COVID-19 in India, Risk and Response in the Early Phase
By Dr Adil Rasheed
(in Rohan
Gunaratna, Mohd Mizan Aslam ed. book, COVID-19 in
South, West, and Southeast Asia, Risk and Response in the Early Phase, Routledge, 272 Pages, Copyright Year 2023)
ABSTRACT
With a poor social security
system and a frail healthcare infrastructure, India has done well to avert the COVID-19
pandemic from spreading in the initial months of the outbreak. Thanks largely
to its decisive leadership that enforced a timely nationwide lockdown; India
bought valuable time to enhance its resources and upgrade its infrastructure to
fight the virus. In spite of this spirited response by the government,
healthcare sector and civil society organizations, the country has recently seen
a rapid upsurge in the disease and some experts fear it might become the global
epicenter of the pandemic in the months ahead. With a major storm still looming
on the horizon, the country hopes that new medicines in the market or a
possible vaccine in the not-so-distant future would come to its aid before it
is too late.
India’s response to the COVID-19 crisis has been like the
three-dimensional chess game played in the television series ‘Star Trek’ — with
‘health’, ‘economy’, ‘social’ and ‘political’ fronts panning out at separate levels
and yet inter-connected to a grand strategy[1]. In
order to score a decisive victory, the Indian central and state governments have
had to not only consider the pros and cons of their coordinated actions, but have
had to keep tabs on an unknown and unpredictable adversary — the elusive
coronavirus. Again, as in the game of chess, some of the best laid plans have tended
to go awry and have not necessarily delivered the intended results.
The challenge and the costs involved for India in fighting this
pandemic — both in humanitarian as well as in economic terms — have been
enormous. For a nation with 1.3 billion
people — of which 275 million (22 percent) live below the poverty line — the
big question has been whether the overstretched administrative machinery and weak
public healthcare system could cope a pandemic from causing a major
humanitarian crisis.
Enormity of the Challenge
The first case of COVID-19 reported in India came
from the state of Kerala on 30 January 2020, which roses to three cases by 3 February, as all were students
who had returned home for a vacation from Wuhan University in
China.[2]
By 18 June, India’s Ministry of Health and Family
Welfare (MoHFW) confirmed 366,946 cases, 194,325 recoveries
(including 1 migration) and 12,237 deaths in the country.[3]
Having the largest number of confirmed cases in Asia, India has the fourth
highest number of cases in the world, even though the fatality rate is
relatively lower at 2.8 percent against the global 6.13 by 3rd of
June.[4]
Six big Indian cities – Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Chennai, Pune and Kolkata,
make for almost half of all reported cases in the country.[5]
More problematic than being the second most populous country in
the world is that India has a huge population density of 464 people/km2.
Compare this figure with the population density of other countries that
have been badly affected by the pandemic such as Italy with a population
density of 206 people/km2, Spain 91, Iran 52 and the USA 36.[6]
India may have the second largest population after China, but its population
density far exceeds it (455/km2 as
opposed to 148/km2).[7]
Thus, the dreaded prospect of the pandemic proliferating out of
control is multiplied many times given the potential for its spread. Social
distancing in Indian cities with overcrowded and fetid shanty towns has proven
to be a near impossibility. As over 160 million Indians still have no access
to clean water to wash their hands, the prospect of a geometric progression of
the pandemic having given sleepless nights to policymakers.[8]
The prevalence of diabetes and hypertension among Indian adults — diseases that
are said to worsen COVID-19 outcomes — is as high as 10% and 25% respectively.
