Chugalkhor Times issue 5

Pandemic Report Card: Who Benefited, Who Suffered

We are now past the three-year-mark of the declaration of the Covid-19 pandemic by the WHO. As the dust finally begins to settle, it’s time to take stock of who all benefited from the global health crisis, and who were the biggest sufferers due to the disease and related steps. Here’s a detailed Pandemic Report Card that gives you a comprehensive picture of the damage done and the benefits reaped.

Presenting: A Museum of Lockdown Stories

Pandemic Blues: Is The New World Disorder Here To Stay?

Bank Charges: An Undeclared Crisis For The Public

The Pandemic Report Card, Three Years On

Big Pharma’s profits went up, small businesses disappeared, comorbid, and elderly people had a hard time – here’s a comprehensive analysis on who gained and who suffered during the three years of Covid-19.

Nadim Siraj

April 1, 2023:

It’s been three years since the WHO (World Health Organisation) declared the coronavirus disease as a ‘pandemic’ on March 11, 2020. For 8 billion people on the planet, these three years were like an eternity.

Ever since the entire world went into emergency mode, the 8 billion residents of human civilisation got collectively tossed from one unprecedented world order to another.

For hundreds of crores of Earthlings for whom life came crashing down following the declaration of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was the onset of a dystopian New Dark Age. Most of us have become accustomed to the new abnormal, while a few of us have struggled to accept it.

Apart from the deadly respiratory disease, the human race had to deal with unhealthy lockdowns, classist physical distancing diktats (wrongfully termed ‘social distancing’), widespread job losses, mass wipe-out of small businesses, Orwellian vaccine mandates, a suspicious rise in surveillance states, an unacknowledged return of Apartheid, and many other rights violations.

But at the other end of the spectrum, or rather,

at the top of the pyramid of social stature, the outlook is completely different. For the folks on the ivory tower of wealth, privilege, and power, the coronavirus pandemic gave them powers, breakthroughs, and windfalls that they’d never tasted in the pre-Covid world.

In simple words, the impact of the pandemic reconfirmed that there are two worlds on planet Earth. Two highly contrasting worlds.

One world is a numerically tiny but wealthwise and power-wise insulated one. It benefited enormously from the New Dark Age. The other world, meanwhile, comprises the vast majority of people who faced the wrath of the attempted Great Reset that came with the pandemic.

While these two worlds are mutually exclusive of one another, they share a one-sided parasitic relationship. As we lived through the new abnormal for three years, the opportunistic ‘tiny world’ benefited massively by shepherding and marginalising the unsuspecting ‘larger world’ in multiple ways.

Who Benefited?

Let’s place the magnifying glass over this ‘tiny world’ to understand who benefited from the Covid-19 pandemic – and precisely how.

Vaccine Companies

No prizes for guessing who hit the biggest jackpot of the post-2020 world. It’s collectively the pharmaceutical industry, or to put it more bluntly, the owners of the influential vaccine companies that raced against time to hurriedly manufacture jabs against the SARS-Cov-2 virus.

Since the uneasy winter of 2020-2021, a handful of vaccine makers around the globe made the logic-defying claim of having successfully created the silver bullet. Thanks to the influence of the pro-pharma mainstream media, it struck very few people that a mass-use vaccine can’t simply be created in a year’s time. It’s technically impossible to do so. That sort of thing historically takes years, even decades, of rigorous testing and trialling, before being approved for commercial use.

It’s sheer science and common sense. Any overnight silver bullet claim in the world of vaccines is driven by business opportunism, not science.

For reasons we’d never know, our belligerent vaccine makers were allowed to completely bypass the mandatory test of time. In 2021 and thereafter, billions of unsuspecting human beings

were hurriedly given untested jabs under the naïve-sounding banner of ‘EUA’ or emergency-use authorisation.

Unpopular vaccine mandates and the mainstream media’s pro-vaccine advocacy served as catalysts to pull off the riskiest medical project of our times. In no time, we had a tiny bunch of pharma companies sitting pretty, having sold and delivered millions and millions and millions of poorly tested Covid-19 vaccines on every continent – including Antarctica!

Hospital Chains

While the vaccine giants scooped up hefty profits, there were other winners from the larger medical industry. Hospital chains minted money by upgrading cheaper, routine wards into expensive ICUs dedicated for Covid-19 patients.

It’s another debate that many panic-stricken Covid patients actually didn’t require exorbitant ICU beds. Routine flu treatment would have been sufficient for many of them to shrug off the ailment. Sadly, they were gaslighted by the hype and fear-mongering industry into checking into ICUs and spending fortunes.

The crisis profiteering by a few large hospital chains was hardly questioned in primetime TV debates, while the unacceptable trend of crores of people with routine flu-like symptoms dying shortly after hospitalisation was barely highlighted or investigated.

Add to this, the ecstatic owners of medical companies that made quick bucks from the ballooning sale of sanitisers, face masks, PPT kits, and all sorts of anti-flu medication, both preventive and SOS.

During these three years, Big Pharma made a ‘killing’, in every sense of the word.

The W.H.O.

That puts the spotlight on the WHO, the Genevabased international health agency that witnessed its powers shoot up since the start of 2020.

From arbitrary and sometimes logic-defying announcements, to hilarious flip-flops in its messaging to the world, to openly toeing the medical industry line, the WHO showed us that it is indeed as immensely powerful as other top global institutions such the UN (its parent body), World Bank, IMF, NATO, and Interpol.

As televisions ran scary headlines all day long about the WHO’s updates and recommendations, the revolving doors of the pharma business came under the scanner, especially the role of medical industry bigwigs and external foundations in how the WHO functions.

