The Supreme Court has listed for hearing on Tuesday (March 28) a petition filed by Lakshadweep MP P P Mohammed Faizal challenging the Lok Sabha Secretariat’s “unlawful action” in failing to withdraw its disqualification notice, more than two months after the Kerala High Court stayed the MP’s conviction and 10-year sentence in an attempt-to-murder case.According to Faizal, a “false case” was registered against him on January 5, 2016 at Androth island police station. While the trial was ongoing, he was elected to Lok Sabha in 2019.On January 11, 2023, Faizal and three others were sentenced to 10 years’ rigorous imprisonment and fined Rs 1 lakh each by a sessions court in Kavaratti for attempting to murder Mohammed Salih, son-in-law of the late Union Minister P M Sayeed, during the 2009 Lok Sabha elections.On January 13, the Lok Sabha Secretariat notified Faizal’s disqualification under Section 8(3) of The Representation of the People Act, 1951, which provides for immediate disqualification of any “person convicted of any offence and sentenced to imprisonment for not less than two years”. This is the same section under which Rahul Gandhi was disqualified after a Surat magistrate’s court sentenced him to two years in jail for defamation.On January 18, with Faizal’s appeal against the sessions court order still pending before the Kerala High Court, the Election Commission announced a by-election to fill the Lakshadweep seat.On January 25, two days before the scheduled bypoll, the Kerala HC suspended the conviction and 10-year sentence given to Faizal. The EC subsequently announced that it had decided to “withhold” the byelection in Lakshadweep.On January 30, the Union Territory of Lakshadweep challenged the Kerala HC’s decision in the Supreme Court. On February 20, a Bench of Justices K M Joseph and B V Nagarathna refused to stay the HC order and, issuing notice on the UT’s plea, posted the matter for hearing on March 28.In a fresh petition, Faizal has challenged the Lok Sabha Secretariat’s non-withdrawal of the January 13 disqualification notification.The plea contends that the Secretariat’s inaction violates settled law under Section 8 of The Representation of People Act, 1951, under which the disqualification of an MP ceases to operate if their conviction is stayed by an appellate court under Section 389 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.In its ruling in Lok Prahari v Election Commission of India & Ors (2018), a three-judge Bench of the Supreme Court comprising then Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra, Justice A M Khanwilkar (retd), and (now CJI) Justice D Y Chandrachud clarified that a disqualification triggered by a conviction will be reversed if the conviction is stayed by a court.“Once the conviction has been stayed during the pendency of an appeal, the disqualification which operates as a consequence of the conviction cannot take or remain in effect,” the ruling had said.
A petition has been filed in the Supreme Court challenging the constitutional validity of a Section 8(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 which provides for automatic disqualification of a legislator from the Parliament or State assembly upon conviction in a criminal case, Bar and Bench reported.The plea, filed by PhD scholar and social activist Aabha Muralidharan, assumes significance as it comes at a time when Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has been disqualified from Lok Sabha after his conviction in a defamation case.Murulidharan said, “Section 8(3) is ultra vires of the Constitution since it curtails free speech of an elected Member of Parliament (MP) or Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) and restrains law makers from freely discharging their duties cast upon them by the voters of their respective constituency. ”According to the petition, Section 8(3) is in contradiction to sub-section (1) of the Section 8, Section 8A, 9, 9A, 10 and 10A and 11 of the 1951 Act. In the petition, Murulidharan said the factors such as nature, gravity, role, moral turpitude and the role of the accused, needed to be examined while considering disqualification under Chapter III of the 1951 Act. He pointed out that the intent of the legislature was to disqualify the elected members who on committing of a heinous offences are convicted by the courts and hence are liable to be disqualified.He also contended that the Lily Thomas judgment of the apex court which struck down Section 8(4), is being misused, reported Bar and Bench.
