Category Archives: India

Blood brother: the Kashmiri man who is India’s biggest donor

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The ‘blood man’ of conflict-racked Kashmir has donated 174 pints of blood since 1980 but feels ‘crushed’ by his poverty

Shabir Hussain Khan was taking an afternoon nap when he heard a commotion outside his house. A friend had been injured in a football match and had lost a lot of blood. Khan, who did not have any transport, rushed to the hospital by foot to donate some. It was 4 July 1980. Yesterday the man known locally as the “blood man of Kashmir” donated his 174th pint of his blood to strangers at the public hospital close to his Srinagar home.

“Blood is not something you can buy in the market,” says Khan, who has an O-negative blood group. “In those days blood donation was not common, nor were blood banks. The way blood is available readily now, it was not like that before. Also there was no connectivity at that time. We only had radios and two or three landline phones in the entire locality.”

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Delta variant of Covid spreading rapidly and detected in 74 countries

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Concerns over impact on poorer countries, while richer governments try different containment measures

The Delta variant of Covid-19, first identified in India, has been detected in 74 countries and continues to spread rapidly amid fears that it is poised to become the dominant strain worldwide.

With outbreaks of the main Delta strain and several of its sub-lineages confirmed in China, the US, Africa, Scandinavia and the Pacific, concern increasingly is focusing on how it appears to be more transmissible as well as causing more serious illness.

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Scott Morrison denied one-on-one with Joe Biden as Boris Johnson joins meeting

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Labor’s Penny Wong says it’s disappointing the Australian prime minister did not secure a private meeting with the US president

Scott Morrison has met with Joe Biden on the sidelines of the G7 summit and agreed to work closely on challenges in the increasingly contested Indo-Pacific region including China.

Regional issues dominated the Australian prime minister’s first face-to-face meeting with the US president late on Saturday – but the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, also attended in what became a trilateral engagement.

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‘My dream was buried’: the children of India orphaned by Covid

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Officials and NGOs say orphans now face the double threat of neglect and being vulnerable to exploitation

Nitish Kumar will never forget the day he and his sisters buried their dead mother in the back garden.

Just 32, Priyanka Devi had died from Covid on 3 May. Neighbours and relatives refused to help with her burial, and all the family’s money had gone on hospital fees.

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Amazon fails to quash investigation into its Indian selling practices

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Inquiry will include company’s £1bn a year joint venture with Rishi Sunak’s father-in-law

The Indian competition commission is to relaunch an investigation into Amazon’s selling practices, which will examine the company’s £1bn a year joint venture with UK chancellor Rishi Sunak’s billionaire father-in-law.

The investigation, originally announced in January 2020, will proceed after an Indian court on Friday dismissed pleas by Amazon and its rival – the Walmart-owned Flipkart – to quash its investigation into the business practices of the huge US retailers.

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Student’s rape and murder puts India’s sexual violence under spotlight again

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Despite new laws to combat the problem, a rape is reported every 15 minutes, leaving victims and families crying out for justice

It was a historic day for women in India. Mamata Banerjee and her party won a spectacular election victory in West Bengal, defeating the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) of the prime minister, Narendra Modi, defying many predictions. Securing a third term as chief minister, she was the only woman in such an important position in India.

The following day, 3 May, while TV anchors debated how Banerjee’s win represented not only a strong force against Modi but also made her a powerful woman in a patriarchal country, a 20-year-old student, known only as Jana (her identity cannot be revealed under Indian law), was cornered by two men in a village, about 70 miles west of Kolkata, West Bengal’s main city.

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Revert to type: how Goa’s last typewriter repair shop defied the digital age

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Luis Abreu once thrived on servicing India’s many typewriters but computers are eclipsing his trade

In Goa’s capital, Panaji, on Rua São Tomé, not far from the main post office, is a shop that offers packaging services. For a small fee, they will wrap your parcel in a sheet of muslin sewn with precise stitches to protect its contents from being damaged in the post.

It started as a sideline to the main business of the store, but now it is the main earner for Luis Francisco Miguel de Abreu as he struggles to maintain one of the last typewriter repair shops in this Indian state.