Governments

Next on the list of big-time gainers from the pandemic are governments and authorities around the world, which went on to taste and exercise newfound powers since March 2020.

For many world leaders, diplomats, and bureaucratic elites, the pandemic was like playing a video game in ‘god mode’ where you get to scoot your way up all the levels undefeated by using cheat codes.

From elected political outfits, to one-party regimes, to military dictatorships, to de facto colonies – those in charge of governance tripped over each other trying to police the masses into accepting the new abnormal. By exercising their full-spectrum powers for the first time ever, they realised they’re in pole position to try out novel ways of controlling the public.

MNCs

Another huge gainer from the pandemic was, and is, the small but powerful clique of Big Business giants, who consolidated their positions in the market after lockdowns swept away millions of small and medium businesses. Once the hard lockdowns arrived and human beings paused dealing with domestic and hyperlocal businesses, the monopolies and oligopolies rushed in and filled up the vacuum.

Thanks to season-long shutdowns, a handful of conglomerates and MNCs with the luxury of having deep pockets grabbed a larger and wider share of the essentials and non-essentials marketplace, muscling out smaller and weaker competition for good.

Recall how during the peak of the confinements, people resorted to ordering everything they

needed under the sun for home delivery. Who catered to those needs at that time? Mostly, the very large businesses.

Big Tech

Next up, the pandemic measures opened up a whole new world of opportunities and profits for a bouquet of technological companies. Many of them are headquartered in the US state of California, the world’s tech capital.

With workforces confined to chipping in from home, the world witnessed an unprecedented jump in the demand for laptops, desktops, and all sorts of so-called smart gadgets that people needed for working from home. Transnational companies that manufacture the tech stuff saw their production and sales literally explode during 2020 and 2021, thanks to the WFH phenomenon.

Add to that the communications software industry, which also witnessed a gigantic jump in demand among workforces. Following a worldwide lockdown on physical offices, the work-from-home employee class had to rely on a handful of new and existing video calling software for office meetings and day-to-day work processes.

Effectively, the stakeholders in the internetbased communications industry saw their businesses roar and profits soar during the peak of the pandemic. Also, the owners of digital payment platforms as well as online gaming companies experienced a similar jump in their respective spheres, spurred by lengthy lockdowns and physical distancing norms.

Big Media

The big owners of the mainstream media industry, too, had a fruitful time during the pandemic, witnessing a phenomenal jump in public attention. In the years leading up to 2020, television news viewership and newspaper readership were steadily going down. But the pandemic helped revive the mainstream media business, especially the TV journalism industry.

During months of lockdowns, people around the world were glued to television sets 24X7, catching Covid-related updates and announcements from the WHO and domestic authorities, and keeping track of the rising number of Covid-19 infections and deaths dished out as alerts all day long.

As TV news viewership hit through the roof, Big Media owners saw their clout and market value shoot up. Smaller media houses, however, failed to compete with the big ones and shrunk further, eventually resorting to retrenching workforces.

Who Suffered?

It looks like there were a lot of gainers. But it’s only a ‘tiny world’ of folks who walked away from this mess smiling. Let’s now look at the vast, vast majority of powerless people whose lives were left dented and mangled ever since the pandemic was declared.

Comorbid People, Senior Citizens

The elderly population all over the world, especially those residing in the richer countries, were dealt

quite a blow during the three years of the pandemic. There’s a fierce debate underway, meanwhile, on why aged people in poorer countries, and in rural settings have been impacted less compared to those living in leafy, organised, and less congested urban settings. Additionally, the months-long hard lockdowns and related restrictions on outdoor movements forced many senior citizens to remain locked indoors. In recent times, many of them have been lamenting it, saying the lockdowns have made them much weaker and less agile than before.

Presenting: A Museum of Lockdown Stories

incarceration of one-sixth of humanity, that is, the lockdown in India.

April 1, 2023:

Do you have a personal story to tell about the draconian measures imposed by the authorities during the Covid-19 lockdowns? Do you wish to share a photo or video from the dystopian times when absurd restrictive rules were rolled out? If the answer is ‘yes’, then there’s something to look forward to – a platform that will welcome your inputs and experiences about your lockdown experience.

Welcome to the ‘Lockdown & Covid Response Museum’, which is all set to be launched online on March 25 – the third anniversary of the mass

The digital museum is a brainchild of the UHO (Universal Health Organisation), a group of critical-thinkers on health issues opposed to the mainstream pandemic narrative and the draconian steps taken by governments around the world.

The museum’s website would be a repository of articles, photos, video footage, audio clips, reallife stories, and news reports about the sufferings of the people due to extreme measures during the pandemic, such as mass-scale and micro lockdowns, distancing diktats, school closures, restriction-related to job losses and damage to business, and vaccine mandates.

Describing the lockdowns as the “biggest peace-time human rights violation in the history

of civilisation”, IIT Bombay professor Bhaskaran Raman said the idea behind the lockdown museum is to document the atrocities for posterity. Raman is a member of the working committee of the UHO, which was formed last year.

“This is what the Lockdown & Covid Response Museum strives to achieve. Personal stories of sufferings must be told and saved to be read by future generations,” Raman, a critic of various aspects of the pandemic’s narrative and one of the moving spirits behind the museum, told Empire Diaries. The museum is expecting people from around the world to send in contributions.

“To start with, the museum will be online. However, we encourage people to set up physical museums using the material from this website,” said Raman, who has authored the contrarian book ‘Math Murder in Media Manufactured Madness’.

Some sample passages and images posted on the museum’s website bring out the horrors and tragedies that the Covid-19 counter-measures resulted in.