He has been on the death row for about 25 years, after being arrested for murder and sent to Pune’s Yerawada jail. During all those years behind bars, this primary school dropout taught himself Marathi and English, and obtained an MA in Sociology. But for the Supreme Court, what really mattered when setting Niranaram Chaudhary free on Monday was a date from the admissions register of a school in Rajasthan’s Bikaner.The register, from Rajkiya Adarsh Uch Madhyamik Vidyalaya in Jalabsar, showed that Chaudhary had dropped out of Class 3 on May 15, 1989.And so, the apex court ruled that he was a juvenile while being sentenced to death in 1998 with two others for the murder of five members of a family, including a pregnant woman and two children, in a “rarest of the rare” case.On Monday, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, headed by Justice K M Joseph, directed that Chaudhary “be set free forthwith from the correctional home in which he remains imprisoned, as he has suffered imprisonment for more than 28 years” after his arrest in 1994.Chaudhary’s death sentence had earlier been confirmed by the Bombay High Court and twice by the Supreme Court in 2000. However, abandoned by his family at the time of conviction, Chaudhary’s name and age were incorrectly recorded by the Pune court that awarded him the death penalty. In 2018, with the intervention of Project 39A, a criminal reforms advocacy group based in National Law University, Delhi, Chaudhary moved the Supreme Court again.He also argued that his actual name was Niranaram, which was wrongly recorded by the court as “Narayan”.In January 2019, the Supreme Court had referred the case to the Principal District and Sessions Judge in Pune to decide on Chaudhary’s status as a juvenile at the time of conviction. The inquiry led to the school admissions register in Jalabsar.“Apart from the documents of the school, there is a family card, to which we have referred to earlier. The date of issue of Family Card is 1989 and, in this card, issued by the State Government, Nirana’s age is shown to be 12 years,” the Supreme Court said in its final verdict.“Going by that certificate, his age at the time of commission of offence was 12 years and 6 months. Thus, he was a child/ juvenile on the date of commission of offence for which he has been convicted, in terms of the provisions of the 2015 Act. This shall be deemed to be the true age of Niranaram, who was tried and convicted as Narayan,” the Supreme Court said.Anup Surendranath, director of Project 39A, told The Indian Express that Chaudhary is currently in a jail in Nagpur. “Once the Pune Sessions Court orders his release, the Nagpur prison will set him free,” he said.
Even though the constitutional validity of the death penalty has been upheld by the Supreme Court, there have been persistent constitutional concerns with various aspects of the administration of the death penalty. Recent proceedings in the Supreme Court have, after nearly four decades, put the spotlight on the mode of execution in death penalty cases. It is inevitable that the Supreme Court will move towards the realisation that the concerns with the mode of execution to kill prisoners on death row raise insurmountable constitutional concerns.Death row prisoners in India are executed by hanging and the constitutional validity of hanging was last considered and upheld by the Supreme Court nearly four decades ago in September 1983 (Deena v. Union of India). The Law Commission of India in October 2003 (187th Report) recognised the constitutional impermissibility of death by hanging and recommended that India consider using lethal injections instead. However, the two decades since the 187th LCI Report have seen a series of botched up executions in the US involving lethal injections.Earlier this week, the Supreme Court was called upon to reconsider its September 1983 decision on whether India could continue using hanging for executions. While the petitioner’s claim was that we must move to lethal injection as a humane method of execution, the proceedings raise some fundamental constitutional questions for the administration of the death penalty. The most immediate question is whether there exists any mode of execution that can meet constitutional requirements. It obviously cannot be the position that merely because the death penalty is currently permissible it is then open to the state to use any method of execution. Any mode of execution that the state adopts must be capable of meeting constitutional requirements and that is a burden for the state to discharge.There is now a strong body of evidence establishing that death by hanging is a cruel and barbaric form of execution that violates human dignity. Contrary to the belief of “instantaneous death” by dislocating the cervical vertebrae, documentation of hangings in the US and the UK expose the cruel “lingering” between life and death as they undergo immense suffering due to asphyxiation before dying. Research is replete with instances of snapped ropes, necks that slipped out of nooses, partial or total decapitations, and slow death due to strangulation (instead of having the neck broken). The immediate and the painless nature of death attributed to hanging is an exception rather than the rule. Various courts including the Privy Council, Supreme Court of Uganda and the High Court of Tanzania have relied on the suffering caused by hangings to reject it as a humane method of execution.Like the Law Commission in October 2003, the petitioners in last week’s proceedings seem to be keen to replace death by hanging with lethal injections. However, there is now incontrovertible evidence from the US that executions using lethal injections come with a real and substantial risk of being botched and leading to immense suffering. In fact, a study published by the British Journal of American Legal Studies (2012) that examined 9,000 executions in the US between 1900 to 2010 found that executions using the lethal injection had a higher rate of being botched than any other method. In addition, the Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit