Minister asks foreign tourists to shun skirts, stirs controversy

Bidar, Apr 2: Karnataka Health Minister B Sriramulu on Thursday confirmed that 11 people out of 27 in Bidar, who had participated in Tablighi Jamaat at Delhi's Nizamuddin Markat have been tested positive for COVID-19.

Speaking to news agency, Karnataka Health Minister said, "We are monitoring 362 people who had attended Nizamuddin Markaz in Delhi. Out of 27 people from Bidar who had attended, 11 have tested positive for COVID-19, while results of 16 others are awaited. Total positive cases in the state are 121."
Meanwhile, Tablighi Jamaat's Maulana Saad has stated that he will fully support the government in its fight against the coronavirus.

This comes soon after an FIR was registered against him in connection with the religious gathering organised in Markaz Nizamuddin area of the national capital.

A huge religious gathering was held at the Markaz building in Nizamuddin between March 13-15, the event came into the spotlight after multiple coronavirus cases were confirmed amongst those who attended the event held in mid-March.

An FIR has been registered against Tablighi Jamaat head Maulana Saad and others under the Epidemic Disease Act 1897 in Delhi.
A total of 2,361 people were brought out from the Markaz in a joint operation by authorities which lasted for over 36 hours, following which the South Delhi Municipal Corporation had carried out a sanitisation of the premises and nearby area.

Bengaluru, Jun 8: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Monday fielded Eranna Kadadi and Ashok Gasti as it's candidates for the June 19 Rajya Sabha elections from Karnataka, ignoring the recommendations of the state BJP unit.

The state unit had recommended the names of Prabhakar Kore, Ramesh Katti and Prakash Shetty.

The names of the two candidates were announced in a party statement in Delhi.

The election is scheduled on June 19 to fill four Rajya Sabha seats from Karnataka, represented by Rajeev Gowda and BK Hariprasad of Congress, Prabhakar Kore of BJP and D Kupendra Reddy of JD(S) that will fall vacant on June 25, with their retirement.

June 9 is the last date for filing nominations. Party sources said both Kadadi and Gasti come from an RSS background.

Kadadi hails from Belagavi, while Gasti is a resident of Raichur.

The 54-year-old Eranna Kadadi started his active political career in 1989 and unsuccessfully contested the assembly election from Arambhavi constituency in 1994 on a BJP ticket.

He had also served as the Belagavi district Panchayat president in 2010.

Ashok Gasti is a lawyer by profession and former general secretary of the BJP's OBC Cell.

He is the former chairperson of the Backward Class Development Corporation.

While it makes perfect sense for IT employees to work from remote locations via video conferencing and collaboration tools seamlessly - especially in the case of tech giants like Google or Microsoft -- workers from the non-IT companies and small and medium enterprises (SMBs) are the worst-hit in India as most of them have little or no clue about how these messaging and collaboration tools work amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Small companies -- from corporate to education verticals -- are scrambling to get their act together as new coronavirus threat has reached their premises, prompting them to send employees home who have age-old laptops, poor network and connectivity with no UPS backups and little knowledge about how to handle group chat and collaboration software like Zoom, Google Hangouts Meet, Microsoft Teams and Flock etc.

Instead of halting operations, however, businesses can choose to shift towards remote working methods with teaching non-IT staff on how to use the latest digital software to connect and work, say industry experts.

The training will take some time and may hamper productivity in the short run but is a win-win situation for the non-tech companies in the long run, in case any such global emergency arises in the future.

According to a latest report by Gartner, 54 per cent of HR leaders have cited that poor technology and/or infrastructure for remote working is the biggest barrier to effective remote working.

Sandy Shen, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner, says that with COVID-19 disrupting the business landscape, CIOs should relook at the digital fulfillment of market demand.

"The value of digital channels, products and operations is immediately obvious to companies everywhere right now. This is a wake-up call for organisations that have placed too much focus on daily operational needs at the expense of investing in digital business and long-term resilience," warned Shen.

Businesses that can shift technology capacity and investments to digital platforms will mitigate the impact of the outbreak and keep their companies running smoothly now, and over the long term.

"Videoconferencing, messaging, collaboration tools and document sharing are just a few examples of technologies that facilitate remote work. Additional bandwidth and network capacity may also be needed, given the increasing number of users and volume of communications," informed Shen.

The IT industry's apex body Nasscom has asked the government to relax norms for a month to allow work-from-home for technology and back-office employees as a measure to deal with the spread of Covid-19 in India.

Networking giant Cisco said that it has seen "significant growth" in the usage of its web conferencing and video-conferencing service Webex in India.

According to Muneer Ahmad, Business Head, ViewSonic India, due to COVID-19 pandemic, the corporate and educational sector is severely getting affected in the country.

"ViewSonic IFP has a cloud-based software which help teachers and corporates to connect through video conferencing to multiple people at the same time and can split the screen into six screens. It can also connect with various tools like Skype, Cisco WebEx, Zoom, Google Hangouts and GoToMeeting," Ahmad told IANS.

Co-working sector has also taken a hit and the industry is looking at several measures to tackle it -- from ensuring supply of juices rich in Vitamin C to supply of disinfectants and giving work from home facilities.

"The scheduled visits of the clients at our co-working offices have been postponed. Few of our clients have cancelled their outstation meetings and have now started audio/video conferencing for virtual meetings," said Nakul Mathur, MD, Avanta India.

According to reports, India has approximately 1,000 co-working locations (as of September 2019) and is the second-largest market for the co-working industry after China.

As India's first licensed B2B Virtual Network Operator, CloudConnect Communications offers a collaborative platform that allows companies to overcome the COVID-19 threat while maintaining seamless business continuity and optimum employee productivity.

"We offer a secure, robust, reliable, scalable and trackable mobile-first unified communication infrastructure that aids remote teleworking so that businesses can continue operating even under any unforeseen circumstances," said Gokul Tandon, Executive Chairman, CloudConnect Communications.