A Joint Civil Society* Contribution to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) for the adoption of the List of Issues Prior to Reporting on India has regretted that despite the abolition of untouchability enshrined in the Indian Constitution, and a constitutional formal prohibition of discrimination on the ground base of race or caste, under the Constitution, Dalits and other communities affected by discrimination based on descent, including Adivasis, still face de facto discrimination.
In Pakistan, sanitation workers face dangerous and dreadful conditions everyday. Unfortunately, not much has changed for sanitation workers in the country over the last many decades. An increasing numbers of sanitation workers continue to lose their lives to poor sanitation planning and management.
More than half the deaths due to Covid among the staff of the three MCDs — North, South and East — have been of safai karamcharis. Of the 94 deaths among corporation employees due to Covid, 49 are sanitation workers, as per data accessed by The Indian Express of the three MCDs.
India’s graveyards and crematoriums are overwhelmed with deaths from COVID-19, trying to manage the surge in the capital city New Delhi’s largest crematorium.
India’s government needs to urgently address healthcare shortages amid the world’s fastest-growing Covid-19 crisis and ensure that vulnerable communities have equitable access to treatment, Human Rights Watch said today. Donors and diaspora groups that are rushing assistance to India should encourage the government to end curbs on free speech and to respect human rights in its pandemic response.
Indian groups trying to locate assistance for Covid-19 patients are finding that the requests keep coming. Although the government has attempted to increase medical supply stocks, distribution remains patchy.
Indian has been battered by a severe COVID-19 second wave. On 3rd May 2021, India reported more than 300,000 new coronavirus cases for a 12th straight day to take its overall caseload to just shy of 20 million. India's total infections stand at 19.93 million, while total fatalities rose to 218,959 according to health ministry data. Hospitals have run out of beds and states have run out of oxygen cylinders, Remdesivir, ventilators and vaccines.
Rural India is no longer just a receptor for returning migrants in the current wave, it is already a site where resources and coping mechanisms have been stretched. Accounts coming in from the field point to the times of distress that will quickly turn into a catastrophe of unimaginable scale, if not addressed immediately.
Daily new cases have risen 60-fold since April 1 and nearly a thousand people have died in the past 10 days, according to official figures which, as in neighboring India, are seen as under-reporting the scale of the virus.
While working to rehabilitate and support manual scavengers, one of the first steps should be to recognise the women engaged in this work and prioritise their needs.
Two years ago, the centennial International Labour Organisation (ILO) conference agreed that occupational health and safety should become a fundamental right at work. The death toll of work – five people every minute of every hour of every day around the world – was so tragic that action was needed.
Need and objectives for EU intervention on sustainable corporate governance
The Informal Sector Service Centre (INSEC), a leading human rights organization in the country, documented 5,543 victims of human rights violations in 2020.
Manual pit-emptying – the removal of faecal sludge from pits and tanks using hands or basic tools – is a widespread practice in Bangladesh, and in other low- and middle-income countries. Despite this, little is known about the livelihoods of pit-emptiers. This paper analyses data from six cases of pit-emptying in three cities in Bangladesh, across three different operational modes: private cooperatives, government employees and self-employed workers.