in the US, catalogues 59 different instances of botched executions including 47 by lethal injection. While the US continues to use lethal injection as a mode of execution, the procedure has not been scientifically or medically studied on human beings. Most states rely on a three-drug combination of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride. While sodium thiopental puts the prisoner to sleep, pancuronium bromide renders the prisoner paralytic and unable to show any pain before potassium chloride causes cardiac arrest. Any suffering that the prisoner goes through as a result of the induced cardiac arrest is masked by the effect of pancuronium bromide.The petitioners in the current instance seem to have approached the court with the intention of wanting to reduce the pain of death row prisoners during executions. However, as Austin Sarat’s thought provoking work on the history of executions in the US has shown us, the conversation about “reducing pain” during executions is really about those viewing executions wanting to see less pain. Historically, societies using the death penalty have moved towards either carrying out executions in private away from the public gaze (like India does in its prisons with very few people witnessing the execution) or towards sanitising executions to make them look clean and without suffering (like the lethal injection executions in the US). However, neither of these options are really concerned with reducing pain for the prisoner and neither can they really achieve that reduction of pain. Society, as a consumer and supporter of the death penalty, does not want to see the immense suffering that is inflicted in killing the death row prisoner. As Sarat powerfully argues, it is almost like society wants to convince itself that it is killing the death row prisoner in a “civilised” way in contrast to the “savage” crime of the prisoner itself. It is now evident that all methods of execution that retentionist countries use inflict tremendous suffering on the death row prisoner.The search for the “least painful method” is ultimately an endeavour in how much cruelty we are willing to tolerate. It is about our collective willingness to inflict cruelty on an individual while wanting to appear otherwise. Instead, it would be better for us to acknowledge that issues surrounding the methods of execution present yet another constitutional crisis point in the administration of the death penalty. Just like the arbitrariness in death penalty sentencing, the discriminatory and disparate impact of the death penalty on marginalised groups, the brutal realities of life on death row, and the mental health consequences of being on death row, the constitutional infirmities with the method of execution is yet another reason to revisit the very administration of the death penalty in India. Over the four decades since the constitutional validity of the death penalty was upheld, it is striking that significant constitutional concerns have emerged over every aspect of its administration without exception.The author is Professor of Law and executive director, Project 39A at National Law University, Delhi. Research support by Namrata Sinha and Lakshmi Menon
PANAJI: The Trinamool Congress Party, on Monday, said the BJP-led Goa government must explain the delay in acting on the Japanese embassy’s advisory and attack on a Japanese tourist.Read AlsoPolice on lookout for ‘fake cops’ who robbed Japanese tourist of Rs 9.5 lakh in GoaMore than a month and a half after a Japanese tourist on holiday in Goa was robbed of nearly Rs 9.5 lakh by two or three persons posing as policemen and threatening to “arrest” him, Goa police are yet to make any arrests in the case.The TMC also demanded that the excise licence issued to a bar within the historic Aguada Fort be withdrawn immediately to preserve its heritage value.“The Goa government must be held accountable for its inaction towards the complaints from the Japanese embassy. We demand an explanation for the BJP government's lack of action and urge them to take immediate measures to address the concerns raised,” said Goa TMC media coordinator Trajano D’Mello.TMC said that chief minister Pramod Sawant’s apathy has led to the overall collapse of administration in the state. A Japanese man was assaulted and more than Rs 9 lakh was stolen from him.“The chief minister, who is also the home minister, did not utter a single word on the incident involving a Japanese tourist who was allegedly assaulted and cheated by someone impersonating as a cop. The tourism minister's silence on the matter is alarming and it raises questions about the government's commitment to upholding the rule of law,” said D’Mello.D’Mello said that Fort Aguada has historical significance and the opening of a bar is unacceptable.“To uphold the heritage value of the Aguada Fort, the government must withdraw the license for the bar without delay. Failure to do so would be a gross disregard for the historical significance of the site and a disservice to those who fought for our freedom,” said D’Mello.
MARGAO: A bag containing 40 cartridges belonging to the Indian Reserve Batallion (IRB) that proceeded to Uttar Pradesh from Goa for election duty that was found misplaced on Tuesday, was recovered by Margao police on Wednesday from the roadside at Davorlim. Police sources said that about 900 IRB personnel had departed by an UP-bound train from Margao railway station on Tuesday evening. They were ferried to the Margao railway station by buses. However, it was after the train departed from Margao railway station that the “missing” bag containing cartridges came to their notice. The Railway police were soon alerted, who in turn contacted the Margao town police who launched a search exercise on the routes taken by the buses to ferry the IRB personnel to the railway station. The bag was finally recovered from a roadside at Davorlim on Wednesday. Police surmise that the IRB personnel left the bag containing cartridges after alighting from the buses to proceed to the railway station.
