1 million mark reminder of acute pandemic threat
Far from defeating the coronavirus in 21 days as Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised the nation while declaring the nationwide lockdown on March 24 or even flattening the curve by May 15 as the government think-tank NITI Ayog projected, India now stands stupefied at the cumulative tally of one million infections on July 16 and the daily surge in the number, which has of late been upwards of 30,000. This trend, if continued unchecked, will take it past 2.5 million patients by August 15, according to projections. More than 25,000 people have already lost their lives to the virus.
As it stands today, nearly half the infections are reported from two states—Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu while Bihar, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have now started showing a worsening trend. Reports from Telangana and Tamil Nadu are particularly worrying as they show another trend: the virus, after making a mess of the lives in the big cities, is now heading towards the interiors. More than half the cases that are reported in Telangana are from districts others than Hyderabad; In Tamil Nadu, while Chennai shows some signs of easing, the villages are slowly slipping into the grip of the pandemic. Even a state such as Kerala which has till now resisted the advance of the virus with meticulous planning and coordination at the grassroots level is now reporting higher number of infections every day. Though officially we are in Unlock 2.0; a considerable part of the nation is in lockdown with varying severity.
The sad part is that the Union government has till now shown little seriousness about tackling the challenge other than cherry-picking data to show that we are sitting in a comfortable position. It is pathetic that the government the other day claimed that deaths per million is low in India. In a nation with 1.36 billion population, such data will be useful only to hoodwink the people; the reality on the ground is painful. What the government misses is that all experts, including the governor of the Reserve Bank of India, are unsure of the future turn of events. The RBI governor was forthright when he flagged bad loans as a real cause of worry. The Prime Minister may be tempted to amplify the green shoots in the economy whether they exist or not but the government he heads has a duty to look into the hard numbers. It may be noteworthy that China has said its economy showed a positive growth rate the last quarter, a feat few economies will be able to claim now or in the near future.
It is time the government pulled up the socks and helped the state governments with a national plan to contain the pandemic and addressed the economic meltdown that stares the nation in the face. It must look seriously into the reports that only a minor fraction of the targeted population has received various relief measures, including food grain, it had announced as part of the pandemic package. Reports of food inflation must ring alarm bells in the government. It cannot act as if it is business as usual.