Indian firms Cure.fit, Reliance contribute to PM-CARES coronavirus fund amid salary cuts, layoffs
Saturday, May 9, 2020
India’s newly established coronavirus relief fund, PM Cares, has marshalled phenomenal contributions from celebrities, tycoons, middle-class professionals, and corporates. Ironically, firms that claim to have no money even to pay their staff, too, have made huge donations to this corpus. Consider the case of Cure.fit. On May 4, the fitness startup axed around 800 employees and closed down many of its fitness centres. While it provisioned only Rs 2 crore – $260,000 – as an emergency fund for axed employees, it allocated a more generous Rs 5 crore to PM Cares and various other relief funds.
DESPITE repeated demands by the states, the centre still has not released what is their legitimate due, namely the compensation for their revenue loss owing to the introduction of GST; this has not been paid since August. Meanwhile the Covid-19 pandemic, while adding to the responsibilities of the state governments, has dried up their revenues owing to the lockdown. The main sources of revenue now left to them, leaving aside GST, are taxes on petro-products and alcohol, and stamp duty. Since petro-product sales have plummeted during the lockdown, they can hardly hope to get anything from this source; likewise with all alcohol shops closed during the lockdown, the revenue from this course too has dried up completely. And since this period of social distancing is hardly the time for people to be buying or selling property, the revenue from stamp duty has vanished.
THE Polit Bureau of the CPI(M) is aghast at the deadly gas leak that took place in LG Polymers plant in Visakhapatnam. More than ten people have died so far and nearly a thousand hospitalised. Hospital authorities anticipate the deaths to rise. This accident is a clear case of criminal negligence by the management of this company. It needs to be properly investigated if all the precautionary measures were taken when the closed plant was restarted after the lockdown restrictions were eased. People were seen running from their houses in thick smoke and the deaths occurred primarily due to asphyxiation. It is reported that the district authorities failed to intervene in time to take the affected people for treatment. The Polit Bureau of the CPI(M) demands that immediately a judicial enquiry be conducted in a time bound manner and the guilty punished. The LG Polymers management must be held culpable and actions must be taken in accordance with the law. The families of those who lost their lives must be paid a compensation of Rs 50 lakhs and adequate compensation must be given to the injured. (May 7)
THE war on the Covid-19 virus is quickly transforming into a war against the working class in India. In parliament, in March this year, the government had stated that there are estimated to be around 100 million (10 crore) inter-state migrant workers. A vast majority of them would have lost their livelihoods with the lockdown being imposed. They have lost their places of stay and were driven to desperation by lack of food and shelter for their families. Most of the so-called migrant workers are actually the working class – they are workers in the construction industry, micro, small and medium factories and labourers in markets and distribution networks. Neoliberal capitalism has consciously informalised the workforce. Workers who had moved to the city or an industrial area from the rural areas or another state, to work in factories and commercial enterprises for a long period of time, are still called “migrant workers” as they do not have a permanent job, no income or social security or housing to call their own.
THE relaxation of restrictions from May 4 onwards, even as the national lockdown continues till May 17, as was widely anticipated, led to a record peaking of the Covid positive cases and consequent deaths. On May 5, India recorded 3875 new cases in a single day spike, 2.5 times higher than the daily average increase over the past week. The highest number of deaths recorded are between May 4/5 - 194. This is the highest single day death toll recorded since the outbreak of the pandemic. We have been repeatedly saying that a mere lockdown is not the answer for containing the pandemic and protecting lives. A lockdown postpones a severe outbreak form occurring but its prevention can only happen if this period is properly and scientifically used for testing, then tracing contacts of those who tested positive, isolating such people and quarantining them, while establishing the support infrastructure to look after the needs of the people during this period.
The working class in India is facing a lethal crisis that promises to push their lives back a century, and turn them into modern day slaves. As Newsclick had warned earlier, a savage attack is being unleashed on the workers through wholesale changes in protective laws, patronised and sanctioned by the Narendra Modi-led Central government, and implemented by diverse state governments, mainly ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). On Thursday, it was reported that the BJP-led Uttar Pradesh government had passed an ordinance to keep all labour laws in abeyance, barring four. Another BJP government in Madhya Pradesh, formed by a coup d’etat recently, has exempted new businesses from labour laws for a thousand days.
Tensions have started to mount between landlords and tenants over rent collection as the nation enters the third phase of the COVID-19-induced lockdown in May. In the national capital, though the people tuned in to requests for benevolence made by both the Prime Minister and the Delhi Chief Minister, it failed to substitute for a policy response, as the ground realities show. The workers, who were inevitably the first to be hit by the half measures of the governments – central and state – are also joined by the students who are now facing a barrage of phone calls, accompanied by threats, from renters over pending monthly dues.
