My dear friends, please, I hope to demand your absolute attention to this matter:
In 2018, my junior from St. John’s Medical College, Bengaluru, Dr. Randall Sequeira (middle in the pic), trekked up a steep, bauxite-rich plateau in Odisha to hold a monsoon health camp in the indigenous Kutiya Kondh village of Kutrumali.
In a piece he wrote then titled "Kutrumali’s Demons," Randall described sleeping under a dripping school roof in freezing fog, borrowing utensils from a local health worker to cook khichdi, and waking up at 6 AM to a line of tribal mothers. He wrote with heartbreak about treating malnourished toddlers with protruding bellies and visible ribs, listening to stories of stillbirths and chronic fevers, while noticing the shiny new solar lights installed by a mining conglomerate eyeing the aluminium ore beneath the villagers' feet.
Comparing his small medical team to hobbits sheltering in the night, Randall worried about the outside forces coming for that fragile village.
Randall stayed with the tribal/ adivasi community to serve them. After St. John’s and an MD in Internal Medicine from SMS Jaipur, he gave up every comfort of urban medicine to live in Kalahandi, recognizing that clinical prescriptions are meaningless when indigenous communities are stripped of their forests, water, and dignity.
On the night of October 16, Odisha police picked up Dr. Randall Sequeira and Dalit activist Laxman Naik at 11 PM from his home in Bhawanipatna. A gentle physician who has spent years trekking up hills to save tribal children is now locked in Rayagada sub-jail under frivolous but draconian charges (attempt to murder, dacoity), simply for standing with Adivasis peaceful protesting the mining of their sacred hills in Sijimali and Kutrumali.
https://t.co/PsxZZCngyV
Odisha Govt. said it will cut down forests to connect tribal villages. But it was a way to bypass green laws and fast track London based Vedanta’s, and Adani's mining plans. Local organisations estimate that around 45 villages depend on these hills and would be affected.
https://t.co/0pATUIYADm
The state has answered with repression rather than dialogue. In the last three years, at least 43 police cases have been filed and over a hundred Adivasis and Dalits, both women and men, have been incarcerated in Odisha jails. For example, from In March and april 2026, 8, 2026, to April 8, 2026, within one month, 24 people were sent to jail, 217 were made accused, and the number of “others” total 1,140. An activist who was not named in the original FIRs, but has since been implicated in about 12 cases, so that bail in one case is followed by arrest in another. This pattern of capture and releases have been used to crush rational dissent.
Dr. Randall understood that being a good doctor means understanding that prescriptions cannot compensate for the denial of land rights, that surgery cannot undo displacement and that no medical can substitute for the basic infrastructure a government has failed to provide.
https://t.co/fOC9AU3jaR
To my fellow medical fraternity, and every citizen with a conscience: a kind physician who embodies the highest ethics of our profession is being criminalized to clear the way for bauxite mining. Please do not let his voice be buried in a sub-jail.
Amplify this, demand due process, and demand the immediate release. Please sign in this form to show solidarity: https://t.co/cgLIoEXExG
If anyone can help out in this situation please reach out to Medico Friend Circle - https://t.co/OT2D2E3DuW
@ShivAroor What is very transparent is, we know the names of everyone who saved the hijak, the people , their profession..everything!!! But, absolutely no clue or name of the copilot! This makes me wonder (rather sure) that we are run by some higher authorities with selective information!
For decades, Kaziranga lost rhinos to men who knew the ground better than the rangers chasing them. Then someone changed the odds. In 2022, for the first time in 45 years, it went a full year without losing one. Read on.
1/12
KGP12, an Indian-born female cheetah and daughter of South African-origin Gamini, gave birth to four cubs at Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh
(Video source: Bhupender Yadav/X)
After MEA asked Odisha to send 1,500 packets of Koraput Coffee for BRICS summit, TDCCOL delivered the entire consignment to Delhi by air within just 36 hours.
The 100% Arabica Tiger Bright coffee, grown in Koraput’s forested hills, is being served to domestic and international media delegates at the summit.
A proud moment for Odisha!
For years, doctors noticed something strange about vaccines in India.
Vaccines that worked well in Europe and America worked less well in Indian children. Same vaccine, same dose, weaker protection.
Most people accepted it. One scientist in Vellore spent 30 years asking why.
Her name is Gagandeep Kang.
She trained as a doctor at Christian Medical College in Vellore, in Tamil Nadu, and then did something unusual for a physician. She went into the laboratory and stayed there.
Her subject was the gut.
Specifically, the guts of children in poor households. She studied what repeated diarrhoeal infection does to a child's intestine over the first years of life.
What she found matters enormously. Those repeated infections do not just make a child ill. They damage the lining of the gut, stunt growth, and interfere with how the body responds to oral vaccines.
That is why a vaccine developed in a clean environment abroad underperforms in a child who has had 10 infections before the age of 2. The problem was never the vaccine. It was what the child's gut had already been through.
Then she went further than diagnosis.
Rotavirus is the leading cause of severe diarrhoea in small children and it kills a very large number of them. India had access to imported rotavirus vaccines, but they were expensive and often out of reach for the families who needed them most.
Kang led the clinical trials for Rotavac, India's first indigenous rotavirus vaccine, made by an Indian company. She was also central to the work behind a second one, Rotasiil.
Both are now approved by the World Health Organisation. Rotavac went into India's national immunisation programme, which means it reaches children whose parents pay nothing for it.
In 2019 she became the first Indian woman scientist working in India to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the scientific body founded in London in 1660. It took 359 years.
She has served on the World Health Organisation's global advisory committee on vaccine safety, and she now leads global health work at one of the largest health foundations in the world.
She built her career on a question most people did not think was worth asking.
Not how do we get vaccines to poor children. But why do they not work as well when they get there.
@RailMinIndia@AshwiniVaishnaw Shameful state of affairs. Trains across Odisha are running 5-6 HOURS late, and ordinary passengers are being forced to bear consequences of this gross mismanagement.
Modi govt destroyed the ISI-backed terror group Shahzad Bhatti Network ahead of Independence Day and thwarted its plans for subversive attacks by arresting more than 200 operatives.
Indian security forces ripped apart the network by launching coordinated operations across different locations in 14 states upholding a brilliant example of India's zero-tolerance towards terrorism.
Substantial recoveries, including IEDs, grenades bearing Pakistan Ordnance Factory markings, pistols, live cartridges, and CCTV cameras used for espionage, were made from the ISI-funded group. The network was involved in several terrorist activities.
This Independence Day 🇮🇳, I asked, "What will the next century of young Indians look like?"
$0.01 Drone Deliveries. UAVs that never land. Groceries in under 10 minutes.
Meet The 22nd Century Indian. A Documentary on a New India.
From carrying weapons in Bastar's dense forests to walking confidently on a fashion runway - these former women Naxalites showcased a powerful story of surrender, reintegration and transformation, at a fashion show in Chhattigarh's Raipur
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#Chhattisgarh#Naxalism#Bastar