A new investigation reported by Nitin Sethi and Mridula Chari of The Reporters’s Collective reveals that a week after the Indian government coercively imposed a country-wide lockdown on March 24 to buy itself time to fight the Covid-19 crisis, its top scientists recommended a step-by-step scientific process that would lead to the lifting of the lockdown. They suggested how the government must monitor the spread of the virus and under what conditions it should relax the lockdown restrictions. Did the government follow that?

Independent journalist Srishti Jaswal was trolled online for a comment on a movie last year. Jaswal and her colleague, Shreegireesh Jalihal then investigated the group – Hindu IT cell- that organised the online trolling and the legal action against her and many other people who they felt insulted Hindu gods and goddesses. A story about this investigation has been published on the news website, Newslaundry. Menaka Rao from Suno India Show interviewed these two journalists and found out how they conducted this investigation. We also have published the interviews with the members of the IT cell in this show.

The Reporters’ Collective analysed municipality death registers from 68 of 170 Gujarat towns. The data shows that in just April 2021 the number of excess deaths is higher than the state’s official death toll since the pandemic first began.

Shreegireesh Jalihal and Tapasya, journalists with The Reporters’ Collective speak to experts to figure out what the data means and how authorities could have possibly fudged Covid data. The episode explains why we urgently need numbers of all-cause mortality from government authorities to analyse the possible extent of Covid-19 deaths since 2020.

Documents reviewed by Nitin and Sambhav show that the scientifically-validated approach recommended to the centre in April was not new. It had been first suggested as far back as February by the government’s top scientists.

They tell Padma Priya how the centre did not have a testing and surveillance strategy until as late as March-end. And how confusion and inaction frustrated the government’s medical experts.

In the first episode, the conversation takes us to the banks of the Gaula river in Uttarakhand, where rampant sand and gravel extraction is permanently damaging landscapes and livelihoods.

Tune in to listen to this new podcast by The Collective that exposes a disturbing story of greed-driven policies and interests taking over norms to protect ecologically sensitive areas.

In the second episode, host Pawan picks up his conversation with Tapasya, focusing first on the state government's weak response to environmental violations. From there, they dive into a revealing story from Jammu, where a political nexus had allowed illegal river mining and stone crushers to operate despite an official ban in place.

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The final episode further delves into the changes made by the Union government to the forest conservation law, which stripped legal protections from unrecorded forests. These changes contradict the Supreme Court’s landmark Godavarman judgment, which ensured that unrecorded forests are also protected.

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