India eases restrictions despite spike

Country records about 100,000 new infections and 1,000 deaths daily

AGRA: India Prime Minister Narendra Modi is reluctant to copy some other nations and tighten the screws on activity again despite the country, which is home to 1.3 billion people, reporting around 100,000 new infections and over 1,000 deaths daily.

After a strict lockdown in March that devastated the livelihoods of tens of millions of people, the government is easing more and more restrictions, including on many train routes, domestic flights, markets, restaurants and now, visiting the Taj Mahal.

The world-famous white-marble mausoleum in Agra, south of New Delhi, reopened to visitors yesterday in a symbolic business-as-usual gesture even as India looks set to overtake the United States as the global leader in coronavirus infections.

The Taj Mahal is India’s most popular tourist site. It usually draws seven million visitors a year but has been closed since March.

Officials said strict social distancing rules were in place and daily visitor numbers capped at 5,000, a quarter the normal rate. Tickets can only be bought online.

“So many people lost their job during the lockdown. People have suffered a lot and it is time the country opens up fully,” said bank official Ayub Sheikh, 35, visiting the Taj with his wife and baby daughter.

“We are not afraid of the virus. If it has to infect us, it will,” Sheikh told AFP.

“Not many people are dying now. I don’t think it is going to go away soon. We have to get used to it.”

Elsewhere, particularly in rural areas where infections are soaring, anecdotal evidence suggests that government guidelines on avoiding the virus are more often ignored than adhered to.

“I think, not just in India but all over the world, fatigue with extreme measures that were taken to restrict the growth of the coronavirus is setting in,” said Gautam Menon, professor of physics and biology at Ashoka University, predicting that infections will keep rising as a result.

Many experts say that even though India is testing more than a million people per day, this is still not enough and the true number of cases may be much higher than officially reported.

The same goes for deaths, which currently stand at more than 86,000, with many fatalities not properly recorded even in normal times in one of the world’s worst-funded healthcare systems.