One of them is a report about Manoj Zende, who ended his life after being unable to bear the mountain of debt due to closure of his salon in the state of Maharashtra.

Another report documents how the panic created through a barrage of propaganda about the coronavirus disease by the authorities compelled a 24-year-old MTech scholar at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru to commit suicide after going into depression due to possible Covid-like symptoms.

Then there is the story of a mother in the US state of Texas who bundled her Covid-positive son in the trunk of a car in order to avoid getting exposed to him.

The absurdity of the authorities’ iron-fist approach to fighting the disease is revealed in a photo posted by US vice-president Kamala Harris on Twitter, of herself with a child. In the image, Harris is seen without a face mask, while the child’s smile is hidden behind a mask.

The children’s section on the website is a telling commentary of the troubles and complications that befell kids because of isolationist measures such as school shutdowns.

While a report from the US says “schools lost track of thousands of students who left during pandemic”, there is the image of a Maharashtra housing society diktat to parents not to send their children to play in the common areas.

The insensitive and heartless treatment of minors is aptly recorded by a Los Angeles Times report of children apologising to their dying elders “for spreading Covid-19”. Never before in history

Credit: Pixabay

The digital initiative to document lockdown-related anecdotes comes from the UHO (Universal Health Organisation), which was formed by logical-thinking activists, doctors, and experts during the Covid-19 pandemic.

—A Special Report

Pandemic Blues: Is The New World Disorder Here To Stay?

COLUMN/ Dr. Amitav Banerjee

The last three years were extremely disruptive.

It was not wrought by the Covid-19 virus, but by the well-meaning but misguided extreme measures by almost all governments around the world on the advice of their expert advisers.

While in the initial stages of the pandemic such harsh measures might have been justified on the basis of the precautionary principle, that is, to err on the side of safety, presently we have adequate hard evidence to guide policy weighing in the riskbenefit of each intervention that can have farreaching and harmful consequences.

Not doing so would not only amount to public health quackery, but would violate the basic principle of bioethics, that is, first, do no harm.

The greatest harm was inflicted on schoolchildren. Early into the pandemic, data indicated that keeping schools open had little adverse impact on the health and well-being of children as well as their teachers.

In a paper published in Public Health, UK, researchers analysed pooled data from seven countries in Europe that faced the fury of the pandemic. They calculated child mortality from Covid-19 and compared it with deaths from other causes among kids during the study period.

At the peak of the pandemic, there were just 44 deaths from Covid-19 and just 107 fatalities from influenza viruses, while 13,200 deaths were from other causes in the 0-18 years age group, the leading cause being accidents. Covid-19 among children contributed to only 0.33% of all child deaths, while influenza viruses were responsible for 0.8% of all fatalities.

School Closures

A more recent study from Japan published in Nature Medicine also established that school closures had no impact on the transmission of Covid-19 and had substantial negative consequences.

In India, we do not have similar studies, nor do

we have good public health statistics. The latest fad is counting cases of Covid-19, and now adding other influenza viruses in that case count, the latest being H3N2.

Public health is not about one or two diseases, but the overall disease burden in a community. Just highlighting a couple of too common illnesses out of context can be considered poor risk communication to the public, if not outright misinformation.

Just like in the West, accidents are the major killer of children in our country as well. In fact, road traffic accident deaths among the young in India are very high. Over 400 fatalities take place daily in India and many more are maimed for life. Compared to Covid-19 mortality or “long Covid”, the accident statistics can be frightening if these numbers are flashed daily in mainstream news.

Over 2,000 children die every day in India due to preventable causes against the background

of malnutrition. Now, school closures increase malnutrition as many children depend on mid-day meals to supplement their calorie and protein intake.

Dengue takes a heavy toll, we do not know how much, as the diseases of the tropics do not get as much attention as the diseases among affluent, westernised Indians.

So is the case with typhoid, which is common among children, and even with treatment, it has mortality of over 1%, which is far more than the fatality from untreated Covid-19 and influenza viruses such as H3N2.

We do have an effective vaccine against typhoid, which is not promoted with as much gusto as the Covid-19 or the influenza vaccine, the latter suddenly finding favour recently.

If we go by these hard data, and evidencebased public health practice, we should be more

(Turn to Page 09)

An increasing number of logical-thinking people around the world are wondering if the new brand of public health advocacy born during the pandemic will remain in place forever.

Credit: Pixabay

India’s Oscar Win, And The Colonial Hangover

The Ukraine Factor

There’s another compelling reason why this song is the toast of the western world. It was filmed on the lawns of Mariinsky Palace in Kyiv, Ukraine, the official residence of the country’s president, just a few months before the Russian invasion began.

The math is a no-brainer. Since America is on Ukraine’s side, the Oscar management perhaps felt tempted to give mileage to a song whose picturisation shows war-rattled Ukraine as a stark reminder of ongoing Russian aggression in that country.

So, there you go. With the geopolitical factor added to the colonial hangover narrative, the Oscar certification was only waiting to happen for Naatu Naatu. Notice the roll of honour for the RRR song in the build-up to the Oscars. Critics’ Choice Awards, Golden Globes, Hollywood Critics Association – all are best original song trophies, and all of them are American. And all of them were showered upon the makers of Naatu Naatu while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was underway.

Many Indians are nowadays busy googling up ‘Naatu Naatu’ and watching the film song with renewed interest because what many see as the western world’s highest cultural office – the Oscar factory – has given the Indian song a stamp of approval.

