India crisis reveals complacency: Rajan

India’s overwhelming surge of coronavirus infections has revealed complacency after last year’s first wave, as well as a “lack of foresight, a lack of leadership,” according to Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the country’s central bank.

“If you were careful, if you were cautious, you had to recognise that it wasn’t done yet,” Rajan said on Tuesday in a Bloomberg Television interview with Kathleen Hays. “Anybody paying attention to what was happening in the rest of the world, in Brazil for example, should have recognized the virus does come back and potentially in more virulent forms.”

The country is suffering the world’s worst outbreak of Covid-19 cases, with deaths hitting a record Sunday and new cases above 350,000 daily. Pressure is building on Prime Minister Narendra Modi to impose strict lockdowns to stem its spread, a move his government has so far avoided after the economic devastation last year from a similar strategy.

After a drop in cases last year, “there was a sense that we had endured the worst the virus could give us and we had come through and it was time to open up, and that complacency hurt us,” said Rajan, a former International Monetary Fund chief economist and now a professor of finance at University of Chicago.

India’s relative success against the first wave of infections also likely led to it not swiftly preparing enough vaccines for its own population, he said.