Counterview

By Sanjeev Kumar*  In a Press Conference held at the Press Club of India, New Delhi, many advocates, journalists, and social activists expressed concern for the alarming number of deaths due to manual scavenging within the last week. These deaths are testimony that manual scavenging is still prevalent in this country even after a decade of the practice being banned. 

By Arun Khote, Sanjeev Kumar*  Recently, there have been four instances of horrifying deaths of sewer/septic tank workers in Uttar Pradesh. On 2 May, 2024, Shobran Yadav, 56, and his son Sushil Yadav, 28, died from suffocation while cleaning a sewer line in Lucknow’s Wazirganj area. In another incident on 3 May 2024, two workers Nooni Mandal, 36 and Kokan Mandal aka Tapan Mandal, 40 were killed while cleaning the septic tank in a house in Noida, Sector 26. The two workers were residents of Malda district of West Bengal and lived in the slum area of Noida Sector 9. 

By Kirity Roy*  In a grave instance of human rights violation, there was custodial death of Daud Seikh, a 27-year-old youth from village Hausnagar, Police Station Samshergunj, District Murshidabad, West Bengal.

Counterview Desk  Th civil rights group, Joint Action Against Custodial Torture (JAACT), referring to the alleged custodial torture of  Savukku Shankar, against whom there are serious charges of making derogatory and disrespectful remarks against women working in the police, has said that while his act is  unpardonable and and is a grave violation of human rights, "Under no exceptional circumstances can torture be resorted to."

By Rajiv Shah  Even as offering lip-service to the United Nations Environment Agency (UNEA) for the need to curb plastic production, the Government of India appears reluctant in reducing the production of plastic. A senior participant at the UNEP’s fourth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-4), which took place in Ottawa in April last week, told a plastics pollution seminar that India, along with China and Russia, did not want any legally binding agreement for curbing plastic pollution.

By Deepika* It is imperative for celebrities and public figures to act responsibly while endorsing a consumer product, the Supreme Court said as it recently clamped down on misleading advertisements.

Counterview Desk  Telangana for Peace and Unity (TPU), claiming to be an independent forum of concerned citizens of the State working towards peace, communal harmony and constitutional values, in a representation to the Chief Electoral Officer, Telangana, has said that Madhavi Latha, the Bharatiya Janata Party MP candidate in Hyderabad, has been intimidating voters and disrupting harmony at polling booths.

By Sandeep Pandey*  Now Israel has killed over 34,700 Palestinians in its war on Gaza during the last seven months and taken seize of Rafah, the point from where Palestinians can go only into Egypt, where they are not welcome. It cannot be more humiliating for the Palestinians. The humanitarian aid has also been disrupted once again. 

By Sameer Dossani*  One of the more frustrating debates I’ve seen on Gaza in the last few months -- and I’ve seen a lot of them -- was between Bassem Youssef and Konstantin Kisin of the YouTube channel Triggernometry . At the beginning of the interview, Kisin asks a question which he pretends (or perhaps actually believes) to be perfectly reasonable: “If you were in charge of the Israeli government, what would you have done on October 8, 2023?”

By Rajiv Shah  I was a little awestruck: The news had already spread that Astrazeneca – whose Indian variant Covishield was delivered to nearly 80% of Indian vaccine recipients during the Covid-19 era – has been withdrawn by the manufacturers following the  admission  by its UK pharma giant that its Covid-19 vector-based vaccine in “rare” instances cause TTS, or “thrombocytopenia thrombosis syndrome”, which lead to the blood to clump and form clots. The vaccine  reportedly  led to at least 81 deaths in the UK. As I was one of its crores of Indian recipients – I went so far as to ensure from the nurse at the local urban health centre that it was Covishield, and not the indigenously manufactured Covaxin – my worry was surely natural. Dr Amitav Banerjee, a renowned Indian epidemiologist, who has served in the armed forces for over two decades and was recently featured on Stanford University’s list of the world’s top 2% scientists, forwarded to me his  latest ...