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Spat at, abused, attacked: healthcare staff face rising violence during Covid

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Data shows increased danger for those on the frontline in the pandemic, with misinformation, scarce vaccines and fragile health systems blamed

Hundreds of healthcare workers treating Covid patients around the world have experienced verbal, physical, and sometimes life-threatening attacks during the pandemic, prompting calls for immediate action from human rights campaigners.

Covid-related attacks on healthcare workers are expected to rise as new variants cause havoc in countries such as India and rollouts of vaccination programmes belatedly get under way in some countries, according to the UN special rapporteur on the right to health.

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‘They stormed the ICU and beat the doctor’: health workers under attack

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From Brazil to Myanmar, five doctors and nurses treating coronavirus patients share their experiences

Since the pandemic began, healthcare workers have been venerated for treating patients with Covid-19, but they have also been attacked for doing their job.

Five doctors and nurses treating coronavirus patients, some of whom asked to be kept anonymous, recount their experiences.

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Trouble in paradise: Indian islands face ‘brazen’ new laws and Covid crisis

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‘Authoritarian’ rules upset sleepy Lakshadweep’s Muslim majority while Covid cases soar from zero to 10% of population

According to local people, the problems for Lakshadweep, an archipelago of paradise islands in southern India, began the day the new government-appointed administrator, Praful Khoda Patel, landed on a charter flight.

The Lakshadweep islands, an Indian union territory off the coast of Kerala, have a population of just 64,000 and are renowned for their crystal-blue waters, white sands and relatively untouched way of life. They had, up to that point, also remained completely unaffected by the pandemic, due to strict controls on movement and enforced quarantine.

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The Beatles in India: ‘With their long hair and jokes, they blew our minds!’

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Two new documentaries offer intriguing insights on how the Beatles’ 1967 escape to study transcendental meditation shaped the band and India, baffled the KGB – and saw Ringo survive on a diet of baked beans

In 1968, Paul Saltzman was a lost soul. The son of a Canadian TV weatherman, he was working as a sound engineer for the National Film Board of Canada in India when he received a “Dear John” letter from the woman he thought was going to be his wife. “I was devastated,” he says. “Then someone on the crew said: ‘Have you tried meditation for the heartbreak?’”

Saltzman went to see the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi – the founder of transcendental meditation – speak at New Delhi University. Emboldened by promises of “inner rejuvenation”, Saltzman then travelled to the International Academy of Meditation in Rishikesh. It was closed, due to the arrival of the Beatles.

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US sets – and quickly suspends – tariffs on UK and others over digital taxes

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Biden administration suspended duties to allow time for negotiations over digital-services taxes on US tech companies

The Biden administration announced 25% tariffs on over $2bn worth of imports from the UK and five other countries on Wednesday over their taxes on US technology companies, but immediately suspended the duties to allow time for negotiations to continue.

The US trade representative, Katherine Tai, said the threatened tariffs on goods from Britain, Italy, Spain, Turkey, India and Austria had been agreed after an investigation concluded that their digital taxes discriminated against US companies.

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Coronavirus live news: Japan mulls tests for Olympics fans; India posts lowest case numbers since April

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Japan may require Games fans to test negative or show vaccine proof; India reports lowest case numbers since 11 April; signs UK is facing third wave

China today re-imposed anti-coronavirus travel controls on its southern province of Guangdong, announcing anyone leaving the populous region must be tested for the virus following a spike in infections that has alarmed authorities, the Associated Press reports. .

Guangdong, which borders Hong Kong, recorded 20 new confirmed cases, all contracted locally, in the 24 hours through to midnight yesterday.

Guangdong’s numbers are low compared with many places in the world, but the rise has rattled Chinese leaders who thought they had the disease under control.

Hello, this is Haroon Siddique. I’ll be updating the blog for the next few hours.

Burkina Faso, one of several countries in Africa that has yet to launch a Covid-19 vaccination campaign, received its first shipment under the global vaccine-sharing scheme Covax yesterday, Reuters reports, citing the country’s health ministry.

The 115,200 AstraZeneca doses were flown into the airport of the capital Ouagadougou and were welcomed by a local delegation led by health minister Charlemagne Ouedraogo.

“In a few weeks other vaccines will probably arrive to supplement what we have,” Ouedraogo said.

