Innholdsfortegnelse for October 18, 2021 i India Today

The historic Gurdwara Kodiwala Ghat in Nighasan tehsil of district Lakhimpur Kheri is a major pilgrimage centre for the Sikhs settled here in the Terai region in the foothills of the Himalayas. They believe it was built by their first guru, Nanak Dev. Special recitations and kirtans are organised here on the occasion of the new moon every month, with thousands of Sikh devotees coming in from the surrounding districts. The new moon on October 6, though, was a sombre affair. The community was still in shock over the events from three days back (October 3) when a confrontation between farmers and a convoy of Ashish Mishra, son of Union minister of state for home Ajay Mishra ‘Teni’, led to the death of eight people, four of them farmers run…

Every month, between the 1st and the 3rd, the Andhra Pradesh government pays out pensions to 6.1 million beneficiaries under the YSR Pension Kanuka, spending a staggering Rs 1,420.5 crore. The pensions are delivered to beneficiaries wherever they might be, even those displaced from their homes. For transparent, well-targeted delivery of benefits, the state relies on biometric identification. Timely distribution of pension is one of 541 services—including the handouts under 30-odd welfare schemes—the Andhra Pradesh government provides through its elaborate village and ward secretariat network. This entails the distribution of about Rs 1 lakh crore a year. Apart from pensions, these services include rice cards, the Aarogyasri health cover cards, house documents, caste and income certificates, all of which are provided by the 11,162 village secretariats—and 3,842 ward secretariats in…

THE TWO RUST-BROWN SHIPPING containers from Iran were among thousands stacked in neat rows like toy bricks in India’s largest seaport, Mundra. For the Department of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) officials who had zeroed in on the shipment, these 20-feet-long containers originating in Iran’s Bandar Abbas port and dispatched to Gujarat’s arid Kutch district, were like two needles in a very giant haystack. The port receives 5.6 million such containers each year. However, it was the consignor that piqued the sleuths’ interest—Hasan Husain Ltd, a firm based in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan. The shipment of talc stones, a clay mineral used as raw material for cosmetics, was headed for Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh and meant for a Chennai-based couple, Machavaram Sudhakar and his wife Vaisali. When DRI sleuths opened the containers on…

On June 17, a small team of police personnel from Khatkhati police station in Assam’s Karbi Anglong district lay in wait of a “queen” at Janak Pukhuri, a small village bordering Nagaland. This wasn’t a receiving party for royalty, though. They were waiting for Th. Paone, the “queen” of a drug empire. Though unsure if she would venture out on her own from her den in Nagaland’s Dimapur, a mere 10 km away from Janak Pukhuri, the police hoped that their bait—an order through a decoy customer for a large consignment of drugs—would prove to be too enticing to ignore. By this time, the police had put in nearly three months of work to penetrate Paone’s inner circle. She eventually did arrive with 164 packets of heroin worth Rs 7…

WINNER: HelpNow, Mumbai WHY IT WON: For providing safe 24x7 logistic help to Covid patients through their dedicated ambulances and reducing the average arrival time of an ambulance from 50 to 20 minutes IN 2016, ADITYA MAKKAR’S FATHER SUFFERED A cardiac arrest and had to be rushed to the hospital. Unable to get an ambulance on time, the distressed family drove him to the hospital in their personal car. In 2019, Makkar co-founded HelpNow, an ambulance aggregator, along with Shikhar Agrawal and Venkatesh Amrutwar, his friends and fellow students at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, so that no one else would go through what he and his family did. HelpNow tied up with several ambulance providers to set up an ‘ambulance on call’ facility. They also launched a…

WINNER: SaveLIFE Foundation, New Delhi WHY THEY WON: Deployed 3,018 ‘Jumbo’ D-type medical oxygen cylinders, totalling a capacity of 99 MT, across Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Bihar, Meghalaya and Karnataka WHEN THE PANDEMIC STRUCK, SaveLIFE Foundation responded on a war footing, putting together a team specialised in disaster relief, military supplies and emergency care and struck collaborations on a global scale to extend help. The first wave in Delhi exposed the city’s inadequate ambulance network. “The ambulance response time lengthened; in some cases, it took 10 hours for an ambulance to arrive,” recalls Piyush Tewari, founder-CEO, SaveLIFE Foundation. The foundation arranged for 400 ambulances from the private sector to beef up the Delhi government’s fleet of 200. Using data analytics, the average ambulance response time was brought down to…

