April | 2020 | Citizen Matters

Life in times of COVID: Caution is essential, but surely paranoia isn’t?

April 30, 2020 Deepti Mehrotra

Even after the lockdown is lifted, how many people will go out and eat in restaurants? How many will send their children to the park with other kids? A worried resident writes.

How Chandigarh’s four-pronged strategy is helping the city fight COVID-19

April 29, 2020 Raj Machhan

Municipal Commissioner K K Yadav talks about the challenges posed by COVID-19 and the strategies adopted by the Chandigarh Municipal Corporation to tackle the same.

Games, social service and family bonding: How lockdown has changed life for parents and kids in Theni

April 29, 2020 Anupriya Murugesan

Citizens have paused their frenetic daily lives owing to the nationwide lockdown. This has created a new reality for parents and kids, as this town shows.

Learnings from a month-long lockdown: How to deliver food and essentials to citizens

April 28, 2020 Siddhant Kalra

In the first part of our COVID Learning Series, we look at how different cities have been dealing with the challenge of providing essentials for all during the lockdown.

Op-ed: Will COVID-19 teach us to respect and value labour more?

April 28, 2020 Vandana Swami

A strong economy cannot be built on weak foundations, especially where human resources are concerned. If and when we return to normal life, how will we treat the ones who toil away at the bottom of the pyramid in India?

Patna: Ground reality trumps relaxation on paper

April 27, 2020 Amit Bhelari

Whatever partial relaxation has been allowed has brought little relief to the poor of Patna, which is not surprising given the many inconsistencies in the guidelines.

City Buzz: Mumbai and Delhi top COVID-positive list | NGT directive to CPCB |Small shops to reopen… and more

April 25, 2020 News Desk

A quick recap of important COVID updates from cities across India over the last seven days

Where should the waste from quarantine centres and COVID isolation wards go?

April 25, 2020 Ananya Tewari

Management of biomedical waste during COVID-19 pandemic plays a critical role in overall public health protection and health care workers’ safety. Here’s what the Central Pollution Control Board recommends.

In Delhi’s CR Park, COVID-19 strengthens the circle of love and compassion

April 25, 2020 Sharmila Sinha

A resident of the predominantly Bengali neighbourhood in Delhi shares how her community has adapted to challenges of the times, and come together as one big family to beat the COVID blues.

Bhubaneswar: The economy is battling the virus too

April 24, 2020 Lalit Pattajoshi

With the Centre’s new guidelines to slowly kickstart the economy, Odisha, too, has announced partial lockdown relaxation. But the problems that formal and informal sectors here face now is representative of what all states will have to tackle post May 3rd.

Thiruvananthapuram: Confusion over colour coding leads to chaos after lockdown relaxation

April 24, 2020 N V Ravindranathan Nair

Residents of Trivandrum took the relaxations as a nod to get back to how it was before the corona outbreak and caused traffic bottlenecks at different parts of the city on April 20. In fact, the capital city is a hot spot though Thiruvananthapuram district as a whole is categorised as Orange zone.

With schools closed, exams suspended, big e-learning push for teachers and students

April 22, 2020 Vijaya Pushkarna

Delhi Deputy CM Manish Sisodia interacted with teachers and parents via YouTube, promoting the theme “Every Home a School, Every Parent a Teacher.” ‘Online’ seems to be the general mantra in education, as students are stuck at home, uncertainty clouding their immediate academic future.

COVID-19 underlines crisis in jute mills in Kolkata suburbs

April 21, 2020 Gurvinder Singh

With no jute bags available, farmers switch to plastic bags to pack and transport their harvest as Bengal’s jute mills remain shut because of the pandemic. Its labour force is left in limbo with unpaid wages and little prospect of getting back to work.

Growing vegetables, storing rice: Lessons from Srinagar that has seen and survived many lockdowns

April 21, 2020 Abid Bashir Wani

The people of Kashmir have learnt some important survival lessons from coping with decades of conflict and resulting restrictions. So much so that Kashmiris living elsewhere are now calling home for advice on how to cope with life under lockdown.

Op-ed: Why cities must strive for equality to fight COVID-19 effectively

April 20, 2020 Robin King, Jillian Du and Radha Chanchani

Social distancing, washing hands — all these are critically important responses to the pandemic, but such directives assume that residents have adequate space, services and social safety nets to carry out these orders. This is simply not the reality across cities in India and in many countries of the world.