PM Modi's Council Of Ministers To Meet Tomorrow, Agenda Covid

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's council of ministers will meet tomorrow morning to discuss the Coronavirus crisis in the country, sources have told NDTV. This will be the first council meeting since the second wave of the virus overtook the country, spreading death and terror in its wake.

The Centre has been tasked with devising a "national plan" to control the spread by the Supreme Court. With hospitals in Delhi gasping for breath for over three days, the top court had taken suo motu cognisance of the issue and tagged the skyrocketing Covid cases a "national emergency".
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The Centre has told the court that it is taking urgent, concrete and comprehensive steps to mitigate the problems and loss of life. The sufferings and miseries of citizens during the second surge of Covid "cannot be taken lightly", the government has said.

In a 201-page affidavit, the Centre has also said PM Modi and Union minister Amit Shah are monitoring oxygen supply across the country on a war footing.

Courts in six states have been looking into matters associated with the second wave of the virus.

With Delhi unable to breathe due to the persistent oxygen shortage, the Centre has also faced the wrath of the High Court, which asked it to "beg, borrow, steal" to keep up the supplies.

Meanwhile, posts tagged #ResignModi -- critical of the government's handling of the crisis -- had flooded social media as people desperately went online to search for beds, medicine and oxygen supplies.

The posts were blocked temporarily. After unblocking them, Facebook said it barred the hashtag by mistake.

"We temporarily blocked this hashtag by mistake, not because the Indian government asked us to, and have since restored it," a spokesperson of the social networking site said.

The government said it has made no request to social media sites to block critics and slammed a Wall Street Journal report that alleged that the block was an attempt to curb public dissent. The report, the government said, was "misleading on facts and mischievous in intent".