Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman says she is open to deficit monetisation, won't hazard a guess on where growth is headed.

The ICMR has specified that “no emergency procedure (including deliveries) should be delayed for lack of test.” If a patient fits the testing criteria, his/ her test can be done simultaneously with the emergency procedure.

Speaking at The Indian Express e-Adda event Monday, Nitin Gadkari said that while it will be difficult to get the migrant workers, who have left, to return to manufacturing hubs such as Gurugram and Pune in the short-term, the need to create “confidence in their minds” to return was essential.

The West Bengal government has started evacuating people from coastal areas to cyclone centres. “Instructions have been given to officials in this regard,” Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said.

Of the 835 samples taken from migrant workers who returned from Delhi, as many as 218 were Covid positive. This works out to a positivity rate of over 26%, while the rate in the national capital is about 7%.

Of the 26 people who were killed on the highway in Uttar Pradesh’s Auraiya early on Saturday, 11 were migrant labourers headed back to their village. Their bodies reached their homes on Monday evening — travelling the 800 km in some 30 hours.

“Had it not been for the doctors at the hospital, who gave me pre-emptive treatment, and the nurses, who gave me motherly care and infused me with hope, I don’t think I would have survived...,” Awhad told The Indian Express on Monday.

This is the first time India has taken a position in an international forum on the origin of the virus and the need for an independent evaluation of WHO’s response to the crisis. So far, New Delhi had maintained that it is engaged in the fight against Covid-19, and will revisit the issue after the crisis is over.

Speaking for Ahmedabad Civil Hospital where Makwana was admitted, Officer on Special Duty Dr M M Prabhakar told The Indian Express it was the job of the AMC to keep the family informed. “We are a multi-speciality treating hospital and there are corporation people to coordinate this.”

Inside, the post-mortem examiners were still at work. A farm hand from Palamu in Jharkhand, Sudama said he had paid Rs 19,000 to a car driver who had brought him and his brother-in-law Guddu Yadav to Auraiya.

This was in contrast to the instructions Goyal issued in a meeting on May 2, during which he asked officials to prioritise freight trains, run Shramik Specials only until May 17 and strictly at the request of state governments, and ensure that states paid for the migrants’ travel.

For MGNREGS, the government announced an additional allocation of Rs 40,000 crore. In the 2020-21 Budget estimate, the government had reduced the allocation under the scheme to Rs 61,500 crore, compared to the revised estimate of Rs 71,002 crore in 2019-20.

Of the destination stations, most fall in states like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal. As many as 295 are in Green Zones, 223 are in hotspots while 482 are in Orange zones.

In her fifth and final tranche of the AtmaNirbhar package announced on Sunday, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman allocated a chunk of the Centre’s fiscal relief — Rs 40,000 crore or 0.2 per cent of GDP — as additional allocation to MGNREGA over and above the Budget Estimate of Rs 61,500 crore.

With 4,987 new cases (the highest single-day jump so far), including 120 deaths, in the last 24 hours, the total count is now 90,927 cases, of which 2,872 people died and 34,108 recovered.

Under the new guidelines, “the zones can be a district, or a municipal corporation/ municipality or even smaller administrative units such as sub-divisions, etc, as decided by states and UTs,” an MHA statement said.

Dharmendra Pradhan, Union Minister of Petroleum & Natural Gas and Steel, speaks to The Indian Express on the migrant labour crisis, changes in labour laws and the Covid-19 impact on steel and oil sectors. Excerpts

Circle Officer (City) Surendranath Yadav said 32 people were still in hospital, while four had been discharged and sent to a quarantine facility in the district after treatment.

The court was hearing a habeas corpus plea moved by advocate A P Suryaprakasam seeking a direction to the police of Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra to locate and produce over 400 Tamil workers alleged to be under illegal detention in Maharashtra.

Asked why he did not wait for a train from Rajasthan to go home, Umesh says, “I waited all this while, but people who worked at the factory were gradually leaving and I felt like I was betraying my family by staying at the factory. How long could I have waited?”

The government announced a hike in FDI limit for automatic approval to 74 per cent from 49 per cent in defence production. At present, FDI is allowed under the automatic route for up to 49 per cent and above 49 per cent through the government route.

According to sources in Uttar Pradesh government, about 10 lakh additional migrant workers are expected to return in the coming weeks. They said Maharashtra had 5.6 lakh workers from UP, Delhi had 5.1 lakh, Gujarat 3 lakh, Haryana 1.3 lakhs, and Punjab about 77,000.

The deaths of migrants walking, cycling, or travelling packed together in the back of trucks hundreds of kilometres to their villages with their children and belongings, have thrown into sharp relief the extent of both their desperation and the government’s misreading of the impact of an extended lockdown.

Wedged between the two journeys is the despair that has forced thousands of migrants away from railway stations and onto highways in a desperate and dangerous bid to reach their homes, driven by the lack of jobs and rapid urban spread of the coronavirus.