It’s important to break the bad news to delirious Indian fans: this song-and-dance piece from the Telugu film RRR smells of racism, insulting visuals, and a colonial hangover. It’s perhaps these very ingredients that charmed the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences into recognising Naatu Naatu as the best original song at the 2023 Oscars in Los Angeles.

Naatu Naatu isn’t just another peppy Indian movie song with colourful picturisation. It shows a dystopian colonial setting in which a couple of Indian men are seen desperately trying to impress civilised British men and women at a cocktail party.

The song is less than five minutes long. But its storyline is appalling enough to write an entire thesis on how West-loving Indians still enjoy narratives hailing the ages-old theme of civilised westerners trying to discipline uncivilised Indians.

Let’s first revisit the song’s stereotypical storyline.

Two Indian guys walk into a fancy British party. One of them loves a British woman. So, to impress everyone at the party, the two guys taunt the British men and break into an energetic dance. The British men find it annoying. One of them rudely yells at the Indians, saying he’s “had enough of the nonsense”, and orders them to leave – “You two — out!”

At that moment, a British woman intervenes and calms the angry British man down. She then teasingly tugs at both the Indian guys’ attire, and playfully tells them to resume dancing. Their spirits lifted by the Englishwoman’s friendly gesture, the

Indian duo starts dancing, only to be again told by the angry British man that it’s “disgusting”.

Shallow as the storyline sounds, the Indian men continue to dance, later joined by the angry British men and the happy Englishwomen. The Indian duo emerges on top as better dancers than the Britishers, eventually impressing the higher mortals – the disciplined British – with their rustic and native (“Naatu”) performance.

For any self-respecting Indian, this kind of narrative, be it a high-quality artwork or a cheap stunt, is a reminder of the days of colonial India. The song’s visually cliched setting brings back memories of when the western invaders occupied the Indian subcontinent from 1499 to 1947.

Essentially, the song appears to bluntly promote the idea that marginalized, none-white people should continue trying to impress the more advanced western people to win them over.

The Oscars have a dark legacy of often awarding artwork along geopolitical lines or to push certain western narratives. Take the latest winner of the best picture award, Everything Everywhere All at Once. The racy film is unlikely to tickle the palate of connoisseurs. But it won the biggest prize perhaps because its fantasy storyline promotes the new concept of metaverses, which the Big Tech industry is trying to familiarise the world with.

There are many other examples of agendalaced best picture wins at the Oscars, such as Argo. It paints a misleading picture of innocent Americans constantly suffering at the hands of demonic Iranians, and portrays the pleasant city of Tehran as hostile towards all outsiders.

Then take The Hurt Locker for example. The movie glorifies the lives of western soldiers serving in interventionist foreign missions.

A screenshot from the RRR film’s song, Naatu Naatu

The Oscar-winning song’s picturisation is a dystopian setting in which two Indian men are shown as desperately trying to impress westerners at a high-end party.

Column / Nadim Siraj

Protest Song Marks 20 Years Of Iraq’s Invasion

‘A Soldier Returns’ is a powerful anti-war song composed and sung by an Indian artist on the 20th anniversary of the start of the Anglo-American joint operation to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

—A Special Report

April 1, 2023

As March 20, 2023 marked two disturbing decades since American and British military forces invaded Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power, a powerful anti-war protest song by India-based singer Asif Rahman sparked a buzz in music and activism circles.

Asif’s evocative, self-composed track about the war on Iraq, titled ‘A Soldier Returns’, was created and presented by the independent current affairs platform, Empire Diaries.

The song narrates a haunting first-person account of a soldier left disillusioned by the horrors of conflict and misery in Iraq in 2003 that the transatlantic troops perpetrated. Sung passionately by the maverick singer, the song carries a strong message to the masses, seeking to awaken them against tendencies of conflict and clashes.

In the track recorded in English, the singer starts with the words – “Hello! Dear brother” – confessing to his near and dear ones about his troubling engagement in the war as a combat soldier. He reminisces his gory acts as a trooper, and decries war following his traumatic experiences. He signs off with a cautionary note, singing that his stories are bound to leave listeners “shaken and undone”.

The vivid visuals of the music video showcase visuals from the invasion of Iraq, and also features the singer belting out the track at outdoor and studio locations. The chilling announcements of the invasion by then US president George W Bush and then British PM Tony Blair are played out in a visually engaging backdrop.

The track’s build-up shows courageous Australian journalist Julian Assange and his lawyer-wife Stella Assange. Julian Assange is jailed in London for exposing US-led war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan on his whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks.

The opening minutes also feature a short clip of Mike Prysner, a disillusioned US-based Iraq invasion veteran who is seen screaming tough questions at Bush at a talk show years after the 2003 invasion, only to be forcefully carried away from the indoor site.

The free-flowing song’s instrumentation includes Spanish guitar and harmonica, both played by singer Asif. The song was written by Nadim Siraj and produced by Ratna. Debdeep Banik’s subtle sound mixing skills and Chinangshuk Chandra’s imaginative video editing expertise helped turn ‘A Soldier Returns’ into a haunting experience.

Recalling how the song came about, singer-composer Asif said, “One fine day, we were having a casual conversation. Ratna suddenly came up with a proposal that she has something in her archive and would only share it

with me if I agreed to tune it up. I told her I’d have a look at it before making any commitment. Then she texted me a piece starting with the words –‘Hello! Dear brother’.”

“As I went through it, I instantly felt deeply

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associated with the words planted by Nadim. So, I gave it a ‘go’ right on the spot. I’m a war movie buff. Films such as Platoon, Enemy at the Gates, and Guns of Navarone have always haunted me. So, in some way, I could relate to the words, and that’s what inspired me to sign on to the project.”