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‘A kind of rat with thorns’: the comic book busting myths about the Madras hedgehog

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The elusive nocturnal creature is rarely seen in Tamil Nadu. One ecologist has made it his mission to spread the word through colourful adventures

The brightly coloured panels of Brawin Kumar’s comic book tell the story of how two children rescue a hedgehog from an unlicensed medicine man. The mother hedgehog is delighted to be reunited with her little one, as she has lost most of her offspring to road traffic.

Kumar, an Indian researcher and ecologist, came up with the idea of writing the book in Tamil to create awareness among children who live in and around the Madras hedgehog’s habitat. Many of those children will never have seen the nocturnal creature, which, unlike the British hedgehog, aestivates (lies in a state of torpor or dormancy) in the summer instead of hibernating in the winter.

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Vaccine inequality exposed by dire situation in world’s poorest nations

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Analysis: the failings of the Covax programme, logistical issues and governments’ own inadequacies are making a bad situation worse

Only 1% of the 1.3 billion vaccines injected around the world have been administered in Africa – and that comparative percentage has been declining in recent weeks. It is a stark figure that underlines just how serious a problem global vaccine inequity has become. But the answer for the developing world is not as simple as delivering more vaccines.

From Africa to Latin America, Asia and the Caribbean, the same issues have been replicated. On top of finding enough doses, there have been logistical difficulties with delivery, problems over healthcare infrastructure and, in some countries, public hesitancy towards vaccines.

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Kumbh Mela: how a superspreader festival seeded Covid across India

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From across India, millions of Hindu pilgrims came to take a ritual dip in the Ganges, then returned home carrying Covid-19. Here are their stories

On 12 April, as India registered another 169,000 new Covid-19 cases to overtake Brazil as the second-worst hit country, three million people gathered on the shores of the Ganges.

They were there, in the ancient city of Haridwar in the state of Uttarakhand, to take a ritual dip in the holy river. The bodies, squashed together in a pack of devotion and religious fervour, paid no visible heed to Covid protocols.

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Tesco and Next among brands linked to labour abuses in India spinning mills

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Supermarket says it will investigate report on forced labour in Tamil Nadu garment chain and ensure improvements are made

Tesco said it has found labour abuses in its garment supply chain in southern India after receiving evidence of widespread forced labour involving migrant women in cotton spinning-mills across Tamil Nadu.

The supermarket said that one of its supply chains is linked to a spinning mill included in a new report by NGOs Somo and Arisa that found evidence across the region of multiple labour abuses including deception, intimidation and threats towards vulnerable female workers, abusive working and living conditions and excessive overtime.

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Oxygen shortages threaten ‘total collapse’ of dozens of health systems

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Data reveals Nepal, Iran and South Africa among 19 countries most at risk of running out as surging Covid cases push supplies to limit

Dozens of countries are facing severe oxygen shortages because of surging Covid-19 cases, threatening the “total collapse” of health systems.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism analysed data provided by the Every Breath Counts Coalition, the NGO Path and the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) to find the countries most at risk of running out of oxygen. It also studied data on global vaccination rates.

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Children with Covid: why are some countries seeing more cases – and deaths?

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The perceived wisdom has been that children do not suffer severely from the virus. Yet they are now in Brazil, Indonesia and India

Emergency physician and leading epidemiologist in Brazil, Dr Fatima Marinho, is seeing symptoms of Covid-19 in children that starkly contrast with the message that has been relayed globally throughout the pandemic that children do not appear to suffer severely from the virus.

Severe muscle aches, diarrhoea, coughing, abdominal pain and hospitalisation – all of these are happening to children with Covid-19 in Brazil, Marinho says.

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‘Black fungus’ disease linked to Covid spreads across India

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7,200 mucormycosis cases reported, usually in patients with diabetes or compromised immune systems

States across India have begun declaring a “black fungus” epidemic as cases of the fatal rare infection shoot up in patients recovering from Covid-19.

The fungal disease, called mucormycosis, has a 50% mortality rate. It affects patients initially in the nose but the fungus can then spread into the brain, and can often only be treated by major surgery removing the eye or part of skull and jaw.

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