Mainstream Weekly

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  Table of Contents Mainstream - Lockdown Edition no.16 | July 11, 2020

  11 July 2020

  Contents - Mainstream, VOL LVIII No 30, New Delhi, July 11, 2020: LETTER TO THE READERS - Mainstream’s, COVID 19 Lockdown Edition No.16 | July 11, 2020 Statement on China by Veterans of the Indian Armed Forces To Heads of Government and Top Military Brass | July 2, 2020 DOCUMENT: While administrative approvals can be expedited, But processes of vaccine development cannot be, without compromising scientific standards - Press Release by Indian Academy of Sciences | 5 July 2020 DOCUMENT: (…)

• LETTER TO THE READERS - Mainstream’s, COVID 19 Lockdown Edition No.16 | July 11, 2020

  11 July 2020

  Talk of De-escalation on the India-China border is good news: Sino-Indian standoff seems to have moved away from a full-blown confrontation. New Delhi appears to have elevated its diplomatic contacts with Beijing. On July 5, 2020, Special Representatives of India and China on border dispute Ajit Doval and Wang Yi reached a ‘positive consensus’ over de-escalation and disengagement in Eastern Ladakh. Time will tell if this holds. Though reports still point at round the clock monitoring by (…)

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  Statement on China by Veterans of the Indian Armed Forces To Heads of Government and Top Military Brass | July 2, 2020

  11 July 2020

  We, the signatories, are all Veterans of the Indian Armed Forces, who have served in the defence of our nation in various ranks and appointments in peacetime and in operational/war zones, over the past several decades.

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  While administrative approvals can be expedited, But processes of vaccine development cannot be, without compromising scientific standards - Press Release by Indian Academy of Sciences | 5 July 2020

  11 July 2020

  The Indian Academy of Sciences (IASc) has noted that a letter reportedly issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) is circulating in the news and other media. It is mentioned in this letter that ICMR and Bharat Biotech India Limited, a private pharmaceutical company, are jointly developing a vaccine against the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. The letter also states that “It is envisaged to launch the vaccine for public health use latest by 15th August 2020 after completion of all clinical trials.” IASc welcomes the exciting development of a candidate vaccine and wishes that the vaccine is quickly made available for public use. However, as a body of scientists – including many who are engaged in vaccine development – IASc strongly believes that the announced timeline is unfeasible. This timeline has raised unrealistic hope and expectations in the minds of our citizens.

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  Move to Communalise CBSE Syllabus - Press release by the Communist Party of India | July 8, 2020

  11 July 2020

  Communist Party of India General Secretary D RAJA has issued the following statement today (on July 8, 2020) condemning the move to communalise CBSE syllabus

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  An Official Report From India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences: Assessment of Climate Change over the Indian Region | June 2020

  11 July 2020

  India will witness warmer days and nights, and heavy rainfall leading to floods till the end of the 21st century, said the first-ever climate change assessment report by the Indian government. The report Assessment of Climate Change over the Indian Region prepared by the Union Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES)

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  Video: Listen To Her - Nandita Das’s Short Film on Domestic Violence | 2020

  11 July 2020

  A 2020 short film on domestic violence by Nandita Das the independent filmmaker and actress

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  Poster 1890s in the UK: Vote for Dadabhai Naoroji - The socialist who stood up for women’s suffrege and workers rights

  11 July 2020

• An Unrelenting Covid-19 Irritates Capitalism No End

  11 July 2020, by Badri Raina

  Through some three centuries of the European Renaissance, Capitalism came to be the dominant social force in the western world.
  New economic relations of production ruthlessly displaced more humane forms of human association, even as earlier relations of production employed their own means of exploitation Capitalism simply made the expropriation of human labour an uncompromising founding principle of the class-based accumilaltion of wealth, causing the alienation of the human from nature, (…)

• Trivialisation of death: With dignity gone, Covid has reduced it to a statistical abstraction | Avijit Pathak

  11 July 2020, by Avijit Pathak

  Death, thy servant, is at my door. He has crossed the unknown sea and brought thy call to my home. — Rabindranath Tagore
  Is it that in the age of the Covid, death has lost its meaning, dignity and poetic wonder? As the virus spreads, hospitals are burdened with infected patients and crematoriums become unmanageable, we engage with death through numbers. Death becomes statistical abstraction: faceless, anonymous and devoid of a meaning. As fearful beings, we have already stigmatised the (…)