As COVID-19 started raising its fang in early 2020, a 21-day lockdown was imposed in the nation to restrict the spread of infection in the country. With the businesses shut and markets closed, millions of migrant workers lost their jobs. With limited access to cash and digital banking services, they struggled to send money back home, which in usual days was done mostly through informal personal networks. Due to the staggered movement of people from cities to villages, the households of migrant workers suffered as they did not have money even to buy the essentials.

Undoubtedly, loans are one of the major sources of income for banks and other related financial institutions. A loan helps the customers to meet their short term financial needs and the interest given by the customer is the way a bank makes a profit. At once it may seem that extending more loans can increase the profit of such financial institutions, however, laxity in granting loans can lead to more losses as many customers may default on the loan repayment.

COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a grinding halt. Nations shut down the non-essential services to cut down the transmission of this new unknown disease. Whilst hospitalizations and mortality were the direct consequences of this undesirable pandemic phase, people suffered due to loss of jobs and for the poor, it became difficult even to make the two ends meet. Experts debated on whether the damage to the economy will be worse than the spread of infection and associated hospitalization and mortality.

We are working towards building a better ecosystem for Indian languages while also keeping up with the recent advancements in NLP. To this end, we are releasing IndicNLPSuite, which is a collection of various resources and models for Indian languages

The duration of gestation of pregnancy is the period between the date of conception and date of delivery, which is about 40 weeks of gestation. Estimating gestational age is crucial for accurate prediction of the date of delivery and classifying it as term or preterm, a birth occurring before 37 weeks of gestation. Preterm birth is one of the leading causes of complications for the newborn that can lead to its death.

Ambient air quality is a dynamic parameter that shows a high degree of spatiotemporal variation. It is known to impact human life and health. Obtaining meaningful estimates of human exposure to air pollutants is key to mitigating its ill effects. Current air quality monitoring regime consists of expensive, static monitoring stations that are sparsely distributed across a city which in turn results in poor spatial resolution. This particular work, accomplished under project Kaatru, demonstrates the efficacy of low-cost sensor based, vehicle mounted, mobile monitoring paradigm in hyperlocal air quality assessment.

Scientific evidence available on the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has caused the global outbreak of COVID-19, shows that the disease spreads through droplets launched from an infected person via coughing, sneezing, talking that land on a healthy person in close proximity (less than 6 feet). Epidemiological researchers have found social distancing measures to be very effective in containing the spread of virus in the absence of a proven cure or vaccine.