The high rates of high rates of tuberculosis and pneumonia vex an already critical
situation. Further, India’s poor (who constitute
22% of its population and
live below the official poverty limit
of earning less than $1.25 per day) have little access to healthcare.[9]
About 90 percent of this population has no form of private or government health insurance (shows data from
India’s largest national survey on social consumption, conducted
between July 2017 and June 2018),[10]
making them incapable of availing any decent healthcare treatment. There has
also been a shortage of doctors and healthcare personnel,[11]
in addition to dearth of hospital beds, testing kits, personal protective
equipment (PPE), N95 masks, ventilators, gloves, goggles, gowns, aprons and
face shields as India imports about 80 percent of its medical device
requirement.[12]
According to a COVID-19 SWOT analysis report by Niti Ayog,[13]
premier policy think tank of the Government of
India, the doctor to patient ratio in the country stands at an alarming 1:1445,
hospital beds to people ratio at 0.7:1000 and ventilators to population ration
at 40,000 to 1.3 billion. The Indian government also faces the twin
challenge of containing the virus even as the economy is undergoing a major
slowdown.
Salient Features of Government
Response
The Indian government has undertaken several
initiatives to safeguard the country against the Covid-19 pandemic. According
to the Information and Broadcasting Ministry, India’s response to COVID-19 has
been “pre-emptive, pro-active and graded”[14].
Since the time of the outbreak, it has put in place a ‘comprehensive response
system’ at the borders of the country, much before the World Health
Organisation (WHO) declared the coronavirus as a public health emergency of
international concern on January 30.[15]
The government claims its response has focused on
divesting leadership in its fight against the pandemic at various
administrative levels – from the federal to provincial, municipal, block and
down to village levels and has involved various ministries to work in a
synchronized manner to implement a grand strategy against the spread of the
pandemic.[16] Its
approach has also sought to involve and engage with the international community
“not only in sending shipments of essential medical
supplies to various nations, including the US”,[17]
but also in bringing back Indian expatriates in large numbers from various
countries afflicted with the disease (such as the Vande Bharat Mission launched
to bring home Indian expats from the Gulf).[18]
The government’s response has included spreading awareness of the pandemic to a
very large population, ably led by the eloquent prime minister himself for providing right information intelligibly to the
country’s poor and uneducated masses without causing panic.
The Indian government campaign has used
scientific-evidence based projections to guide its decision making and has used
state-of-the-art technology in its fight against the disease, such as the
launch of Aarogya Setu, a “contact tracing, syndromic mapping and
self-assessment mobile app”,[19]
which tells how many COVID-19 positive cases are likely in a radius of 500 m,
1 km, 2 km, 5 km and 10 km from the mobile user. It has
used the right kind of legislative and law enforcement measures to ensure the
disease is not spread, has involved private sector and civil society
organizations in its campaigns, and launched a specific fund to fight the
disease — The PM CARES Fund — to receive domestic and foreign donations to
further availability of quality treatment of the patients infected by COVID-19.[20]
The aforementioned measures come within the ambit
of the Indian government’s phased strategy to fight the COVID-19 pandemic,
which covers the initial preventive stage, the subsequent containment phase and
the final mitigating phase.
The Preventive Stage (late January to mid-March
2020)
In this stage, India sought to control ingress of
the virus from abroad. The country began thermal screening of passengers
arriving from China on 21 January at seven airports, which was subsequently
expanded to 20 airports towards the end of that month.[21]
All visas were suspended on 13 March, barring a few diplomatic and official
visas.[22]
Thereafter, government ordered seven ministries — Home, Labour, Defence,
Aviation, Railways, Tourism and Minorities Affairs — to set up additional
treatment and quarantine facilities across the country. In early March, The
Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution was instructed to
ensure availability of essential goods and food items throughout the country,
The Ministry of Textiles was to ensure the availability of protective
and medical materials and The Department of Pharmaceuticals took steps
to ensure that essential medicines were available.[23]
The government also formulated a plan to create
greater public awareness about the COVID 19 threat, while avoiding panic in
society. Central and state governments set up helpline numbers and a COVID-19
Economic Response Task Force was formed around the third week of March.[24]
On 15 March, Ministry of Culture closed all monuments and museums under
Archeological Survey of India.[25]
Over the course of the month, several Indian states started closing educational
institutions (schools and colleges), as well as public places like shopping
malls, gyms, cinema halls and other public places to check the pandemic from
spreading.
