Reclaiming Their Place in the City: Narratives of Street Food Vendors of Bengaluru During the COVID Crisis

Street vending is considered a lucrative livelihood especially among migrants coming to Indian cities. The pandemic-induced lockdowns in India brought out the precarity of these street-based livelihoods. This paper focuses on street food vendors of Bengaluru. Through narratives from in-depth interviews conducted across the city, it tries to capture the struggles of street vendors as they navigate the pandemic. With the streets being completely shut down with the lockdowns, these vendors lost their means of livelihood. Many of them who were living in the city for over a generation were forced to move back to their native villages. Those who managed to stay back had sunk into debt. Even when the lockdown was eased and streets became accessible, the vendors' struggles continued-to get back their customer base and to reclaim their physical space on the street which, during the prolonged lockdown, was appropriated for other purposes. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023.

Is there impact of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic on steroidogenesis and fertility?

In December of 2019, several cases of unknown atypical respiratory diseases emerged in Wuhan, Hubei Province in China. After preliminary research, it was stated that the disease is transmittable between humans and was named COVID-19. Over the course of next months, it spread all over the world by air and sea transport and caused a global pandemic which affects life of everyone now-a-days. A large number of countries, have since been forced to take precautions such as curfews, lockdowns, wearing facemasks etc. Even with vaccines being produced in mass numbers, lack of targeted therapy continues to be a major problem. According to studies so far it seems that elderly people are more vulnerable to severe symptoms while children tend to by asymptomatic or have milder form the disease. In our review, we focused on gathering data about the virus itself, its characteristics, paths of transmission, and its effect on hormone production and secretion. In such, there is insufficient information in the literature worldwide, especially the ones that focus on the effect of COVID-19 on individual organs systems within the human body. Hence, the present evidence-based study focused on the possible effects of COVID-19 on adrenal gland and gonads i.e. on the process of steroidogenesis and fertility.

Spatiotemporal Analysis of COVID-19 Pandemic and Predictive Models based on Artificial Intelligence for different States of India

Geographical and spatial diversities play important roles in dynamics of spread of COVID-19 virus. These phenomena are not properly addressed in the literature yet. In this paper, COVID data of various states of India are collected. The data had been processed and analysed using an open-source software. A framework based on Susceptible, Infectious, Hospitalised, Recovered and Deaths model to determine the effects of geographical diversities of Indian states on COVID-19 pandemic has been developed. The confirmed, cured and death cases due to the virus have been analysed for different state. Reasons behind the differences in number of cases in different states are identified. An improved Long-Short-Term-Memory algorithm has been developed to forecast the virus spread and recovery of patients for the next one month. Numerical results along with discussions are given. © 2021, The Institution of Engineers (India).