Asif is a professional artist who is into folk, western, contemporary, classical, and experimental music. He’s been recording music for TV series and albums as a singer from his childhood days.

He hails from a family of Kolkata-based music industry insiders. His mother, Sufika Rahman, is a renowned classical singer and sought-after music teacher who has recorded albums and has worked alongside the leading names in India’s music circles. Asif’s father, Babul Rahman, was in charge of artists’ contracts for decades at famed music company HMV during its heyday.

In his message to audiences, Asif, who currently resides in Kolkata, said, “Had there been no war, this song would’ve been unnecessary. I hope that, at least for now, mankind won’t vouch for any further wars. Let’s have peace.” (To watch the music video, visit the YouTube channel @empirediaries)

Asif Rahman, composer and singer of ‘A Soldier Returns’ (Empire Diaries)

Why Are We Rolling Out Red Carpet For Foreign Universities?

GREAT GAME 2.0: The UGC’s proposed plan for opening up India’s education sector further comes amid an unreported foreign corporation-led recolonisation of various sectors of the Indian economy.

April 1, 2023

Two years ago, the national children’s rights body alleged that church schools in India had violated the Right to Education Act, cornering Rs 2,500 crore in the 2017-18 period by denying free seats to poor children. The NCPCR (National Commission for Protection of Child Rights) had reportedly detected that almost 13,000 church schools defied a mandate under the Act to earmark 25% of their seats for kids from economically weaker sections or EWSs.

Many of those schools, notwithstanding the impeccable quality of English-medium education they impart across India, are a legacy of centuriesold church missions that had once upon a time zeroed in on the Indian subcontinent from Europe to anglicise the native culture.

That chapter was about church schools. Now, fast forward to 2023. The NCPCR’s warning bells about the impunity with which some schools with an overseas legacy can operate seem to have fallen on deaf ears. On January 5, the UGC (University Grants Commission) floated a proposition that could pave the way for FHEIs (foreign higher educational institutions) to literally prise India’s economy open.

The statutory body regulating higher education in the country issued a notice provisionally announcing that all kinds of foreign universities should soon be able to open campuses across India with the commission’s nod, and conduct business with a high degree of freedom. The approval would be given for a period of 10 years.

A Free Hand

If the UGC’s proposal is finalised, FHEIs would enjoy unprecedented powers, such as hiring foreign staff and thereby ignoring Indian talent, charging exorbitant fees and thereby denying poor students access, and – most disturbingly – repatriating their entire profits to their home countries under India’s FEMA (Foreign Exchange Management Act).

The UGC’s draft has been posted on the regulator’s website. It awaits feedback from stakeholders and the public by February 20, after which the final rules would be announced and published in the government-run Gazette of India.

In a country where more than 3,200 foreign companies are already doing business, with many of them repatriating considerable chunks of their profits, the proposal has expectedly drawn sharp criticism from experts.

The UGC argues that the initiative is a follow-up of the New Education Policy 2020, and “will provide an international dimension to higher education, enable Indian students to obtain foreign qualifications at affordable cost, and make India an attractive global study destination”.

Apart from putting in place routine checks and balances, the UGC’s draft notice gives a free hand to what it calls “reputed” institutes to run their courses and programmes, including those from undergraduate to postdoctoral levels, and also award degrees, diplomas, and certificates in all disciplines.

Experts and teachers’ bodies have voiced apprehensions, pointing out that FHEIs are unlikely to land here with utilitarian goals, and might see this opportunity primarily as an offshore business venture.

Consequently, the gulf between the haves and have-nots in India’s educational sphere could widen further with students only from affluent families having the means to afford the hefty fees.

The free run to be given to FHEIs could hit hard the country’s reputed higher educational institutes as well, whose day-to-day functioning is already severely hampered by a lack funds and strict rules, explained Kolkata-based Partha Pratim Roy,

secretary of the Jadavpur University Teachers’ Association, or JUTA.

“Government-run universities function under strict rules and regulations. The rules framed by the UGC for recruitment of faculty and programmes such as PhD are binding on us. But the FHEIs are being given full autonomy on recruitment and to decide and control their PhD rules, undergraduate and postgraduate regulations. So, there are apprehensions that they may do things on their whims and fancies,” Roy told Empire Diaries.

In Dire Straits

To buttress his argument about the financial distress gripping India’s top institutes of higher learning, Roy cited the condition prevailing at Jadavpur University, considered as one of the best academic institutions in the country, especially in engineering courses.

“While the Bengal government has curtailed the maintenance grant, the UGC grant that used to come under the Five-Year Plans stopped in 2017 as the Planning Commission itself was scrapped.

“Leave alone buying new equipment and computers, we don’t even have proper funds to change the ink for printers. We used the previous

Credit: Pixabay

—A Special Report

(from

People with comorbidities, too, had a harrowing time, with the virus aggravating their pre-existing ailments and triggering fatalities that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. The virus was genuinely harsh on them.

(from page 04)

had children, that too healthy ones, been blamed for the elderly catching an infectious virus.

Raman feels the unchecked atrocities and the fear propaganda carried on by various governments triggered immense panic among the public during the pandemic. The events and anecdotes chronicled by the museum would ensure such mistakes are not repeated, he believes.

concerned with major childhood killers such as accidents and dengue. In fact, the vector mosquito of dengue is a daytime biter and cannot be taught to maintain so-called social distancing.

Another breach of evidence-based practice is the insistence on wearing face masks. Before Covid-19 and even during the early days of the pandemic, the WHO (World Health Organisation), and even the great Anthony Fauci, who, according to his own view, represents science, did not recommend masks for the public as there was no evidence that it will prevent viral transmission.