Margao: In a major relief, the 40 live cartridges that were in the possession of IRB personnel headed for poll duty in Uttar Pradesh and had gone missing late on Tuesday night, were found in a gutter near Davorlim circle hardly half km away from the Margao railway station platform on Wednesday morning.Ten companies of IRBpolice personnel left by a train for Delhi from where they will travel to Uttar Pradesh. Four boxeswith each containing 10cartridgeshad gone missing. IRBpersonnel Nansekerhad made an application to the Margao police on Tuesday late night in which he had mentioned thatthe live cartridges in his possession had gone missing.He had reported that the cartridges went missing along the ring road between fire station and Davorlim circle. A search operation was conducted by police.Police teamengaged in the search operationhad visited the Konkan railway station area, checked the CCTV footagebesides parkingareaswhere buseshad dropped the IRBstaff, however, the cartridges were not found.However on Wednesday at around 10 a.m.,the four missing boxeswerefound in a gutter by LIB team of policewhich was also pressed into a search operation. It is still a mystery howthe live cartridges reached the gutter. Investigation is in progress. Police havekept the cartridges in custody after conducting legal formalities.
He has been on the death row for about 25 years, after being arrested for murder and sent to Pune’s Yerawada jail. During all those years behind bars, this primary school dropout taught himself Marathi and English, and obtained an MA in Sociology. But for the Supreme Court, what really mattered when setting Niranaram Chaudhary free on Monday was a date from the admissions register of a school in Rajasthan’s Bikaner.The register, from Rajkiya Adarsh Uch Madhyamik Vidyalaya in Jalabsar, showed that Chaudhary had dropped out of Class 3 on May 15, 1989.And so, the apex court ruled that he was a juvenile while being sentenced to death in 1998 with two others for the murder of five members of a family, including a pregnant woman and two children, in a “rarest of the rare” case.On Monday, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, headed by Justice K M Joseph, directed that Chaudhary “be set free forthwith from the correctional home in which he remains imprisoned, as he has suffered imprisonment for more than 28 years” after his arrest in 1994.Chaudhary’s death sentence had earlier been confirmed by the Bombay High Court and twice by the Supreme Court in 2000. However, abandoned by his family at the time of conviction, Chaudhary’s name and age were incorrectly recorded by the Pune court that awarded him the death penalty. In 2018, with the intervention of Project 39A, a criminal reforms advocacy group based in National Law University, Delhi, Chaudhary moved the Supreme Court again.He also argued that his actual name was Niranaram, which was wrongly recorded by the court as “Narayan”.In January 2019, the Supreme Court had referred the case to the Principal District and Sessions Judge in Pune to decide on Chaudhary’s status as a juvenile at the time of conviction. The inquiry led to the school admissions register in Jalabsar.“Apart from the documents of the school, there is a family card, to which we have referred to earlier. The date of issue of Family Card is 1989 and, in this card, issued by the State Government, Nirana’s age is shown to be 12 years,” the Supreme Court said in its final verdict.“Going by that certificate, his age at the time of commission of offence was 12 years and 6 months. Thus, he was a child/ juvenile on the date of commission of offence for which he has been convicted, in terms of the provisions of the 2015 Act. This shall be deemed to be the true age of Niranaram, who was tried and convicted as Narayan,” the Supreme Court said.Anup Surendranath, director of Project 39A, told The Indian Express that Chaudhary is currently in a jail in Nagpur. “Once the Pune Sessions Court orders his release, the Nagpur prison will set him free,” he said.
