An Ernst & Young (EY) office in western India, which employed a 26-year-old who allegedly died after facing a high workload, has operated since 2007 without a state permit which regulates work hours,

Indian authorities inspected consulting firm Ernst & Young's (EY) Pune office and interviewed executives in the western city on Monday, a state official said, amid an investigation into an associate worker's death,

EY faces increasing scrutiny in India after the death of 26-year-old audit executive Anna Sebastian Perayil, who allegedly succumbed to a "backbreaking" workload, according to her mother. The incident has triggered both a state-level inspection and a federal investigation into working conditions at the firm's Pune office,

India has reported its first case with the new mpox strain that has triggered a public health emergency alert by the World Health Organization (WHO), Reuters reports. Called clade 1b, the new variant is highly-transmissible and has been linked to the mpox outbreak in Africa.

India said on Monday that an mpox case involving a man in the southern state of Kerala was from the fast-spreading clade 1b variety, marking South Asia's first recorded case from the new strain. Health Ministry spokesperson Manisha Verma confirmed the strain after news agency ANI cited official sources as saying that the mpox case reported in the Malappuram district of Kerala last week belonged to clade 1.