We flattened wrong curve: Bajaj
‘Draconian’ lockdown decimated the economy, industrialist tells Rahul Gandhi
Industrialist Rajiv Bajaj said Thursday the lockdown in India to check Covid-19 was one of the world’s most draconian and ended up “flattening the wrong curve”: the economy instead of the coronavirus infection rate.
Mr Bajaj was speaking to Rahul Gandhi in one of the many video chats the Congress leader has been having with experts on the pandemic and the way forward.
“We tried to implement a hard lockdown, which was still porous. I think we ended up with the worst of both worlds. On one hand, a porous lockdown makes sure the virus will still exist and, as you said, it is still waiting to hit you when you will unlock. So, you have not solved that problem,” the 53-year-old managing director of Bajaj Auto said.
“But you have definitely decimated the economy. You flattened the wrong curve. It is not the infection curve, it is the GDP curve,” he said.
Faulting the government for falling short of “disclosing facts, logic and the truth”, he said this has “amplified and instilled such an enormous fear in people that people seem to think that the contagion is equal to a contagious cancer or something”.
This has now become an obstacle in convincing people of India about the idea of learning to live with the virus, Mr Bajaj said.
Mr Bajaj further said India was not seeing a smooth and concerted move towards unlocking. “Unfortunately, India not only looked west, it went to the wild west. I think we stayed more towards the impervious side.”
“I think right from the beginning, this is my view, whether it was in terms of how this problem was to be perceived, I don’t understand how despite being an Asian country, we sought not to look at what was happening east, we looked at Italy, France, Spain, the UK and the US. Which are not really the right benchmarks in any sense. Whether it is in terms of inherent immunity, temperature, demography, predisposition to thrombosis, etc,” he said.
Mr Gandhi, on his part, said: “The bittersweet thing you said is shocking to me. Rich people can deal with it as they have a home… it’s completely devastating for poor people and guest workers”.
We tried to implement a hard lockdown which was still porous. So, I think we have ended up with the worst of both worlds. — Rahul Bajaj