WINNER: The Cyrus & Priya Vandrevala Foundation, Mumbai WHY IT WON: For ramping up its free mental health support services tenfold during the pandemic BEFORE THE COVID pandemic struck, the Cyrus and Priya Vandrevala Foundation had 10 counsellors. Over the next 18 months, that number was increased tenfold to deal with the massive surge in calls to helplines. “There was a lot of anxiety about the disease, the lockdowns and the future,” says Dr Arun John, CEO of the foundation. “Relationship and privacy issues also arose; people also called in because of financial difficulties and job losses.” The foundation introduced cloud telephony in August 2020 to ensure seamless connectivity and to ensure that no call goes unanswered. It also allows for calls to be scheduled keeping in mind the preferred…

WINNER: World Vision India WHY IT WON: For working towards the welfare of children and providing them support and care in the areas of health, nutrition and psychological wellbeing WITH A PRESENCE IN 25 states, World Vision India prioritised working for children during the pandemic. Among the most vulnerable, children have been impacted, psychologically and physically, in a big way by the virus, and the organisation recognised the need to reach out to them. Since Covid’s outbreak in March 2020, World Vision India, headquartered in Chennai, has reached out to 1.68 million children with services in the areas of healthcare, nutrition, education, water, sanitation and hygiene. Apart from these, they have also been giving children psycho-social support and working to protect them from child trafficking and sexual abuse, instances of…

WINNER: Faridabad, Haryana WHY IT WON: Faridabad has among the highest recovery rates in India, and during the second wave of the pandemic, was able to support other areas in the NCR—Delhi, Noida and Gurugram—when hospitals found themselves stretched to breaking point AS CASES SURGED during the second wave of Covid-19, hospitals in Haryana’s Faridabad district were called upon to take up some of the cases spilling over from overloaded hospitals in other areas in the NCR (National Capital Region), including Delhi, Gurugram and Noida. This was in addition to the surge in cases from within Faridabad itself. The industrial city used technology not only to assist patients and improve the management of oxygen supplies in hospitals, but also to draw up and implement schemes like a food distribution action…

WINNER: Bharat Biotech, Hyderabad WHY THEY WON: Ramped up production capacity to 700 million Covaxin doses a year; aiming for a billion doses a year by end-2021 Covaxin has proved to be a success story of public-private partnership between Bharat Biotech India Limited (BBIL) and the National Institute of Virology, Pune, of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). It is India’s first indigenous vaccine against Covid-19. BBIL is currently also working on ‘BBV154’, a novel adenovirus vectored, intranasal vaccine for Covid-19, along with the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. BBIL was founded in 1996 by Dr Krishna M. Ella and his wife Suchitra Ella, who left their successful careers in the United States to establish the life sciences startup for innovative vaccines and biotherapeutics. Dr Krishna…

SHAMSHERA Ranbir Kapoor’s first release since Sanju sees him take on Sanjay Dutt in an action thriller. RELEASING: March 18, 2022 RRR 2022 begins with the return of box office king S.S. Rajamouli, the brains behind the biggest Indian film: Bahubali 1 & 2. RELEASING: January 7, 2022 SOORYAVANSHI ‘AA RAHI HAI POLICE…’ wrote filmmaker Rohit Shetty on Insta. His action drama finally arrives in theatres after an 18-month delay. RELEASING: This Diwali JERSEY Expectations are sky high from Shahid Kapur’s first release after the blockbuster Kabir Singh. This one like the latter is also a remake of a popular Telugu film. December 31, 2021 GANGUBAI KATHIAWADI Alia Bhatt and Sanjay Leela Bhansali team up for this drama on a Bombay mafia queen. RELEASING: January 6, 2022 PRITHVIRAJ Kumar’s first…