Duly parroting their western academic masters, the then director of AIIMS gave an interview, saying healthy people need not wear masks. Even a high-school student knows that masks cannot act as filters for viruses.

During the course of the study, a couple of good-quality randomised, controlled trials, one in Denmark and another large community trial in Bangladesh, established that masks have very modest impact, if at all. Strangely, defying evidence as well as common sense, the mask mandates spread like wildfire throughout the world.

Even now, the knee-jerk reaction of administrations and their pliable medical advisers is to recommend masking at the slightest rise in seasonal, self-limiting respiratory illnesses, notwithstanding that the latest Cochrane review (considered the final word in evidence-based medicine) has concluded that masks do not offer much protection.

Were these practices by various governments

(from page 06)

There’s Slumdog Millionaire, too, to cite as an example. It borders on glorifying poverty and misery in India – traditionally a favourite subject among many westerners. There’s The Departed, which glorifies gun-toting culture among hot-headed, trigger-happy cops on the streets of America. Or take Schindler’s List, for example. The film flows with only that narrative of Nazi Germany that the West wants the world to follow.

Empire’s Agenda

At the end of the day, one has to understand that Hollywood isn’t an isolated arena in the entertainment industry. American films and

Sacked Employees

Among several major losses inflicted on the masses was the spectacular culling of jobs and contractual work. In rich countries as well as poor ones, the years 2020 and 2021 saw workforces experience the pain and trauma of sackings, unending salary delays, and the shrinking of wages.

“As the panic recedes and the next generation is able to look at the happenings impassionately, the sheer scale of absurdities and atrocities will become clear. This will be critical to ensure that such colossal mistakes are not repeated in the future,” he said.

Those keen to contribute content to the digital lockdown museum can visit the official website of the Universal Health Organisation (uho.org.in).

nothing but public health quackery? Or were they a sinister design to control the people using fear as the key?

The Hancock Files

Recently, leaked messages revealed that Matt Hancock, former British health secretary, wanted to “frighten the pants off everyone” to ensure compliance with restrictions by strategically “deploying” details of a new strain.

One can only hope that leaders all over the world are not following the same modus operandi.

In the context of the above deliberations, it is dismaying to note that the Union Territory of Puducherry has declared that schools will remain closed from March 16 to 26, and so-called experts are yet again recommending masks – the same experts who were parroting at the beginning of the pandemic that masks are not recommended for healthy people.

Not only do these interventions not follow the current available evidence, they will also cause much collateral harm – physical, mental, and social.

Such hypocrisy and public health quackery is also poor education for students who read science and then find that it is not followed in practice.

(Dr. Amitav Banerjee was a field epidemiologist for over two decades in the Indian Army. He led the mobile epidemic investigation team at the Armed Forces Medical College in Pune, India, from 2000-2004. During this period, he investigated a number of outbreaks in the country. He is presently a professor in a medical college in Pune.)

awards are too influential for the American Empire not to use them as propaganda tools.

It is an important cog in the wheel for the US imperialist machine and its bid to fan its onesided agenda. Which is precisely why songs such as Naatu Naatu and films such as Schindler’s List, which are aligned with western narratives, are given special treatment.

The best way to get a sense of why it’s wrong for Indians to go ecstatic over Naatu Naatu’s Oscar certification is to imagine the reverse scenario. What if India awards a music video that shows Indians belittling Americans and US culture along racist lines? Would people in the US celebrate that song’s certification by India? Or will they be outraged? Think about it.

that the employed class lived through for those two disturbing years. Every other day, we would get news of mass sackings in various industries due to shrinking economic activity and dwindling business.

Small Businesses

The March 11, 2020 declaration of the pandemic also served as a death knell for lakhs and lakhs of small and medium businesses across continents, especially in countries home to the poorer half of the global population.

Once hard lockdowns came into force and outdoor life came to a grinding halt, the writing was on the wall for roadside businesses, mom-andpop shops, hyperlocal departmental stores, food and veggie stalls on carts, and cash-dependent domestic companies.

Indian cities and suburbs are a case in point, where the struggling owners of roadside shops on wheels selling perishables were dealt a blinding blow by the shock imposition of lockdowns. Countless such unorganised marketplaces simply vanished out of sight. With street-life wearing a deserted look for weeks and months, stall owners wrapped up their modest belongings in the city and retreated to cash-strapped villages.

Migrant Workers

A gigantic disruption was felt by a huge number of migrant workers dwelling in the cities of poor countries. It is estimated that in India, the lockdown call and other negative effects of pandemic-related moves dented the lives of several hundred million migrants.

The chilling visuals of lakhs of migrants leaving lockdown-hit Indian cities on foot and desperately heading back to their villages that are hundreds of kilometres away will remain as the darkest and most disturbing chapter of India’s pandemic story.

Natural Immunity

A crucial loss for the human race during the last couple of years was the harm caused to people’s natural immunity via the mass vaccination campaign. As crores of people queued up and took the jab, the largely untested vaccines’ experimental nature replaced the human body’s natural immunity, expectedly sparking a rising number of adverse reactions and deaths.

Doctors, scientists, and activists kept warning – only in vain – about looming health-related complications that a small but significant percentage of people would experience in the days to come as a result of the vaccine superseding natural immunity.

Two years into the vaccination drive, we are already witnessing a steady rise in heart-related problems, cardiac arrests, and neurological ailments across the planet. We’re are also experiencing a slow but steady upward tick in excess deaths.

Schoolchildren

Children across the world also suffered. While schools were shut during hard lockdowns, many of them continued to teach online despite a phased end to hard restrictions and physical distancing diktats.