The Containment Stage (World’s
Largest Lockdown)
However, measures taken in the preventive stage
did not stop the COVID-19 infection from spreading in the country. By March 22,
the number of confirmed cases rapidly neared the 500-mark, with eight
deaths. The Indian government decided that the best way to flatten the rising curve
of infection and fatalities and to avoid large-scale community transmission,
buy time for ramping up the health infrastructure and to achieve social distancing was to impose a nationwide lockdown. This was a
difficult decision for the government, as the country’s economy had been
struggling before the outbreak of the pandemic, and fear that the shutdown
could cause massive job losses in n economy where over 90 percent of the
workforce is employed in the informal sector.[26]
Taking the cue from China,
Spain and Italy, the Indian government opted for a nationwide lockdown and
rejected the ‘herd immunity’ approach initially employed in UK, or that of ‘voluntary
social distancing’ as used in Sweden or merely restricting itself to aggressive
testing, contact tracing and isolation as practiced by South Korea. The Indian
prime minister used a highly emotive popular
Hindi idiom (‘Jaan Hai toh Jahaan Hai’,
which can be roughly translated as ‘life comes first and then the world’[27])
to convey the point that the safety of the life of people should take
precedence over the state of the national economy, as a justification for the
national lockdown.
On 19 March, Prime Minister Narendra Modi
addressed the nation on television and asked all citizens to observe a one-day
‘Janta Curfew’ (“people's curfew”) on Sunday, 22 March. Following the successful
completion of the curfew, the Prime Minister made another televised address on
24 March, wherein he announced a nationwide lockdown (the largest and one of the
most stringent lockdown in the world over 1.3 billion people) from midnight of
that day, for a period of 21 days. “Jahan Hai, Wahan Rahain” (Stay where you
are) was his new catchphrase this time.[28]
Phase I of the Lockdown lasted 21 days from 25 March-14 April. As a
result people were prohibited from stepping out of their homes, all shops and
services were closed (except grocery shops, pharmacies, hospitals, banks, and
other essential services), there was closure of commercial and private
establishments as well as all educational, training and research institutions.
In addition, all places of worship were closed, non-essential public and
private transport suspended and all social, political, sports, entertainment,
academic, cultural and religious activities were prohibited. During this phase,
the police was very strict and made arrests in all the states of the country
for violating lockdown restrictions, such as people coming out on the streets
for no reason, opening their shops or businesses and driving on roads, highways
unless in an emergency.
To mitigate the economic impact of the lockdown
on the poor, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced Rs 1.7 trillion (US
$24b) worth of relief package[29]
on 26 March to provide food security for poor families through direct cash
transfers, free grains and free cooking gas for three months. On 27
March, the Reserve Bank of India announced several measures to mitigate the
economic impact of the lockdown.
Towards
the end of the Phase I lockdown (21 days), the spread of COVID infections seem
to have been checked significantly, with the rate of doubling every three days
registered before the lockdown slowing down to doubling every eight days by 18
April. Reputed Indian journalist Shekhar Gupta noted the benefit of the lockdown
then with some measure of satisfaction then: “India isn’t going through a picnic, but our
drains aren’t filled with bodies, hospitals haven’t run out of beds,
crematoriums and graveyards not out of wood or space.”[30]
Phase II of the Lockdown (from April 14 to May 3): At the end of the
21-period lockdown, Prime Minister Modi delivered another televised addressed
to the nation and claimed that India was doing better with his government’s
“timely decision” of enforcing a national lockdown and a “holistic approach” in
comparison to other countries. He claimed the lockdown slowed down the
disease’s spread that allowed for labs to come up, beds to increase and said
that “more than 600 hospitals are working for coronavirus treatment. These
facilities are being added every day”.[31]
However, Prime Minister
Modi announced the extension of the lockdown for 20 more days (from April 14 to
May 3), as India still needed to curtail the pandemic as there were already 100,000
confirmed cases and over 300 deaths across various states by April 14. The
premier announced a conditional relaxation in some places where the spread had
been contained. A new classification of areas was announced on 16 April,
wherein hotspots with high rate of infection were branded as “red zones”, areas
with relatively fewer cases were tagged as “orange zones”, while places with no
infections — where restrictions could be eased — were classified as “green zones”.[32]
The government also
allowed relaxations for agricultural businesses (including dairy, aquaculture
and plantations), banks, small retail shops (with half the staff), public works
programmes and cargo transportation vehicles to operate. However, social
distancing norms had to be strictly adhered to and the wearing of masks in
public places, slums and shanty towns was made mandatory.
