Covid-19 pandemic is a matter of great concern for all of us. As part of our commitment to the JNU community and to the Nation at large, we recognize our role in unitedly fighting this pandemic and providing academic leadership towards this objective. JNU has a large number of faculty members who are involved in information dissemination, data mining, vaccine and diagnosis research that have direct or indirect implications for effectively dealing with the disease and secondary issues arising from it. JNU has taken a number of steps towards the health and well being of its community and towards communicating effectively with our students, staff and faculty for educational, administrative and welfare purposes. As part of these efforts, we have formed a Covid-19 task force that will look into the possible ways of working with the National agencies so as to enable the best use of JNU resources for public welfare. The committee led by Prof Pawan Dhar is doing a great job in this regard.

Further, together with Covid-19 task force, we appreciate that providing verified information to the community at large and timely access to the recent developments relevant for Covid-19 pandemic are very important and therefore, we have decided to create this Covid-19 portal, coordinated by Prof Shandar Ahmad, member Covid-19 task force with the purpose of providing a single stop source of authentic information which will help researchers, students, faculty, staff and larger JNU community in making best choices during this time of grave challenge.

I also take this opportunity to reiterate our resolve to fight this worldwide calamity with courage and determination and share the optimism that we will overcome it together with everyone's cooperation.