“People in Bengal were supporting her only because they thought there is no alternative. Now they regard BJP as an alternative.”
BJP president J.P Nadda in an interview with India Today (April 12)
“The fall-out of the Covid-19 pandemic would have been far less serious had the PM based his policies on the advice of India’s top epidemiologists rather than his penchant for the spectacular and dramatic.”
Historian Ramchandra Guha (The Wire, April 20)
“There is no logic of incentives or crosssubsidies or a free market in these decisions. There is no epidemiological logic. This is ad hoc social Darwinism. The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must. A perfect metaphor for our healthcare system.”
Dr Pratap Bhanu Mehta, former president, Centre for Policy Research, on the Centre’s rudderless Coronavirus policies (April 28, Indian Express)
“It is an extreme irony that while we want our children to study science in school, we don’t want to apply scientific thought in our process… Millions of people went to take a dip in the Kumbh Mela. The world laughed at us, as images of record cases and choked hospitals contrasted with lakhs of people at the river banks.”
Chetan Bhagat, author, on how contempt for science has prompted spread of the Covid-19 pandemic (Times of India, April 25)
“It is one thing to say that the State may regulate the fee structure of private unaided schools to ensure that the school management does not indulge in profiteering and commercialisation, but in the guise of exercise of that power, it cannot transcend the line of regulation and impinge upon the autonomy of the school to fix and collect ‘just’ and ’permissible’ school fees from its students.”
Supreme Court judgement in Indian School, Jodhpur & Anr vs. State Government of Rajasthan (May 3, 2021)