The villain in No Time to Die (Rami Malek) is vaguely non-white, and his murdered father used to produce biological weapons for Bond’s arch-nemesis Blofeld. His skin is disfigured, he is given to sitting cross-legged in bright shawls and enjoys theorising on the greater good. He employs thick-accented Russian scientists, has an island-lab that produces pandemic-ready smallpox to wipe out DNA-matched targets. If all this sounds like a throwback to a pre-Daniel Craig Bond, wait till you see Sean Connery’s Aston Martin gunning down a whole posse, the return of Pierce Brosnan’s flying cables, Roger Moore’s missiles in the sky. In conventional Marvel fashion, it’s all kitschy self-referential, and should be taken lightly. At the same time, death and change are motifs for emotional heft. American interventionism, Cold War-era villains,…

Will the purge of Rahul and Priyanka save or destroy Congress? by Kaushik Deka With hardly any political managers around, the Gandhi Family’s handling of the Congress’ affairs has shown incoherence https://bit.ly/3lgBo6X Why Asia’s longest tunnel through Zoji La could be a game changer for J&K’s economy by Shwweta Punj The Zoji La tunnel, aimed for completion by 2023, will shrink journey time from Sonmarg in J&K to Drass in Ladakh from hours to minutes and also offer strategic advantage to the armed forces https://bit.ly/3BhKqX7 How Tamil Nadu is battling temple land encroachers by Amarnath K. Menon The state has so far recovered land worth over Rs 1,000 crore. There is a discrepancy of over 40,000 acres as noted by two surveys of temple land 35 years apart https://bit.ly/3lh71xb Spiralling…

For the past 50 years, the surface temperature of the Arabian Sea off Mumbai’s coast has been rising steadily, says a report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published in July. Another report by the World Resources Institute (WRI) India, published in August, says Mumbai is becoming warmer and has seen a substantial increase in extreme rainfall events in the past few years. Mumbai and Surat, it adds, will see regular floods if the problem is not contained. The effects of climate change in Mumbai are becoming more stark with every passing year. As per the WRI report, Mumbai has been witnessing an increase in the number of ‘extreme caution days’—when the temperature varies from 32 to 42 degrees Celsius. On average, Mumbai records 187 extreme…

WINNER: Kalinga Institute of Medical Sciences, Bhubaneswar WHY THEY WON: For setting up India’s first dedicated Covid hospital at the very onset of the pandemic and extending Covid care to rural Odisha THE KALINGA INSTITUTE of Medical Sciences (KIMS) set up India’s first dedicated Covid-19 hospital as early as on April 2, 2020, when the pandemic was just beginning to spread in the country. KIMS, in association with the Odisha government and Odisha Mining Corporation, set up the 500-bed hospital within the KIMS premises in Bhubaneswar, equipping it with critical care units, ventilators and an 8.6 MT capacity medical oxygen plant. Since a building was being built there, KIMS founder Prof. Achyuta Samanta turned it into a Covid facility. KIMS also extended Covid care beyond the urban centres. It set…

WINNER: Karnataka WHY IT WON: The state scored high in the recovery rate and vaccination campaign. Bengaluru also became the first fully vaccinated city in India KARNATAKA SCORED HIGH on several parameters such as testing, implementation of best practices, recovery rate and administration of vaccines. These were supported by a slew of initiatives, including the Lasika Utsav, to make Bengaluru the first fully vaccinated city in India and directing pharma companies to use their 2 per cent CSR budget for Covid-19 vaccination. By the first week of September, the vaccine had been administered to more than 46 million people in the state. “Karnataka’s success in the fight against Covid is the result of a three-tiered philosophy: act early, act quick and act big,” says Dr Sudhakar K., the state minister…