Phase
III of the Lockdown came with another extension from 4th to18th
of May, albeit with some relaxation spread out across Indian districts split into three zones: red zones (130 districts),
orange zones (284 districts) and green zones (319 districts). Buses were
allowed to operate on only 50 percent capacity in green zones, while private
and hired vehicles were allowed in orange zones.
Phase IV
of the Lockdown (from 18th to 31st May): This was the final
phase of the lockdown, announced by the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) and the Ministry of
Home Affairs (MHA) for a period for two weeks from 18th to 31st
of May, although it introduced additional relaxations. Unlike the previous
extensions, the central government gave a larger say to states in the
demarcation of Green, Orange and Red zones and the implementation roadmap.
Unwinding the Lockdown – Unlock I
(1-30 June): The growing
economic problems faced by India’s struggling economy under the lockdown forced
the government to open the lockdown, albeit gradually all over the country.
While opening the lockdown during the so-called ‘Unlock I’ phase, the MHA
states that the re-opening would “have an economic focus”. It was decided that
lockdown restrictions would from now only be
imposed in containment zones (hotspots), while regular business would be permitted
to function in other zones in a phased manner.[33]
Thus, religious places, shopping malls, hotels and restaurants were allowed to
reopen from 8th of June and restrictions on inter-state travel
finally lifted. In upcoming Phase II, educational institutions are scheduled to
reopen in July, pending consultations with state governments, while in Phase
III, restrictions on international air travel, operation of metro trains and
recreation (gymnasiums, cinema halls, entertainment parks, auditoriums and
assembly halls) are scheduled to end in August.
Cases,
Deaths Shoot Up after Lockdown
Even as the lockdown
continues to unwind, the success of this stringent containment measure has
become a matter of contentious debate in the country, as government sources
claim that the lockdown was successful in preventing a rapid rise in
infections, even though it admits that a large proportion of the population still remains
highly susceptible to contracting the disease. Thus, the government believes it
has managed to bring down the growth in confirmed cases “from 24.3 percent in
the pre-lockdown period to 3.8 percent during the
current ‘Unlock 1.0’,” the daily rise in cases have spiked above 10,000 for
several days in the second and third week of June, even as deaths topped 300
per day.
Indian opposition parties
have been highly critical of the lockdown claim that the over two-month long “curfew”
on the country has proven to be a total failure and have questioned the
effectiveness of the financial package announced to mitigate effects of the
lockdown. In a tweet, former president of the opposition Congress party Rahul
Gandhi said “This is what a failed lockdown looks like”, as he compared the
grim Indian figures on corona infected cases with worst-hit countries like
Spain, the UK and Italy.
Even the Indian press
has gradually shifted its views against the measure from its largely favourable
view of the lockdown when it was enforced.
Writing for the online news portal The Wire, Suvrat Raju argues that the
government was unable to take advantage of the lockdown to increase its
healthcare capacities and had few effective long term measures. He writes: “A lockdown reduces the number
of infections for a short period. In the absence of sustainable long-term
measures, the pandemic will resume its original trajectory when the lockdown
ends. Simple models suggest that, in such a scenario, when the pandemic has run
its course, it will have extracted almost exactly the same final toll in lives
as it would have without the lockdown”.
