JURIST EXCLUSIVE – One of our law student staffers in Mumbai filed this report Friday on some legal aspects of India’s second-wave COVID-19 catastrophe:

The situation is still really bad, and there’s a shortage of oxygen, beds, vaccines and other medical equipment. Governments (central and state) are trying to make arrangements, but it all seems like a “too little, too late” scenario.

The judiciary, however, is providing a ray of hope amidst all this chaos. The State High Courts have been very proactive, pronouncing judgments daily on what the executive is doing to control the situation. The Madras High Court questioned the Centre yesterday on what had it been doing the past 14 months to face a crisis like this. The Telangana High Court is seeking to prevent the State Election Commission from conducting state elections (the judges literally asked them if elections matter more than people’s lives?). Other High Courts also, like those of Delhi and Patna, are pronouncing orders that are giving hope to people.

Today itself, the Supreme Court announced that governments do not have the right to clamp down citizens’ call for medical help on social media. Otherwise, contempt action can be taken against such states/officials. (A little background to this: Twitter had removed over 50 tweets criticizing the the govt’s disappointing response to the pandemic, on govt. orders. In Uttar Pradesh, an FIR was filed against a man who used Twitter to ask for oxygen for his dying grandfather).

The situation is still very bad, so it’s very difficult to predict anything. Everyday we are hearing news of people dying (even ones that we know of personally).