WINNER: Gujarat WHY IT WON: For vaccinating (first dose) a majority of the adult population; running special vaccination drives for the elderly, differently-abled and in tribal districts A SCENE AT AHMEDABAD railway station tells Gujarat’s vaccination success story the best. The health workers seated at a couple of vaccination booths appeal to passengers to take the jab if they haven’t yet. Vaccination is completed within a few minutes and passengers are on their way soon after. Easy availability of vaccine and an effective way to administer it has made a great impact on the state’s vaccination rate. Having administered the first dose of the vaccine to 84 per cent of the state’s adult population and the second dose to 36 per cent (till September 26), Gujarat has topped the vaccination…

WINNER: Guruprasad Mohapatra, Delhi WHY HE WON: For his dedication to duty in clearing up the problems in the production and supply of medical oxygen to hospitals at the height of the second wave of the pandemic AT THE HEIGHT OF THE SECOND WAVE, hospitals across the nation were struggling with inadequate oxygen supplies, leaving patients in dire straits. If India saw any success in boosting the production and streamlining the supply of oxygen to medical facilities, one man gets the lion’s share of the credit—the late Guruprasad Mahapatra, who served as secretary of the Department of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT). He also served as the chairman of an empowered group mandated to streamline the delivery of oxygen supplies to hospitals. Toward the end of his life, Mohapatra himself…

For the past 25 years, Umendra Dutt, 58, has made it a daily routine to get up early in the morning, flip through his diary to call up five new people with whom he can discuss organic, natural farming. They aren’t just farmers but scientists, doctors, academics, economists, consumer and civil society groups, even politicians. The focus is on pushing zero chemical residue farming methods. Based in Jaitu, a sleepy town in Faridkot district, Punjab, Dutt has devoted his entire life to introducing this method of farming to farmers of all kinds, especially small and marginal landholders, landless labourers and even the kitchen gardeners. What makes his work special is the effort is happening in Punjab where 85 per cent of the crops that come to the market are procured…

What do Amitabh Bachchan and Sunny Leone have in common? Celebrity apart, they are both profiting off NFTs. While Big B is expected to launch his NFT collection in November, Sunny Leone has launched one already. The answer to the question you’re asking—What’s an NFT, anyway?—is simple and also complex. An NFT (non-fungible token) is a digital asset. Examples include art, music, memes, video games, and so on. NFTs are bought and sold digitally through platforms like OpenSea, Foundation and WazirX, to name a few. You cannot buy an NFT in everyday currency like rupees or dollars. Every time an NFT is sold, its creator gets paid in cryptocurrency. But unlike cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin that have the same value overall, each NFT represents a unique value. Put simply, if you…

ON PAPER, BREAK POINT, a ZEE5 show on the highs and lows in the tennis partnership of Mahesh Bhupathi and Leander Paes, is a sports documentary, but it can also just as easily be viewed as a relationship horror story, one where the couple keeps patching up again and again, despite knowing they will get hurt. Through the course of seven episodes, the married filmmaker duo, Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari (Bareilly Ki Barfi!) and Nitesh Tiwari (Dangal, Chhichhore), rely on the talking heads format to show what made India’s most successful tennis doubles pair tick and also what tore them apart. Parents, friends, coaches, manager, fellow tennis players including the Bryan brothers and Woodies—Todd Woodbridge and Mark Woodforde—all chip in with their thoughts. Some, including Amitabh Bachchan, are unnecessarily interviewed. The…

The pandemic, a torn ligament and an ex-girlfriend’s saxophone resulted in the creation of Pune-based Shreyas Iyengar’s debut jazz album, Tough Times. The multi-instrumentalist, who has been playing music professionally for 17 years, says he had been wanting to write music for himself, but a bulk of his composing was done for ads, TV shows and background scores. He has also performed with several bands and done some Bollywood gigs, which he doesn’t like to talk about. “You gotta do what you gotta do,” he shrugs. The pandemic offered Iyengar some much-needed time to work on Tough Times. “During the lockdown, I started planning my day in such a way that I could dedicate time to different aspects of music,” he says. Apart from time, the next hurdle that stood…