The Deccan Chronicle
newspaper highlighted the spike in COVID cases once the lockdown was lifted: “Between June 1 and 18, the country has seen a
surge of 1,76,411 coronavirus infection cases with Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu,
Delhi, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh remaining among the top ten states”.[34]
Economic Fallout (Major Recession
Ahead)
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as
the government response to fight it has taken a heavy toll on the Indian
economy. According to the Indian Ministry of Statistics and Programme
Implementation (MoSPI), India’s gross domestic product (GDP) rose by 3.1% in
the Q4 of FY20 (January-March 2020), compared to 4.1% in the preceding three
months.[35]
At 4.2 per cent, FY20’s growth rate is the lowest
in 11 years.[36] According to the World
Bank’s South Asia Economic Focus (Spring 2020) edition, COVID19 pandemic has “magnified pre-existing risks to India's economic
outlook”.[37]
The World Bank report added that India may record
its worst growth performance since 1991 liberalisation, which may veer around 1.5
percent to 2.8 percent in 2020-21. However, the prognosis became more dire
after the May 12 Atmanirbhar Bharat: COVID 19 Special Economic Package announced pumping Rs 20 trillion stimulus
package (US $260 billion) to revive the pandemic-struck economy.[38]
Since then, India’s GDP estimates have been reduced further by credit rating
agencies, such as Moody’s June 1 downgrade to a notch above junk (Baa3), which
signal a deep recession ahead.[39]
While CRISIL fears that the recession, which is
“already here”, will be perhaps India’s worse since independence and that it
will be “tough for India to return to its pre-pandemic growth levels at least
for the next three years”,[40]
irrespective of policy support, State Bank of India research estimates that the
country’s economy faces a ‘humongous’ loss in the June quarter and gross
domestic product (GDP) could contract by more than 40 percent during the
period.[41]
Within half a month of the lockdown, the reputed Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE)
unemployment figures shot up from 6.7 percent (as estimated on 15 March) to over
23 percent (as of 07 April 2020), with one of its reports estimating that 140 million
people lost their employment while salaries were cut for many others.[42]
Over 45 percent of households in the country have reported a drop in income as
compared to the previous year.[43]
About 53 percent of Indian businesses have been said to be significantly hit by
the pandemic fallout, while supply chains were severely disrupted by lockdown restrictions
in place. Farmers who grow perishable crops also faced great uncertainty.[44]
Workers Flee Cities on Foot
Indian cities depend on a vast workforce that
comes from far-flung provinces (small towns and the countryside) of the
country, a poor yet aspirant population that migrates in search of opportunity
to the big metropolises, leaving behind their extended families in the remote
regions in the prospect of a brighter future.
This population of internal migrants, which is in
the tens of millions, ends up working in small industries, construction sector,
hotels and restaurants. After Indian Prime Minister announced an all-India
lockdown many of these migrant workers saw their business establishments close
and even their wages and puny savings fizzle away. Transport restrictions also
blocked their option to return to their places of origin. As the period of
lockdown extended for months, many of these migrant workers started facing
starvation. Consequently, hundreds of thousands of them started walking back
home, covering hundreds of kilometers, as there was no public transport
available. They also had to face police action for straying into the streets
and on to the highways.
It took some time for the central and state
governments to view the flight of these migrant workers sympathetically, as
city establishments and industry viewed the exodus of labourers as an adverse
development that could impede resumption of business even after the lockdown is
lifted. By mid-May, Indian central government started providing relief package
worth $22.6 billion to ease the economic plight of about 800 million poor
people.[45]
However, these schemes could not stop migrant workers from leaving cities and
walking back on foot to their hometowns, with their images streaming on national
televisions covering stories of their exhaustion, starvation, road and railway
accidents and police high-handedness. Thus, the correct and well-meaning action
of the government and law-enforcement agencies started to be misconstrued as
‘insensitive’, and even ‘draconian’ in the Indian and foreign media.
