The present scholarly attention on fake news is heavily western centric with limited comparative perspectives. Many of these academic narratives are primarily focused on finding technological solutions to the issue by making the networks and the algorithms more responsible. However, just addressing the technological aspect may not be a viable long-term solution to fake news, especially in media markets like India.  With several instances of Indian mainstream journalists mistaking fake news for real, it can be seen that the issue is not just proliferation, but also how it is perceived by its audience, including journalists. Any attempts to develop a pedagogic approach to tackle an issue like fake news should be situated in temporal reflexivity, which takes account of the changing contexts of the post-truth reality, rather than focusing too much on a set of the technological advancements making such phenomena like fake news possible. Attempts which seek technologically militant solutions to tackle fake news, in terms of developing algorithms or apps to do it, often lack this. This argument is not meant to downplay the immediate importance of such solutions in fighting the proliferation of fake news. However, attempts with an aggressive focus on imparting training to develop or handle such technological tools may not suffice to facilitate existing journalism education framework to adapt to post-truth realities. Technological solutions pop up and turn invalid over a short span of time unless they sustain with fast-paced updates.

Air pollution is looked upon as an emerging concern in India, as it is becoming a serious health threat for people living in densely populated towns and cities, with children and elderly being most at risk. India contains 11 out of the 20 most polluted cities in the World. Air pollution is reported every year on national dailies with stories varying from stubble burning to closing of educational institutions, but does the reportage cover crucial aspects and factors that lead to soaring air pollution in Indian cities? Despite its implications for society at large, climate change is difficult to perceive and understand for most lay audiences. As a complex and unobtrusive issue, people often encounter it via news media. The news media attention to climate change plays an important role in influencing public opinion by helping people to better understand the complexities of the issue to make their demand for action more vocal. Primafacie, air quality/air pollution and climate change are observed as two independent issues but interwoven with each other on regional and global level due to non-linear and bi-directional interactions between the two. The on-going global climate change debate is making the understanding of the problem of air quality difficult to deal with, whereas the poor air quality is enhancing the magnitude and frequency of climate change implications. With this understanding, studies are needed to look into the levels of issue attention towards climate change with an emphasis on air quality news coverage in the national editions of newspapers. Apparent movement of the sun between the tropics caused by an annual oscillation in the parameters of the sun – the earth geometry results in different seasons over a hemisphere. As extreme weather events and severely poor air-quality episodes are generally specific to a particular season. Studies need to be undertaken on stories centred on extreme weather events (heat waves, floods etc.) and air-quality deterioration episodes published in different national editions of Indian dailies. It is high time for Indian climate researchers to explore the prevalence of frames, themes, topics and dimensions (scientific, ecological and societal) in the news-media coverage of the issue and how the stories of climate change with reference to air quality coverage, perceives and reports the discussion of science and scientists in news media.

