India committed to vaccine for all, says PM Modi

mumbai — Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday said the government was working rapidly to ensure the supply of Covid-19 vaccines to all citizens once they are available.

In his address to the nation, Modi urged Indians to continue wearing masks and uphold social distancing rules to prevent further spread of the pandemic ahead of India’s festive season. “Whenever the corona vaccine comes, how it reaches to every Indian as soon as possible, the government is also working for that,” Modi said.

Earlier on Tuesday, India reported its lowest daily coronavirus caseload in nearly three months, as new cases continued to decline from a peak in September.

The country reported 46,790 new infections in the last 24 hours, taking its tally to nearly 7.6 million — the second highest behind the United States. It also reported 587 deaths, taking the total to 115,197.

sinnar — India is on course to top the world in coronavirus cases, but from Maharashtra’s whirring factories to Kolkata’s thronging markets, people are back at work — and eager to forget the pandemic for festival season.

After a strict lockdown in March that left millions on the brink of starvation, the government and people of the world’s second-most populous country decided life must go on.

Sonali Dange, for instance, has two young daughters and an elderly mother-in-law to look after. She was hospitalised this year in excruciating pain after catching the coronavirus.

But after the lockdown exhausted the family’s savings, the 29-year-old had to return to work at a factory where she earns 25,000 rupees a month.

“Now that I have recovered, I am no longer so scared of the disease,” she said amid the din of machinery at the Nobel Hygiene plant east of Mumbai.

The pandemic’s confirmed fatality rate has been heaviest in richer nations with older populations — the US death toll is double that of India despite having only a quarter of the population.

Poor countries have suffered far worse economic pain, with the World Bank predicting 150 million people could fall into extreme poverty worldwide.

Many children in the developing world are now working to help their parents make ends meet, activists say, while thousands of young girls have been forced into marriage.

In Varanasi in northern India, 12-year-old Sanchit no longer attends school and instead collects cloth discarded from bodies before cremation on the city’s ghats. “On a good day, I earn around 50 rupees,” the boy said.

The IMF projects India’s GDP will contract by 10.3 per cent this year, the biggest slump of any major emerging nation and its worst since independence in 1947. When India went into lockdown, it was a human catastrophe, leaving millions in the informal economy jobless, penniless and destitute almost overnight.

No one wants to go back to that, said Gargi Mukherjee, 42, as she shopped in the New Market area of Kolkata, thronging with festival-season customers, many without face masks.

“For survival, people have to come out and do their jobs. If you don’t earn, you cannot feed your family,” she said.

Experts caution that the OctoberNovember season — when Hindus celebrate major festivals such as Durga Puja, Dasara and Diwali — may trigger a sharp increase in infections, as consumers crowd markets to snap up bigticket items on discount. —