On September 26, at a streetcorner meeting before the Bhabanipur bypoll, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee proclaimed: “Bhabanipur theke arekta khela shuru hobe. E khela shesh hobe Bharatbarsha joy kore (A new ‘khela’ (game) has begun in Bhabanipur; it will end only when India has been won).” The TMC (Trinamool Congress) chief has lately been hammering home the message that her party won’t rest on its laurels; after the triumph in the Bengal assembly election, its sights are now set on Delhi. At the same meeting, TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee said it even more baldly: “Remember, you are not just voting for Didi; you are voting for change in Delhi.” There are two simultaneous campaigns in play here: the first is to build a loose-knit Opposition coalition…

West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s search for a finance minister to replace the unwell incumbent Amit Mitra seems to have hit a roadblock. There is much speculation in political circles, though, over Ashok Lahiri, seen as a likely candidate for the post. Lahiri, a BJP MLA and former chief economic advisor in the Union finance ministry, has ruled out joining the TMC saying he is happy where he is, but his absence at a recent meeting of BJP leaders from North Bengal triggered rumours of his exit. Even while denying the speculated move to TMC, Lahiri says he is not averse to occasionally advising the state government on the economy. Should the BJP panic? Saying It with Slippers Mamata Banerjee’s rubber slippers—her trademark footwear—could be competing with her party’s…

On October 2, the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) conducted raids at Mumbai’s international cruise terminal just as some 1,000 guests were about to board a Goa-bound ship of the Cordelia Cruises company. Most of the guests were from the north Indian states, flown in by a Delhi-based company. Entry tickets apparently ranged from Rs 80,000 to Rs 3 lakh. The cruise ship was on the third leg of an international voyage. The NCB officers, led by zonal director Sameer Wan khede, boarded the cruise ship as guests after a tip-off from a drug pedlar about a rave party being organised onboard. While conducting searches, they zeroed in on eight people, including Aryan Khan, 23, son of Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan, and his friends Arbaaz Merchant and Munmun Dhamecha. The…

With a new chief in the saddle, the Indian Air Force, which turned 89 on October 8, faces a plethora of challenges that demand great tact and strategic vision to surmount. Embracing the concept of parallel operations in its doctrine almost a decade ago to impact the tactical, operational and strategic domains simultaneously through the application of air power, this time around, the IAF confronts a situation wherein it must adapt to manoeuvring on parallel fronts during a period of transformational change. Of these fronts, five merit serious reflection by the IAF and the policy-makers within India’s national security establishment. First, the IAF must step up efforts to sensitise the political establishment and the joint war-fighting leadership of the value that air power, particularly offensive air power, offers as a…

WINNER: Topiwala National Medical College and B.Y.L. Nair Charitable Hospital, Mumbai WHY IT WON: Nair Hospital had the minimum death rate among hospitals in Mumbai. With three oxygen plants, it had enough supply for critical patients THE B.Y.L. NAIR CHARITABLE HOSPITAL was the first in Maharashtra to dedicate 1,100 beds to Covid patients. It was also the first to have reserved beds for pregnant Covid-affected women and those who needed dialysis. In six months, the hospital staff conducted 1,100 deliveries and 5,000 dialysis treatments. “Most of the women came to us at the last moment when they were going into labour,” says Dr Ramesh Bharmal, dean of Nair Hospital. The treatment model developed by Nair Hospital was later adopted by several other hospitals in Mumbai. At present, the hospital has…

WINNER: Wipro Ltd, Bengaluru WHY THEY WON: Wipro helped thousands with food, medicines, safety kits, oxygen and hospital beds during the pandemic WITH THE PANDEMIC impacting both lives and livelihoods, IT giant Wipro, along with the Azim Premji Foundation (APF), committed an initial Rs 1,125 crore for Covid relief, increasing it to Rs 2,125 crore in May 2021 to expand its work on vaccination. A 1,600-strong APF team, over 55,000 members from nearly 500 civil society groups, local administrations in 27 states and three Union territories, public school teachers and Azim Premji University alumni focused their efforts on providing relief. “There was an immediate humanitarian need and a longer term healthcare challenge,” says Narayan P.S., global head-sustainability, Wipro. To address the former, Wipro fast-tracked approvals to provide food rations, cooked…

