In March 2020, India’s health ministry tasked 1 million Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) with COVID-19 duty in rural areas. This, in a country where 65 percent of its 1.38 billion people live outside cities. Suddenly, ASHAs’ workload increased exponentially. Yet, they remain underpaid and now suffer stress-related chronic ailments, reports Sanket Jain.
Living standards of India's working people have deteriorated because of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government's lack of sufficient policy interventions during the pandemic, People's Dispatch reports.
Regular contributor Sanket Jain has been named a Top 10 finalist for Oxfam's 2021-22 Journalism for an Equitable Asia Award for his coverage of India's rural poor during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Far-right Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced in March 2020 a 21-day nationwide lockdown to curb a pandemic caused by COVID-19, the novel coronavirus. The lockdown was extended to 67 days, causing 121 million people to lose their jobs within the first month, writes Sanket Jain.
Nicaragua leapt forward to defend its national self-determination against U.S. global hegemony when it announced earlier this month it had discontinued diplomatic relations with Taiwan and was ready to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative. This move opens up the small Central American country’s economy to the People’s Republic of China, a country of 1.4 billion people that is rapidly edging toward surpassing the United States and becoming the biggest economy in the world.
In the fevered imaginations of U.S. war planners and their media sycophants, the empire’s greatest ideological, civilizational, and racial enemies of the last century—communism, Islamist jihadism, and a rising China—seem to be fusing into one. Hopefully, recent events have taught the United States’ prospective partners to think twice before following them once more unto the breach.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019