While the trend of schools going online was documented by the mainstream media, the same press hardly bothered to dig deep and report on the drastic drop in the quality of education as primary and secondary schooling went online.

Moreover, long-distance schooling created

a class-based divide between students from affluent families and kids from poorer households. While well-off parents were lucky to be able to arm their children with smartphones, tablets, laptops, or desktops required for attending classes online from home, financially unstable families couldn’t afford to buy the gadgets, leaving their kids falling behind in school. The divide caused irreversible damage.

Blue-Collared Workers

In another unnerving turn of events, the pandemic gifted to the human race two new ‘Apartheids’ – one in which the rich began distancing themselves from the poor citing virus fears, and another in which the jabbed started to keep the unjabbed at bay.

In the leafy suburbs of big cities, including in India, gated communities or housing societies turned snobbier than ever before, bringing Apartheid back from the dead. On the pretext of staying safe, the well-to-do owners of these artificial neighbourhoods brought in never-before-seen rules disallowing bluecollared workforces such as maids, cooks, cleaners, delivery staff, etc. from getting equal access to elevators and common passageways.

The northern Indian city of Noida is a case point here, where the management of numerous housing societies designating separate lifts, separate seating arrangements, and additional surveillance systems for blue-collar working class going about their work.

Most of the virus-related restrictions have now been lifted in Noida, but the new Apartheid seems to have become permanent.

The Unjabbed

The other Apartheid the pandemic has given us, of course, is the rise in toxicity in the relationship between those who hastily took the jab and those who mindfully avoided it. The difference between the jabbed and unjabbed has become so ingrained in society since 2021 that even many employers around the world compelled their staff to quit for not taking the vaccine.

Effectively, the minority of unjabbed people are seen by the jabbed majority not as critical-thinking people, but mostly as anti-science, irresponsible people who’re putting others’ lives at risk.

Cash-Dependent People

Yet another big sufferer of the pandemic blues is the class of the people who rely largely on cash use, and not on digital transactions, for their livelihoods and survival.

With a growing trend of people treating strangers with suspicion – thanks to the dark culture of physical distancing – exchanging cash went out of fashion across many walks of life, leaving cash-dependent people in trouble.

So, while the peak of the pandemic had plunged the entire human race into darkness, it also widened the gulf between the haves and have-nots, as listed in this ‘pandemic report card’. A tiny bunch ended up at the right end of the gun, and a vast majority stared down the wrong end of the barrel. The virus that causes Covid-19 may someday be gone from our lives. But the virus of extreme social divide resulting from the WHO’s pandemic call and its aftermath threatens to linger on for years to come.

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Bank Charges: An Undeclared Crisis For The Public

April 1, 2023

Service charges, transaction charges, penalties for this, penalties for that, and then GST on top of all that. Over the past decade or so, Indian banks have literally been pulling off a slow and silent heist – inflicting unprecedented damage on their customers by hitting them with a torrent of ‘bank charges’.

Anyone who has a bank account in India, be it with one of the 12 public sector banks or the 22 private sector ones, is made to pay bank charges at the drop of a hat. There are multiple fronts on

which banks slap these charges on unsuspecting customers.

They charge account holders for making cash deposits and withdrawals at branches, which means as a customer of any bank, you get penalised for withdrawing your own money and even for handing over your moolah to them!

You get slapped with fines if your account balance goes below a designated threshold, which means you are basically bullied into always keeping a certain minimum amount of money in the bank in order to avoid getting punished.

Then, at ATM machines, you can make free-ofcharge withdrawals only for a limited number of times, which means you don’t have the right to exceed the number of occasions you can encash your own money without paying a penalty.

And then there are charges that you are forced to pay simply for using your own debit card for making transactions. As an account holder, it’s your right as a customer to be able to freely use your debit card – that’s the whole purpose – but you get docked for possessing it and for using it. You make a payment to a third party using your

debit card, and your bank imposes a charge on you for a transaction that it had absolutely nothing to do with!

It’s an endless list of bank charges that customers in India just can’t avoid. The GST that authorities levy on you for these questionable charges adds salt to the wound. Sadly, many customers don’t even notice this gigantic, unjustified loot that is carried out by the banks.

Here’s a shocking and comprehensive checklist of all bank charges that customers are slapped with, as put together by the watchdog FAN India

Here’s a checklist of bank charges that Indian customers have been slapped with in recent times, as put together by the independent watchdog Financial Accountability Network India in a powerful analysis.

Credit: Pixabay

(Financial Accountability Network India), in a report titled ‘Bank Charges: Penalising The Poor’:

• Cash deposits and withdrawals at bank branches

• Cash deposits in accounts other than one’s own

• Cash withdrawal from ATMs

• Issuance fee on debit cards

• Annual charge on debit cards

• Balance inquiry at ATMs

• Mini-statements from ATMs

• Regeneration of ATM PIN code from branch

• Account-closing charges

• Transaction declined on debit card due to insufficient funds

• SMS alerts from banks

• Change in address

• Change in mobile number

• Change in KYC-related documents

• Cash deposits and CDMs

• Change of mutilated and old currency notes

• NEFT and RTGS transfer of funds

• Surcharge on use of debit cards for buying rail tickets and fuel pumps

• Cheque books

• Demand draft

• Balance certificate

• Signature verification

While we slam India’s banking sector for pulling off this silent financial coup, many argue that the country’s banks have been woefully stressed due to three broad reasons, which compelled them to resort to imposing bank charges as a compensatory measure.

