border with China, the issue of declining fighter jet numbers has once again taken centre stage for the IAF, which celebrated its 88th raising day on October 8. The fact that a two-front war—the prospect of having to simultaneously face off against Pakistan and China—remains a reality, and that the IAF’s fleet strength is not large enough to cover both…

THE DETAILS—FLASHING ACROSS NEWSPAPER HEADLINES AND television screens and circulated over social media—are by now all-too-familiar. Of a young Dalit girl, not yet 20, dragged into the fields, allegedly gang-raped by four upper-caste men, tongue cut, spine broken and left to die. Her mother hears her screams, finds the bleeding daughter, the family rushes first to the police station, then to a hospital in Aligarh, and when her condition takes a turn for the worse, she is shifted to the Safdarjung Hospital in Delhi where, two weeks after her ordeal began, she succumbs to her injuries. Her body is brought back to Hathras and cremated by the police in the dead of the night. Without their consent, says the family. To pre-empt the breakdown of law and order, say the…

It’s December 2025 and ‘Exercise Sea Dragon’ has begun. The world’s largest navy has bided its time for decades and is now ready to project power beyond its shores. Two PLAN (People’s Liberation Army-Navy) aircraft carrier battle groups, the Shandong and Fujian, with their entourage of nuclear-powered attack submarines, cruisers and destroyers, enter the Indian Ocean through the Malacca Straits, shadowed by Indian P-8I reconnaissance aircraft. ‘Sea Dragon’ is meant to test PLAN’s responsiveness to maritime operations against a distant adversary, the official release says. Four Shang class submarines circle the east and west coast of India—two on either coast conducting ‘barrier patrols’—leaving no doubt as to who this distant adversary is. In Delhi, the Maritime Domain Awareness panels in the navy’s maritime operations room paint a picture of the…

Extraordinary situations call for extraordinary responses. And no one has risen to the challenge of Covid as admirably as our healthcare workers. It was only fitting, therefore, that the sixth edition of the INDIA TODAY Safaigiri awards are dedicated to these frontline warriors. As a tribute, the commendations this time were called the ‘Healthgiri Awards’ to honour the individuals and institutes that led the way in the fight against the pandemic. In an online event held on the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary, 11 institutes and individuals received awards in 10 categories. Acknowledging their stellar role, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a written message, said that serving people during such a crisis is worthy of special recognition. “The exemplary work of our healthcare workforce as frontline warriors in such…

BEST GOVERNMENT HOSPITAL COMBATING COVID-19 WINNER: AIIMS, New Delhi Within a few days of the outbreak, AIIMS set up 22 dedicated wards, five ICUs, 90 ventilators and 1,426 isolation wards for Covid patients. “From March itself, we took a leading and holistic role in the pandemic,” says Dr Randeep Guleria, AIIMS director. “We set up a massive procurement, training, testing and treatment chain to cover all aspects of Covid management.” To juggle the roles of a Covid care centre and the country’s largest public hospital, AIIMS rapidly commissioned buildings in NCI (National Cancer Institute), Jhajjar, to accommodate over 600 patients and nearly 1,700 beds overall for Covid-19. It then transferred all patients from its trauma centre in Delhi, many on ventilators, to the main hospital to convert it into a…

BEST NGO THAT EXTENDED TIMELY HELP TO MIGRANTS DURING COVID-19 WINNER: RASHTRIYA SEWA BHARATI Turning adversity into opportunity, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS’s) social service body, the Rashtriya Sewa Bharati (RSB), has made great strides in serving those in need during these past few months. It opened around 11,000 food distribution centres across the country, as well as 483 medical centres that have helped over 146,000 people. As many as 580,000 RSB workers contributed with their effort in tens of thousands of places across the country: 7.4 million ration kits, 466,000 ready food packets and 9 million masks were distributed, with temporary accommodation being provided to over 200,000 people without shelter. Ayurvedic remedies were distributed to over 6 million people, with more than 6,200 bottles of blood collected for blood…

BEST LOGISTICS SERVICE PROVIDER DURING COVID-19 WINNER: DEPARTMENT OF POSTS, MINISTRY OF COMMUNICATIONS Never in his three decades of service at the department of posts has Rajbir Singh felt the kind of pressure he has during the Covid pandemic, but he has also never felt more proud. A postman at one of Delhi’s busiest post offices, in Connaught Place, Singh and his colleagues from across India kept the country going during the pandemic. During the lockdown, the postal department’s robust network of 156,000 post offices, of which 141,000 are in rural areas, delivered not only medical kits, ventilators and critical post, but also doorstep delivery of pensions and social sector benefits, says Pradipta Kumar Bisoi, secretary at the department of posts. The India Post service conducted 38 million India Post…