WINNER: Shaheed Bhagat Singh Sewa Dal, New Delhi WHY IT WON: For facilitating the cremation and last rites of over 4,000 Covid victims For Jitender Singh Shunty, former BJP MLA and founder and president of the NGO Shaheed Bhagat Singh Sewa Dal, facilitating cremations of Covid victims has been some of his life’s most painful experiences. In so many cases, family, friends and neighbours didn’t come through for the deceased by either choice or because of restrictions imposed by the nationwide lockdown. In such instances, Shunty and over 25 volunteers of the Shaheed Bhagat Singh Sewa Dal, an organisation he founded in 1995, came forward to help. From picking up bodies from hospitals or of those in home isolation, to sanitising and packing up the bodies and providing vans to…

WINNER: Kerala WHY IT WON: For its aggressive campaign to conduct vaccination drives, including the involvement of local bodies and the setting up of mobile vaccination units Kerala reported its first Covid-positive case on January 30, 2020, when a medical student returned home to Thrissur from China’s Wuhan. Since then, the state has been on a mission to fight the pandemic, with determination and public support—these include a series of lockdowns ordered by the state government to control the spread of the virus. As on September 26, around 4.44 million people had recovered from the virus, with about 162,000 undergoing treatment. The state has seen 24,603 deaths due to Covid since March 28, 2020. According to Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, the state has achieved highest vaccination rate per million people…

WINNER: Sir H.N. Reliance Hospital Trust, Mumbai WHY THEY WON: Running an efficient and public-friendly vaccination drive that has seen close to a million people being administered doses till September A TECHNOLOGY-BASED system with electronic display to allot coupons and assign vaccination booths, friendly staff, monitoring of recipients’ blood pressure and body temperature, and instantly providing them a printed copy of the vaccination certificate. These are some of the features that make the vaccination drive run by the Sir H.N. Reliance Foundation Hospital (RFH) in Mumbai stand apart. With a massive in-house and outreach programme, RFH had administered Covid vaccine doses to close to a million people till September. Under the ‘Mission Vaccine Suraksha’ campaign by the Reliance Foundation, which runs the hospital, free vaccination has been rolled out for…

WINNER: Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh WHY IT WON: For adopting the mantra of ‘test, trace and treat’ to tackle the virus; providing Covid-positive households with basic medicine kits to prevent cases becoming critical; and taking up vaccination on a war footing THE FIGHT AGAINST COVID in Ghaziabad, with its population of 4 million, was proving to be difficult initially because of patients pouring in from other districts of western Uttar Pradesh for treatment in Ghaziabad hospitals. However, adopting the basic principle of ‘test, trace and treat’ helped the district achieve great success. From zero testing capacity till a year and a half ago, the district is now equipped to conduct 1,500 Covid tests daily. Ghaziabad was among the few districts in Uttar Pradesh that was able to eliminate its problem of…

READING AMITAV GHOSH’S The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable in 2016 was a turning point for Delhi-based musician Tarun Balani. And after suffering the Capital’s Great Smog that same year, he found himself on the internet, poring over the details of the Paris Agreement on climate change. “The more I engaged with it, the more climate change became a pressing matter to me,” says Balani, an established jazz drummer who has worked with bands such as Advaita and Artistes Unlimited in the past. He is also part of the popular jazz act Dharma. He laughs and shares that since he couldn’t all of a sudden join politics, he decided to use his art to raise awareness about climate change. Thus, Seasonal Affected Beats was born—an avatar that also allows…

THE REVISIT PROJECT The New Delhi-based jazz/funk fusion outfit originally started as a tribute band in 2014, but made the switch to creating original music in 2017. This year, they released two singles, ‘Miles to Coltrane’ and ‘Vibes for Tribes’. HEAT SINK Hailing from Ahmedabad, this act draws inspiration from genres ranging from jazz to prog rock. In 2019, they debuted their EP Euphony, which was mixed and mastered by Grammy Award-winning engineer Thomas Juth. FAKEER & THE ARC The experimental jazz-hop band from Bengaluru dropped their debut EP Ikigai last year, one they describe as a mix of psychedelic jazz and chill hop.…