The devastating impact of Covid-19 has compelled the healthcare leaders around the world to revisit the current healthcare systems in terms of response to the crisis in the new post-pandemic reality. It requires the redesign of healthcare systems by introducing new care models to address primary, secondary and acute care. Patients are demanding continuous access to healthcare services in a safe and convenient way and also demand a more agile, inter-professional delivery of care with empowered frontline staff leveraging technology. This further need a new framework to enable healthcare organizations to orchestrate the myriad interconnected changes required to sustain virtual care. The framework needs clinical and corporate strategies to ensure full connectivity between the core clinical workflows, supporting operations and technology platforms. Here, connected health, a widely used term in public health studies,  have the capability of providing cost-effective solutions at a time when the demands on healthcare services continue to increase due to the world’s growing and ageing population, the rising costs of advanced medical treatments, and severely constrained healthcare budgets. Although the challenge is that the connected health solutions are technology-driven processes, hence, needs skill and willingness to engage with technology. This becomes crucial at a time, when the scale and pace of changes are high. Here the concerns are education and training. Education, training and widespread access to broadband technology can not only improve accessibility to connected health devices but can also be crucial in addressing gaps in our existing healthcare system. There is no doubt, that the technology has the power to improve access to healthcare services for people with mobility problems. Mobile technology is empowering patients and care givers by giving them more control over their health and making them less dependent on healthcare professionals for health information. With the help of digital technologies, they can not only search information online, but can also share their experiences and identify diagnostic and treatment options. An integrated healthcare system can exploit these technological opportunities further. Connecting patients to information, advice, and support can move the patient as a passive recipient of care to one where they are actively engaged in their own care. Despite, that the connected health covers a large number of patient care points, the two central points witnessed across the globe are – patient access to care and patient empowerment. The connected health tools in recent times have not only improved patient care access and self-efficacy, but also delivered on central tenets of patient engagement. Connected health allows patients to connect with their medical providers more quickly and conveniently than ever before. The tele-health facilities allows patients to directly speak to their providers using video-conferences and at the same time it can connect the providers with one another to share consults, expertise, and knowledge during patient care. The benefits of connected health go beyond the logistic factors also – such as, it improves the way patients interact with and perceive their healthcare. When patients manage their own health using connected health tools, patients’ empowerment and self-efficacy increase. It further put patients’ in-charge of their own care. A fitness wearable helps a patient set her own fitness goals and track her progress towards those goals. A remote patient monitoring system alerts a diabetic patient when his sugars are too high, allowing the patient to make his own adjustments. It is an appropriate time to unlock the immense potential of connected health to explore a new phase of patient centricity, where the patients are becoming more and more responsible for their own healthcare thus creating enormous opportunities for engagement.    

Schools are the best place to promote health programmes both at individual and collective level. The comprehensive and integrated environment of a school provides a good setting to encourage health promotion campaigns. The practice of health promotion in schools has been emphasized by the World Health Organization (WHO) several times in its health conventions. Studies have been undertaken by various health agencies to find out the synergy between health promotion and academic institutions and schools were identified as a preferable place to address both individual’s attitudes and behaviours. There are evidence about how a comprehensive and integrated health promotion campaign designed for schools can improve children’s health but what a health campaign promoting de-worming should constituent and how and in what ways it should be implemented in a school involving a wide range of actors is a less talked area. Engaging schools in promoting de-worming needs to look health promotion as a multi-component, context-sensitive and behaviour-change oriented intervention and shall aim to identify the socio-cultural conditions and actions leading to the implementation of de-worming programme in schools. Policy dialogues and response strategies are required to look into how and in what ways health promotion programs are implemented in Schools. What different socio-cultural factors are associated with the implementation of health promotion programmes in schools? How to conceptualize and design health interventions to promote vaccinations and immunization at schools while effectively addressing the complexities in a school setting.  

Nutrition has always been a policy priority in health studies. In recent times, many middle- and low-income countries have strengthened their nutrition policies and programs with measurable success. Recent studies provided evidence to explore how the nutrition progress in India struggled during the Covid-19 crisis and why it is an appropriate time to approach the health policy research to mitigate the adverse nutrition impacts through multi-sectoral actions to protect the vulnerable mothers and children. The Covid-19 pandemic has damaged the nutritional status of vulnerable groups through multiple mechanisms resulting in a sharp decline in dietary quality in India stemming from income losses due to government-mandated lockdowns and mobility restrictions. The suspension of food transfer schemes such as mid-day meal programs and the breakdown of food markets due to demand shock and supply constraints had seriously affected the nutrition outreach programs and schemes. The high rates of under-nutrition in the form of deficiencies in vitamins and minerals had severely affected the long-term health of women and children progressing towards increased risks of underweight, weakness and diet-related non-communicable diseases. The pandemic had raised the challenges for women and child nutrition and compels the public healthcare systems to revisit the diets, services and practices that mothers and children require to support adequate nutrition. Studies are required to undertake a rapid assessment to identify key priorities for health policy research in India within the context of maternal and child nutrition challenges.  Based on evidence from the pandemic crisis, it is a time to outline the health policy research shift require to protect the vulnerable, especially women and children, from the effects of nutritional crisis. There is a dire need of research information to shape policies by placing issues on policy agenda. It is time to explore research informed policy development and its importance in taking right decisions in terms of surveillance of vulnerable population (through surveys) and co-ordination of various stakeholders across sectors including health, agriculture, education, water and sanitation, social protection and commerce and trade. Since, malnutrition is a multidimensional problem, a clear understanding of policy shift in approaches is important to deal with the contextual issues of nutrition and how concerns are raising in a post-Covid world to identify and implement effective and affordable health interventions in Indian sub-continent. 

