India
January 18, 2021
Last Tuesday, Delhi deployed teachers from government schools to bird duty to stand as sentries at border points and check for any illegal transportation of poultry into the city state
, in the midst of a spreading outbreak of avian flu. From 8 pm to 6 am, the teachers were instructed to check the birds’ veterinary certificates and to prohibit chicken products from being shipped into Delhi.
The order raised the hackles of the Government School Teachers Association, which said that teachers couldn’t be expected to pull night shifts after spending their days in online classes. “Sir, the teaching community selflessly served when the government and the citizens needed them for Covid-19 prevention,” the teachers’ letter to the government remarked. Now the government was “taking advantage of the situation and just harassing teachers into unjustified duties.”
January 11, 2021
It’s a miracle of modern medicine that scientists were able to develop multiple successful vaccines against Covid-19, a disease that wasn’t even on their radar a year ago. But so far, the global effort to roll out these vaccines and distribute them to vulnerable people is off to a slow start.
According to a tracker developed by OurWorldInData a research partnership between the University of Oxford and the British non-profit Global Change Data Lab three countries have vaccinated a higher proportion of their populations than the rest of the world: Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Bahrain.
January 7, 2021
When the spread of Covid-19 was on the verge of hurting the Indian economy in early 2020, the central bank quickly moved to protect the country’s banking system. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) provided relief to banks as well as borrowers by offering the option of halting loan repayments for six months (March-August). It slashed the repo rate to a record low, and opened up a special credit line for banks to encourage them to lend more. It also allowed lenders to restructure some loans.
All these steps gave much-needed temporary respite to India’s banking system. While the moratorium on loan repayments protected them against the shock of rising bad loans, the availability of cheap credit flushed the banking system with liquidity.