Even though the constitutional validity of the death penalty has been upheld by the Supreme Court, there have been persistent constitutional concerns with various aspects of the administration of the death penalty. Recent proceedings in the Supreme Court have, after nearly four decades, put the spotlight on the mode of execution in death penalty cases. It is inevitable that the Supreme Court will move towards the realisation that the concerns with the mode of execution to kill prisoners on death row raise insurmountable constitutional concerns.Death row prisoners in India are executed by hanging and the constitutional validity of hanging was last considered and upheld by the Supreme Court nearly four decades ago in September 1983 (Deena v. Union of India). The Law Commission of India in October 2003 (187th Report) recognised the constitutional impermissibility of death by hanging and recommended that India consider using lethal injections instead. However, the two decades since the 187th LCI Report have seen a series of botched up executions in the US involving lethal injections.Earlier this week, the Supreme Court was called upon to reconsider its September 1983 decision on whether India could continue using hanging for executions. While the petitioner’s claim was that we must move to lethal injection as a humane method of execution, the proceedings raise some fundamental constitutional questions for the administration of the death penalty. The most immediate question is whether there exists any mode of execution that can meet constitutional requirements. It obviously cannot be the position that merely because the death penalty is currently permissible it is then open to the state to use any method of execution. Any mode of execution that the state adopts must be capable of meeting constitutional requirements and that is a burden for the state to discharge.There is now a strong body of evidence establishing that death by hanging is a cruel and barbaric form of execution that violates human dignity. Contrary to the belief of “instantaneous death” by dislocating the cervical vertebrae, documentation of hangings in the US and the UK expose the cruel “lingering” between life and death as they undergo immense suffering due to asphyxiation before dying. Research is replete with instances of snapped ropes, necks that slipped out of nooses, partial or total decapitations, and slow death due to strangulation (instead of having the neck broken). The immediate and the painless nature of death attributed to hanging is an exception rather than the rule. Various courts including the Privy Council, Supreme Court of Uganda and the High Court of Tanzania have relied on the suffering caused by hangings to reject it as a humane method of execution.Like the Law Commission in October 2003, the petitioners in last week’s proceedings seem to be keen to replace death by hanging with lethal injections. However, there is now incontrovertible evidence from the US that executions using lethal injections come with a real and substantial risk of being botched and leading to immense suffering. In fact, a study published by the British Journal of American Legal Studies (2012) that examined 9,000 executions in the US between 1900 to 2010 found that executions using the lethal injection had a higher rate of being botched than any other method. In addition, the Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit in the US, catalogues 59 different instances of botched executions including 47 by lethal injection. While the US continues to use lethal injection as a mode of execution, the procedure has not been scientifically or medically studied on human beings. Most states rely on a three-drug combination of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride. While sodium thiopental puts the prisoner to sleep, pancuronium bromide renders the prisoner paralytic and unable to show any pain before potassium chloride causes cardiac arrest. Any suffering that the prisoner goes through as a result of the induced cardiac arrest is masked by the effect of pancuronium bromide.The petitioners in the current instance seem to have approached the court with the intention of wanting to reduce the pain of death row prisoners during executions. However, as Austin Sarat’s thought provoking work on the history of executions in the US has shown us, the conversation about “reducing pain” during executions is really about those viewing executions wanting to see less pain. Historically, societies using the death penalty have moved towards either carrying out executions in private away from the public gaze (like India does in its prisons with very few people witnessing the execution) or towards sanitising executions to make them look clean and without suffering (like the lethal injection executions in the US). However, neither of these options are really concerned with reducing pain for the prisoner and neither can they really achieve that reduction of pain. Society, as a consumer and supporter of the death penalty, does not want to see the immense suffering that is inflicted in killing the death row prisoner. As Sarat powerfully argues, it is almost like society wants to convince itself that it is killing the death row prisoner in a “civilised” way in contrast to the “savage” crime of the prisoner itself. It is now evident that all methods of execution that retentionist countries use inflict tremendous suffering on the death row prisoner.The search for the “least painful method” is ultimately an endeavour in how much cruelty we are willing to tolerate. It is about our collective willingness to inflict cruelty on an individual while wanting to appear otherwise. Instead, it would be better for us to acknowledge that issues surrounding the methods of execution present yet another constitutional crisis point in the administration of the death penalty. Just like the arbitrariness in death penalty sentencing, the discriminatory and disparate impact of the death penalty on marginalised groups, the brutal realities of life on death row, and the mental health consequences of being on death row, the constitutional infirmities with the method of execution is yet another reason to revisit the very administration of the death penalty in India. Over the four decades since the constitutional validity of the death penalty was upheld, it is striking that significant constitutional concerns have emerged over every aspect of its administration without exception.The author is Professor of Law and executive director, Project 39A at National Law University, Delhi. Research support by Namrata Sinha and Lakshmi Menon
