Kolkota: Trinamool Congress Member of Parliament Dr. Shantanu Sen has written a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi urging him to look into alleged discrepancies in the World Health Organisation's Covid-19 dashboard which shows parts of Jammu and Kashmir as well as Arunachal Pradesh as belonging to Pakistan and China respectively.
Sen wrote he was navigating through the dashboard when he came across the discrepancy. "When I clicked the blue portion, it was showing the COVID-19 data of our country. But to my utter surprise, when I clicked over the differently coloured portions, given to our state of J&K, the larger portion was showing the data of Pakistan and the smaller one was showing the data of China."
The Trinamool Congress legislator also claimed that a portion of the state of Arunachal Pradesh was demarcated separately.
A copy of the letter has also been sent to the Ministries for Home Affairs, External Affairs and Health, a report by Hindustan Times said.
Describing the matter as a "serious international issue", Sen said that the discrepancies could have "grievous" consequences for the citizens of India. He urged the Prime Minister to conduct a thorough probe into the incident wherein it could rectify the mistake and make the citizens of the country aware of the issue.
In October 2020, Twitter released a map under the heading "Tweep Life" which had tagged large parts of Leh as belonging to China. After backlash from senior government representatives including Ajay Sawhney, Secretary of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology writing a stern letter to Twitter's founder and global chief, Jack Dorsey, the map was taken down byy the microblogging site.
Any attempt by Twitter to disrespect the sovereignty and integrity of India is unlawful and totally unacceptable, the government had said in its letter.