lockdown in India

While I have not witnessed anything like this in my lifetime, as a social scientist and as an entrepreneur I can see that the phobia has gone to another level. And I believe this is because we live in an 'Information Age' where every piece of information is a hyperbole, with global implications. We are overloaded with information, it's driving us insane. It's reducing our sense of wisdom, patience, kindness and empathy. It's making us all information addicts. But that said, the physical reality of it is far scarier. For instance, I stay in a huge, beautiful, green society in…

Parents resorting to healthy parenting skills through Google. Youngsters who otherwise spend their time roaming the serene streets of Theni Corporation engaged in social service, visiting senior citizens in the locality and buying them essential commodities. Children aged three years teaching grandparents how to use mobile phones and citizens playing traditional games indoors. The lockdown imposed to arrest the spread of the deadly coronavirus outbreak has changed the entire lifestyle of residents in the Southern city of Tamil Nadu. This is the time when children usually take up intensive summer classes in subjects such as Computers, Spoken English and Abacus…

Having coming up with a three-stage lockdown exit strategy which got much countrywide acclaim, the state government in Kerala abruptly withdrew some of the lockdown relaxations it had announced, causing some confusion and chaos. As per the relaxation proposed by the state government, people were allowed to go out in their private vehicles on odd-even number basis in the Orange B and  green categories starting April 20th.  There were proposals to allow barber shops to open and function. Hotels and restaurants were allowed to  open and permit customers to dine at the hotel from 9 am to 7 pm. Both…

Ghulam Mohammed Meer, a 61-year old Kashmiri Muslim, is a worried man. His brow furrowed with worry lines, he sits brooding over a cup of tea in a corner of his rented accommodation, which he shares with 11 other fellow Kashmiris, in Mori Gate Mohalla of Chandigarh. “I am stuck here for the past 22 days,” said Meer, his voice choked with emotion. “I badly need to go home bad. My 105-year-old father is on his death bed. He just wants to meet me one last time before saying his final good bye”. Meer, a resident of Karalpura village of…

It’s become the model for containment zones now being declared in many cities across the country. The Bhilwara model. A positive story of how a much-maligned district and state administration successfully contained the country’s first corona hotspot. Today, there is reason to cheer the news from Bhilwara. All the 25 COVID-19 positive cases have recovered as on April 9th. (The first positive case emerged on March 19th. Out of the total 28 infected since, two had died earlier). Though the news of a fresh positive case on April 10th came as a dampener, it is only the second case since…

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on both lives and livelihoods in India -- the virus has claimed 239 lives, the lockdown has reportedly claimed another 20. While there's not much cause for cheer in what's being observed all around, a recent briefing released by Climate Trends points to a possible silver lining: a drastic reduction in air pollution. 'Good-air days' for many Indian cities The briefing paper says that over 90 Indian cities showed minimal air pollution since the lockdown. 35 cities ranked "good" on the fourth day of the lockdown. These levels have been seen for…

“I survived on bananas which I had stocked up in my bag,” Surendra Ram told me on the phone, about how he got through the ‘Janata Curfew’ of March 22. That day, when most of the shops and businesses in Mumbai shut down and those who could stay indoors locked themselves in, Surendra sat on the footpath near the Tata Memorial Hospital in Parel. Surendra is 37 years old and has oral cancer. That footpath had been his ‘home’ for a week by the day of the curfew – no ‘locking in’ for him and many other patients living on…

As coronavirus positive cases near the 6000 mark countrywide, with certain cities and districts reporting high numbers, an immediate end to the nationwide lockdown on April 15 is very unlikely. Instead, states are looking at containment strategies to keep under total lockdown areas which are seeing a big spurt in positive cases, while relaxing some curbs in districts which have reported very few or no positive cases.  The basic guidelines for such a containment strategy were listed in an official “Containment Plan for Large Outbreak” formulated and released by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) on March 6th…

Volunteers are most often people who lead from the front, blaze the trail on ground zero and set the path for others to follow. And the others inevitably do follow, because goodness and giving have a ripple effect like none other. Chennai is no stranger to such phenomena and our citizens are not new to volunteering in times of normalcy and disaster, alike. As a volunteer, I have been part of citizenship efforts in times normal and severely abnormal. In terms of the latter, we have volunteered through floods, water scarcity, cyclones and earthquakes. We have rallied thousands of volunteers…