EDITORS' PICK

Even as the UK, US and other countries have started vaccinating their citizens, India is yet to start immunising its massive population, as the final human trials are not yet over. The task is difficult and poses unique challenges. Citizen Matters spoke to four eminent experts on their views on the vaccine and the various challenges of a mass vaccination drive: Dr Satyajit Rath: Visiting Professor, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune.Dr Shahid Jameel: Director, Trivedi School of Biosciences, Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana.Dr Rakesh Mishra: Director, CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad.Prof Nirmal Kumar Ganguly:…

Health workers at a Boston hospital broke into a celebratory dance on receiving their first doses of COVID-19 vaccine recently. In India, even before the vials are ready, competition is emerging over who will have the first access. With the vaccine in the final trial phase, India faces the looming challenge of producing the quantities necessary to provide immunity to all its citizens.  Globally, pharma companies are racing ahead to roll out vaccines to fight COVID-19, including the new highly infectious strain that has been found in Britain. Daily life cannot find a new normal until populations have built up antibodies…

All through the lockdown imposed to avert the spread of COVID-19, Chennai was without public transport and even now, services have just begun to operate in a limited manner. While there have been signs of a cycling revival, there are also reports of an increase in the sales of personal motor vehicles. But, as colleges and offices begin to reopen, it raises various questions about what commute in the city will be like in the coming year. Even before the pandemic, and in fact, for several years now, there has been a call to rethink how transportation works in Chennai.…

Around noon of December 9th, 13-year-old Sangram Singh was playing cricket with other boys at the Central Park in Kaushambi, in the National Capital Region location of Ghaziabad. A student of class 7 of the Delhi government's Ghazipur Boys' Senior Secondary School, not far from the infamous garbage-dump, Sangram does not have to stay home attending a Zoom class. His teacher sends the lessons and home work on Facebook or WhatsApp, and he attends to them at night because he shares a cheap smart phone with his elder brother, who studies in class 9 of the same school and uses…

Renee McPereira is a worried young girl. Her pre-board exams ahead of the 12th standard Central Board of Secondary Examinations (CBSE) exams should normally have been over by now. But now they are slated to begin on January 16th. The school final exams would normally have begun in March 2021. But as the countdown to an unknown date begins, Renee does not know when they will be held and counts herself lucky that she is in the Arts group and does not have to worry about practicals. Vaccine or no vaccine, “it is unlikely to be a happy new year for students, parents, teachers—all…

When one looks at the lessons learnt about learning itself during the lockdown, there is one thing that is abundantly clear – our education system was simply not equipped for it. We were so habituated to telling children 'what to think' that the demand that online teaching placed on teachers – to assist children with 'how to think' – threw the entire system off gear, leading to weeks of flux and confounding chaos. Be it familiarity with technology or the concept of heutagogy, everything was being tested out for the first time, and true to the Indian spirit of surviving…

The concept of a ‘gap year’ is unheard of in India. I remember a friend who had joined IIT Madras with me, taking a gap year when we hit the last semester. He took six years to graduate but unlike many of us, he stayed true to his chosen discipline of Mechanical Engineering. That was in college. What about a ‘gap year’ at work, in your career? Most HR executives while interviewing candidates do not look kindly on a gap in the resume. This is generally viewed as being unemployed after being sacked from the previous job. But COVID-19 has,…

"There is the fear of COVID-19 but you hear the music and you forget the pandemic," says music aficionado Shreeya Jayaraman on her live concert experience this Margazhi. Having attended one of the few live events in the city, a T M Krishna concert in Kilpauk, Shreeya adds that nothing can beat an in-person concert as the fans get to enjoy the full kutcheri experience. When it rained unexpectedly mid-concert, the audience had to be moved indoors. While social distancing norms were still followed indoors, Shreeya chose to remain on the periphery and listen to the rest of the show.…

Climate change is leading to a rise in extreme events the world over, and developing countries such as India have been experiencing not only higher death rates but also greater economic impacts due to natural hazards. Urban areas in India have been found to be particularly vulnerable to floods due to unplanned developmental activities, change in land use patterns, overcrowding as well as increase in natural hazards such as rise in sea levels, storms and cyclones. This paper 'Investigation of role of retention storage in tanks (small water bodies) on future urban flooding: A case study of Chennai city, India'…

What do the trees, water bodies, agricultural fields and forests mean for a city like Delhi? Can we ascribe a monetary value to their contribution? These are some of the questions that a team of Delhi-based scientists recently tried to answer and found that rapid and unplanned urbanisation in Delhi during the last two decades (1998-2018) has happened at the expense of many natural and semi-natural elements and it has resulted in a loss of about Rs. 560 million (US$ 7.614 million). The study showed that the biggest contributor to this loss was the decline in the city’s forest cover, which declined…