COVID-19: Rift Between Tenants and Landlords Grows as Extended Lockdown Compounds Students’ Woes in Delhi | NewsClick
When the coronavirus pandemic was first declared, Americans dutifully stayed at home to prevent outbreaks like the ones playing out in China and Italy. Although a majority of Americans continue to support quarantine orders intended to quell the spread of the virus, a growing number of anti-lockdown protests across the nation are sending a clear message that they don’t care about spreading infection or the rising death toll. The whiteness of the protests alongside the stark racial disparities in COVID-19 mortality underscores that the desire to reopen businesses is rooted in white supremacy. As if it weren’t already clear, in Michigan where the nation’s most prominent protest took place, armed white men demanded an end to the lockdown while carrying Confederate flags, swastikas, and nooses.
Why Trump and Anti-Lockdown Protesters’ Calls to Return to Normal Are Acts of White Supremacy | NewsClick
We frequently hear that Covid-19 is the worst pandemic since the 1918 Spanish flu. It is forgotten that the third plague pandemic killed millions in South, South East and East Asia from the 1890s, and continued well after the Spanish flu, to the 1950s. That pandemic killed an estimated 10 million in India alone. I remember my family talking about it, as also numerous stories I read which had plague as their backdrop, and a recent book on the Bombay plague.
Friday, May 8, 2020
The World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Friday that although a market in the Chinese city of Wuhan selling live animals is likely to have played a significant role in the emergence of the new coronavirus, it does not recommend that such markets be shut down globally. In a press briefing, WHO food safety and animal diseases expert, Peter Ben Embarek, said live animal markets are critical to providing food and livelihoods for millions of people globally and that authorities should focus on improving them rather than outlawing them -- even though they can sometimes spark epidemics in humans.
New Delhi: Amid the lockdown, 16 migrant workers were killed when a freight train ran over them while they were sleeping on the tracks in Maharashtra's Aurangabad on Friday morning. In the absence of the transportation facility, the poor, hapless migrants were walking from Jalna to Bhusaval, 157 km apart. Though the Maharashtra government has announced ex-gratia for the victims, the Indian Railways is yet to budge since the mishap is being termed as "trespassing".
Several workers and police personnel were injured in clashes and subsequent cane charge on Friday, when violent protests broke out in Jammu and Kashmir's Kathua district over non-payment of full wages by Chenab Textile Mills (CTM), officials said. Police have also detained over two dozen persons in this connection. A large number of workers came out of CTM and held protests on Friday against the failure of the management to pay full wages to them, they said.
Sitaram Yechury, General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), talks about the government's failure to prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic, the hypocrisy in its policy on migrants and the steps it needs to take to address the crisis. He also talks about how the pandemic has led to a greater realization of the failures of capitalism and will spur fresh struggles for a more just system.
"The Bharatiya Janata Party has used federalism to settle political scores, in the process weakening the nation more than ever before in its independent history. As we head into the worst economic recession we have known in living memory, it is the lack of leadership which is being cruelly felt in New Delhi," says Professor Balveer Arora, Chairman, Centre for Multilevel Federalism and former professor of political science at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
टीवी डिबेट से लेकर सोशल मीडिया तक ख़ुद को चीख – चीख कर राष्ट्रवादी बताने वाले देश के जाने माने न्यूज़ एंकर्स आतंकियों को हथियार मुहैया कराने के आरोप में बीजेपी नेता तारिक़ अहमद मीर की गिरफ्तारी पर ख़ामोश नज़र आ रहे हैं। वो इस गिरफ्तारी को लेकर ना तो टीवी पर डिबेट करते दिखाई दे रहे हैं और ना ही सोशल मीडिया पर पोस्ट कर बीजेपी को कटघरे में खड़ा करते नज़र आ रहे हैं।
आतंकवाद के आरोप में BJP नेता गिरफ़्तार, कांग्रेस ने पूछा- अर्नब-सुधीर ख़ामोश क्यों हैं? बीजेपी को बचा रहे हैं?
Thursday, May 7, 2020
एक फ्रेंच हैकर ने दावा किया है कि, भारत का कोरोना ट्रैकिंग मोबाइल एप Aarogya Setu एप में एक खामी मिली है जिसकी वजह से भारत के 9 करोड़ लोगों की निजता खतरे में पड़ गई है। साथ ही हैकर ने कहा है कि, राहुल गांधी ने इस एप के बारे में सही कहा था।
फ्रेंच हैकर का खुलासा- आरोग्य सेतु से 9 करोड़ भारतीयों की प्राइवेसी ख़तरे में, सच निकला राहुल गांधी का दावा!
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