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When the General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development it emphasized the principle of ‘leaving no one behind’. Then onwards, countries designed programmes on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) around a holistic, inclusive and transdisciplinary approach which was based on harmony and partnership. The current fear of Coronavirus transmission has derailed this approach. Media has always been a partner and an accelerator to governance in normal as well as in crisis times. Covid-19, a fatally contagious disease that has spread into hundreds of countries cutting across geographical boundaries, killing over four hundred thousand people in about six months, largely remains an enigma for governments, medical fraternity and disease control organizations. This disease exposes the fragile public health infrastructure and preparedness in both rich and poor nations. Media and communication are important parts of every disaster management, both from the perspective of authorities in charge of managing the crisis who have to keep people informed and independent media that by its very nature is probing and questioning, seeking accountability. There is a debate within the media itself on ‘independent vs. embedded’ discourse. During a crisis situation, information emerging from various players ends up as a complex web of communication. The current paper analyzes the Covid-19 crisis through the lens of communication and media capturing various glimpses to discuss how the crisis is being managed. Covid crisis has affected the media like any other industry with dwindling revenues and loss of jobs. The print media in particular is facing the existentialist crisis and this paper attempts to explore possible solutions which have been discussed in the paper.

BACKGROUND Inadequate administrative health data, sub-optimal public health infrastructure, rapid and unplanned urbanization,environmental degradation and poor penetration of information technology make the tracking of health and well being of the populations within developing countries more challenging. This necessitates setting-up comprehensive surveillance platforms integrated with the information technologies that can cater to the full spectrum of the public health problems. OBJECTIVE This manuscript aims to provide methodological insights on establishing GIS integrated comprehensive surveillance platform in resource constrained rural settings. METHODS The INCLEN (International Clinical Epidemiology Network) Trust International established a comprehensive SOMAARTH Demographic, Development and Environmental Surveillance Site (DDESS) in a northern Indian rural setting. The surveillance platform evolved through adopting four major steps: 1) site preparation 2) data construction 3) data quality assurance 4) data update and maintenance system. Arc GIS 10.3 and QGIS 2.14 software were employed for geo-spatial data construction. Surveillance data architecture was built upon the geo-referenced land parcel data sets. The composition data pertaining to the land use (residential, non-residential, and vacant), water bodies, roads, railways, community trails, landmarks, water, sanitation and food environment, weather and air quality, demographic characteristics were constructed in relational manner within the surveillance platform. RESULTS A comprehensive surveillance platform encompassing 0.2 million population residing in 51 villages over a land mass of 251.7 sq. Km having 32,662 households and 19,260 nonresidential features (cattle shed, shops, health, education, banking, religious institutions etc.) is established. The processes adopted for subdivision of villages into sectors helped in developing geo-referenced location identification system in a setting where no postal addresses or postal codes system were in place. Also the socially and economically homogeneous community clusters (78% of 676 sectors) which usually hide within the village aggregates were disclosed. Characterization and storage of variety of data sets critical for health and epidemiology and generation of new information e.g. water, sanitation and hygiene through geo-analytics were demonstrated. Settlement pattern was compact to the extent that 80% of habitation was concentrated in 9% of the total village area. Community involvement proved helpful in the ground-truthing of the data sets for ascertaining the level of positional, temporal and attribute accuracies and identification of small habitations, missing in the official records. CONCLUSIONS SOMAARTH experience allowed characterization and monitoring of wide range of attributes from demography, development, and environmental domains and developed geospatial inter-phase to explore and explain their dynamic relationships, associations and pathways across multiple levels i.e. individual, household, neighborhood, and village. The methodology takes care of the common challenges faced while building information system in the developing countries. However generalizability and scalability needs to be tested in other resource constrained settings as well.

Background: Inadequate administrative health data, sub-optimal public health infrastructure, rapid and unplanned urbanisation, environmental degradation and poor penetration of information technology make the tracking of health and wellbeing of the populations and their social determinants in the developing countries challenging. Technology integrated comprehensive surveillance platforms have thepotential to overcome these gaps. Objective: The manuscript provides methodological insights into establishing a geographic information system (GIS) integrated, comprehensive surveillance platform in rural North India, a resource constrained setting. Methods: The INCLEN (International Clinical Epidemiology Network) Trust International established a comprehensive SOMAARTH Demographic, Development and Environmental Surveillance Site (DDESS) in rural Palwal, a district in Haryana, North India. The surveillance platform evolved through adopting four major steps: 1) site preparation 2) data construction 3) data quality assurance 4) data update and maintenance system. Arc GIS 10.3 and QGIS 2.14 software were employed for geospatial data construction. Surveillance data architecture was built upon the geo spatial land parcel data sets.Dedicated software (SOMAARTH-1 ) was developed for handling high volume of longitudinal data sets.The built infrastructure data pertaining to the land use, water bodies, roads, railways, community trails,landmarks, water, sanitation and food environment, weather and air quality, and demographiccharacteristics were constructed in a relational manner. Results: The comprehensive surveillance platform encompassed 0.2 million population residing in 51 villages over a land mass of 251.7 sq. Km having 32,662 households and 19,260 non-residential features(cattle shed, shops, health, education, banking, religious institutions etc.). All the land parcels were assigned geo-referenced location identification numbers to enable space and time monitoring.Subdivision of villages into sectors helped in identifying socially homogenous community clusters (61.8%of 676 sectors). Water and hygiene paramenters of the whole area were mapped on the GIS platform and quantified. Risk of physical exposure to harmful environment (poor water and sanitation indicators)was significantly (P .001) associated with the caste of individual household and the path was mediated through socio-economic status and density of waste spots (liquid and solid) of the sector in which these households were located. Ground-truthing for ascertaining the land parcel level accuracies, community involvent in mapping exercise and identification of small habitations not recorded in in the administrative data were key learnings. Conclusion: The SOMAARTH DDESS experience allowed to document and explore dynamic relationships,associations and pathways across multiple levels of the system i.e., individual, household, neighborhood and village through a geospatial interface. This could be used for characterization and monitoring of awide range of proximal and distal determinants of health of the households. Refereed/Peer-reviewed