| | | | Hello Pz10,
This week the World Health Organization said India might be the country with the most pandemic-related deaths, India's ranking on the Press Freedom Index by Reporters Sans Frontiers fell to 150 of 180 countries, from 142 last year, and the Supreme Court's decision in a case related to environment impact assessment set a dangerous precedent for environmental protection in India.
Rukmini S writes that India had 4.7 million excess deaths in 2020 and 2021, as compared to the country's official Covid-19 toll of 481,000. The Indian government has rejected the findings, making it the only one of the WHO's 194 member states to push back against these estimates. We were the first Indian organisation to report on the WHOs findings, and had written about the Indian government's objections to its methodology last week. | | | Flavia Lopes looks at cases and orders by the environment ministry to find that the court goes against previous decisions in allowing a chemical manufacturing unit to function without prior environmental clearance, and permitting an ex post facto clearance. One previous order had called providing an environmental clearance after a project had already been set up "potently destructive". The story tells you why this move is so dangerous. | | | May 3 was Press Freedom Day. Saswat Pattnaik explained why India ranks so low on the Press Freedom Index, and why its rank has fallen. | | | | ------
On Factchecker.in Divyani Dubey did a data dive into fire accidents in India, and found that most fires are caused by cooking gas bursts. Divyani also found out that the Centre's recent claim that higher GST collection, a rise in EPF accounts and exports signifies creation of jobs, was not entirely true. Read why, here.
Isha Bajpai explained what the repo rate is and why it is important for our household budget.
Union Minister of Minority Affairs, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, recently told a visiting European Union delegation that there has been "no major incident of communal violence in the past seven-eight years" under the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government in India. Nidhi Jacob found that it was a false claim. Read the full factcheck here.
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