Covid-pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on health systems across countries. Both public and private healthcare sectors had struggled and are still struggling to respond to the impact of the pandemic. The struggle is to adopt diverse healthcare responses in terms of cutting-edge technological tools and innovations in the areas of public health, medicine and wellness to take prompt decisions to address the after-effect of the pandemic. In such scenario, digital health has emerged as a solution for healthcare challenges. It encompasses areas like wearable technology, telehealth and telemedicine, mobile health, health information technology, and personalised medicine. However, revisiting and reopening the realm of ‘digital health’ in the policy and public discourse is an emerging concern. As the healthcare world becomes increasingly digitized, care and service providers rely more on data to drive their decision-making. This has made data governance in healthcare a growing interest as health information becomes an essential tool for diagnosis, treatment planning and after-care. However, it is now the responsibility of healthcare organisations to guarantee that patient data is handled and managed appropriately in order to uphold patient privacy and data governance's confidentiality, as the latter can provide users a great deal of power.

In comparison to big newspapers with an established sophisticated newsroom and trained journalists, the coverage of climate stories is noticeable in state editions of language newspapers, even though the profile of these stories has never been higher. In a hill state like Himachal Pradesh, the public understanding of the subject is low and journalists are no exception as they come from the same community with limited exposure to the issue. The reflection of this can be seen in the stories published in the state editions of Hindi newspapers. The opinions and views presented in these stories are mostly outdated, driven by spin or simply wrong. In state editions of Hindi language newspapers published from Himachal Pradesh, stories about climatic hazards/disasters reflected in terms of extreme temperature and extreme precipitation events are often written without a brief introduction that covers what, why and how the type of questions about a particular issue like chill or heat waves, cloud burst and flash-floods etc. Moreover, issues such as implications of climate change viz. loss of biodiversity, shift in vegetation, migration of species, loss of food security, and increase of insects/vector-borne diseases etc. hardly get any space. Many times, disastrous events like earthquakes or flash floods are covered just like a simple science/environment story. Most of the journalists working in these state editions of Hindi newspapers are graduates of arts or social sciences and are unwilling or unable to have a better understanding of science. Since, climate change nowadays encompasses the economy, health, security and more, the subject is extremely complex and easy to get wrong. The foremost challenge in covering climate change stories is the requirement for a strong grasp of the fundamentals of the climate debate. This grasp is often lacking and this has contributed to stories out of facts and false balance. The coverage of a recent event – a flash flood-like situation in Dharamshala covered by the state editions of Hindi newspapers was woefully inadequate (Nisbet, 2010). Nearly all the state editions termed the situation as a cloud-burst quoting state sources instead of consulting with qualified scientists which brought chaos and created panic among the state community. The story was quickly picked up by many national TV channels and newspapers, and the visuals of the incident quickly circulated on social media. This is one of the many examples of journalistic balance gone wrong.

South Africa has seen a work-from-home movement post-COVID, as many companies have implemented remote work policies to comply with social distancing guidelines and to maintain business continuity during the pandemic. However, the extent of this movement and its long-term sustainability is still uncertain, as it depends on various factors such as the nature of work, infrastructure, and employee preferences. What is your thoughts on this?