Amid the ongoing surge in Covid cases across the country, India logged 1,590 fresh cases on Friday, the highest in 146 days. With this, India’s tally of active Covid cases has gone up to 8,601, while the total caseload has climbed to 4,47,02,257.According to the Union Health Ministry bulletin, six new deaths were recorded on Friday: three from Maharashtra and one each from Karnataka, Uttarakhand and Rajasthan. India’s Covid death toll has now gone up to 5,30,824.The daily positivity was recorded at 1.33 per cent while the weekly positivity was pegged at 1.23 per cent.The active cases account for 0.02 per cent of the total caseload, while the national Covid-19 recovery rate was recorded at 98.79 per cent, the ministry said.The number of people who have recovered from the coronavirus infection has gone up to 4,41,62,832, while the case fatality rate was recorded at 1.19 per cent.According to the ministry’s website, 220.65 crore doses of anti-Covid vaccines have so far been administered to beneficiaries across the country.(With PTI inputs)
India on Wednesday logged 1,300 new Covid-19 cases — highest in 140 days —-taking the country’s active caseload to 7,605, according to the Union Health Ministry data. With this, the cumulative number of infections rose to 4,46,99, 418. Three persons succumbed to the virus, pushing the country’s toll to 5,30,816. The case fatality rate is 1.19 per cent.The daily positivity rate was pegged at 1.46 per cent, while the weekly positivity was recorded at 1.08 per cent. As many as 4,41,60,99 individuals have recovered from the illness, clocking a national recovery rate of 98.79 per cent.India has so far administered a total of 220.65 crore doses of Covid vaccine as per the ministry’s website. A total of 92.06 crore tests have been conducted including 89,078 in the last 24 hours.With a significant rise in the number of daily cases, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has directed officials to enhance whole genome sequencing of the Covid-19 virus to track newer variants and carry out effective monitoring of influenza-like illnesses and severe acute respiratory infections. He has also urged people to follow respiratory hygiene and Covid-19 appropriate behaviour. In instructions came at a high-level meeting to review the country’s Covid-19 and influenza situation, where the PM was informed that availability and prices of 20 main Covid drugs, 12 other drugs, 8 buffer drugs and 1 influenza drug are being monitored.Maharashtra on Wednesday recorded 334 fresh Covid-19 cases, 54 more than a day before, and one fatality, the health department said in a bulletin. In Mumbai, 71 out of 1290 people who took the test were found to be positive. Hence, the test positivity rate stood at 5.5 per cent. There are 361 active cases in Mumbai. While 26 of the patients are in hospital, 10 among them are on oxygen support.With the new cases, the state’s Covid-19 tally rose to 81,40,479 and the death toll to 1,48,430.
With 699 new cases reported on Wednesday morning, India witnessed a slight dip in fresh cases, according to the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare’s latest data. The country had logged 918 new cases on Monday.According to the data updated at 8 am, two deaths recorded in Kerala and Odisha increased the mortality toll to 5,30,808.The daily positivity rate was pegged at 0.71 per cent while the weekly positivity was 0.91 per cent. The total Covid case tally was recorded at 4.46 crore (4,46,96,984).According to the ministry, the number of active cases is now 0.01 per cent of all infections, and the national Covid-19 recovery rate is 98.80 per cent.So far, a total of 92.04 crore tests have been conducted with 97,866 being undertaken in the last 24 hours.A total of 4,41,59,617 individuals have recovered from the illness, while the case fatality rate has been reported at 1.19 per cent.On the nation as a whole, 220.65 crore doses of Covid vaccine have been administered so far as per the ministry’s website.With inputs from PTI
India saw a single-day rise of 918 fresh coronavirus cases, while the active cases rose to 6,350, according to the Union health ministry data updated on Monday.The country’s COVID-19 death toll has increased to 5,30,806, with four latest fatalities — two reported by Rajasthan, one by Karnataka and one death reconciled by Kerala.According to the data updated at 8 am, the daily positivity was recorded at 2.08 per cent while the weekly positivity was pegged at 0.86 per cent.The infection tally stands at 4.46 crore (4,46,96,338).The active cases now comprise 0.01 per cent of the total cases, while the national COVID-19 recovery rate has been recorded at 98.8 per cent, according to the health ministry website.A total of 92.03 crore tests for detection of Covid have been conducted so far with 44,225 tests conducted in the last 24 hours.The total number of people who have recuperated from the disease surged to 4,41,59,182, while the case fatality rate was recorded at 1.19 per cent.According to the ministry, 220.65 crore doses of Covid vaccine have been administered in the country so far under the nationwide vaccination drive.