According to one school of thought, when the Indian government rolled out the Jan Dhan account-opening initiative a few years back, the sudden and exponential rise in the number of new bank accounts across the country turned out to be counterproductive for the banking workforce. It is

argued that the landmark move left the banking sector’s staff struggling to process and manage the new accounts opened as part of the scheme. So, the banks have been looking for ways to raise extra funds (read: bank charges) in order to handle the excess workload.

Banks in trouble?

Another school of thought claims the demonetisation in 2016 may have compelled the banking sector to look for ways to raise money in new ways. Although the banks were flush with cash due to a torrent of deposits of banned currency notes, it turned out to be a bane and not a boon for the banking sector. That’s because the banks, armed with an unprecedented amount of incoming cash, saw subsequent interest payments to customers shoot up and hit the roof. It apparently offset the initial gains made due to the note ban.

Then, of course, there’s the case of nonperforming assets or NPAs in recent years. Having leaked bad and dodgy loans to shady outsiders that never really got paid back, banks were portrayed

by the popular press as tragic victims of siphoning and fraud. The case of ballooning NPAs – as these unrecovered loans are called – appeared to have given the banks a kind of licence to compensate for the losses by turning their guns on innocent customers.

It is true that the banking industry in India is going through turbulent times. Long gone are the days of full-spectrum nationalisation like it was during the Indira Gandhi years. In recent decades, foreign and domestic private businesses have been gnawing at the nationalised banking sector, forcing the privatisation of chunks of it. Anti-privatisation protests have been jolting the industry, sparking more turmoil.

It is in these trying times that India’s troubled banks need the support of their huge customer base. Slapping bank charges on them and making money out of thin air to compensate for various problems is certainly not the answer – especially because a large majority of Indians trust high street banks and park their hard-earned money there.

grants for laboratory development. But now, the labs are in very bad shape. Introducing new experiments is a pipe dream. The old experiments are being continued by repeatedly repairing old instruments, which have shelf life,” said Roy. While on one hand, government-run educational institutions are in dire straits, the free hand given to foreign universities under the new plan would trigger unequal competition and chaos, he said.

Echoing Roy’s fears, Thanjavur-based SASTRA Deemed University’s Vice Chancellor S Vaidhyasubramaniam recently sought a levelplaying field for Indian varsities.

“The UGC should ensure an equal amount of academic, administrative, and financial autonomy to Indian universities as much as foreign universities might be entitled to. Such a levelplaying field will ensure progressive competition and increase overall quality and excellence in Indian higher education,” Vaidhyasubramaniam reportedly said.

On the tendency that FHEIs could have to coldshoulder students from poor families because they wouldn’t fit into their business model, former UGC chairman Sukhadeo Thorat recently wrote that the proposal “was likely to further reduce the

access of weaker sections to higher education… which may enhance unequal access, unless the government comes with corresponding measures to safeguard them”.

The UGC’s draft makes no mention of India’s complex reservation system, leaving out the need to address problem areas such as admission quotas for students representing Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, and EWSs. Thus, there are fears that FHEIs could become exclusive clubs of urban social and financial elites.

Financial Drain

A bone of contention is the UGC’s plan to give FHEIs the permission to repatriate their earnings to parent campuses headquartered abroad. The move, if approved, could see them avoid reinvesting their profits into the Indian economy, therefore, resulting in India’s financial resources getting drained out.

“Cross-border movement of funds and maintenance of Foreign Currency Accounts, mode of payments, remittance, repatriation, and sale of proceeds, if any, shall be as per the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) 1999 and its Rules,” the UGC draft reads.

In fact, UGC chairman M Jagadish Kumar has

made it amply clear what this rule means. “This has been an area in which there has been some debate. Now, it is very clear in these regulations that the campus established by the foreign HEI can repatriate the funds generated by the campus. The audit report should be submitted annually to the commission certifying that the operations are under FEMA Act 1999 and its rules,” he announced at a press event.

At the same press conference, while highlighting that domestic students would benefit from the proposed move, Kumar pointed out that in 2022, over 4.5 lakh Indian students went abroad to study, leading to an outflow of an estimated $2830 billion.

Clearly, the two statements seem contradictory. If the motive is to stop the outflow of foreign currency, then why is the UGC proposing that FHEIs should be allowed to send their earnings out of India? Apart from levying the usual charges and taxes on the outward money transfer, the UGC doesn’t want to make it mandatory for the foreign entities to invest at least some fraction of the earnings in the Indian economy.

Roy, the JUTA secretary, questioned whether India will benefit by allowing a new flock of foreign educational institutions to send abroad the profits they make here. “See, the foreign universities and institutes, if they come, will come to serve their

business interests only. They will use their brand names to do business. If repatriation or outward remittance of funds is allowed, how do we stand to gain then?” he asked.

GREAT GAME 2.0: Recolonising India

The UGC’s proposal shouldn’t be seen as an isolated event. It is a reminder of an ongoing recolonisation of the Indian economy across industries by several overseas corporations that have set up shop here, and are repatriating significant chunks of their profits out of India.

International trade is no longer the primary source of financial resource drain for the geopolitically weaker nations in South Asia, Africa, and South America, where MNCs from export-oriented countries often dump enormous quantities of goods and pump out money. Recolonisation of these economies by foreign players through FDI and other strategies has, in recent decades, silently re-emerged from the bygone days of the seven East India Companies that once infamously squeezed the Indian subcontinent dry of its financial wealth. It remains to be seen if the UGC’s proposed red carpet will indeed get rolled out for a new breed of opportunistic FHEIs that are eyeing Indian education’s green pastures.

C U R E @ 72

Credit: Pixabay