According to data compiled by the SaveLIFE Foundation, a road
safety NGO, 198 migrant workers lost their lives in road accidents during
the lockdown period.[46]
The workers leaving cities that were killed while returning to their home towns
and villages constituted 26.4 percent of the deaths during the lockdown, the
report states.
India’s Successes, Achievements and Plaudits
Indian government’s decisive, effective and timely measures for fighting the pandemic has drawn
praise from various international institutions. The United Nations and the
World Health Organization (WHO) hailed India’s management of the COVID-19
crisis as “comprehensive and robust”, and termed the decision to enforce a nation-wide lockdown an “aggressive but
vital” containment measure.[47]
The Indian government has also been praised by the WHO for
increasing its healthcare capacities to prevent, contain and mitigate the
impact of the disease. WHO Representative to India Hank Bekedam hailed the Modi
government by stating: “Massive efforts have
been made towards prevention and containing the spread, including strengthening surveillance, laboratory
capacity, contact tracing and isolation and risk communications”.[48]
Rapid Increase in Healthcare Facilities: The Indian government has been praised for its
swift action in the wake of the crisis, evident from its screening of
international passengers as early as mid-January. The nation had six COVID
testing labs ready before it found its first patient with the disease. In fact,
it had reportedly screened 150,000 people when just three active cases were
found.[49]
By April 21, India reportedly had
over 21,000 round-the-clock medical institutions dedicated to fighting the
disease, over 173,000 patients in isolation and 21,000 ICU beds. Over 276 labs
had conducted over 400,000 tests by that time.
Timely Relief for the Poor: The government also drawn praise for having
launched Rs348 billion
financial assistance scheme under Pradhan
Mantri Gareeb Kalyan Anna Yojana which would use digital payment
infrastructure to about 390 million people — primarily low-wage earners,
farmers, senior citizens, disabled, widows and the needy. The measure became
part of the government massive economic relief and stimulus package (under the Atma Nirbhar Bharat Abhiyan) worth Rs 20
trillion (US $260 billion), announced in mid-May.[50]
The scheme provides free 5 kilograms wheat/rice
and one kilogram pulses for 800 million people for a period of three months. It
also provided three free LPG cylinders to 80 million beneficiaries of Ujjwala
Scheme. Nearly 200 million holders of Jan Dhan bank accounts (dedicated to
the poor), have reportedly received Rs 500 each directly into their bank
accounts, as 83.1 million farmers have reportedly received Rs2,000 each as
first installment under the PM-KISAN Yojana, as part of the government’s relief
measures. Wages for the rural unemployed under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural
Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) has been increased to Rs 202 per day.
Criticism of Government Response
The difficult decisions the Indian government to
fight the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented challenge in nature and scope,
naturally drew a lot of criticism from mainly within the country.
Lockdown
without Advance Notice Hurt Workers, Small Businesses:
To begin with, the government was criticized in some quarters for announcing
the lockdown suddenly, without allowing Indian businesses and households,
particularly the poor and daily wage earners. People also remained unsure for
how long the lockdown would last and caused a lot of workers (daily wage
earners), small farmers and the poor great economic hardship, even starvation.
In his weekly radio address, Prime Minister Modi himself apologized for the
impact of his stay-at-home enforcement. Thus, he admitted: “Especially when I
look at my poor brothers and sisters, I definitely feel that they must be
thinking, what kind of prime minister is this who has placed us in this
difficulty?
However, he insisted that he had “no other way”.[51]
Critics argue that the Prime Minister could have alerted the population a week
or a few days earlier, and point out that he repeated the mistake of keeping
the nation in the dark even before declaring subsequent extensions to the
lockdown.
The Shortfall in Testing: The other criticism the government faces is that
it has still not prioritized and procured for more testing of the disease in
the population. Opposition party leader Rahul Gandhi has ardently stressed upon
the need for expanding the test base, which experience from other nations show
is the key method to counter the virus. India has made progress in this regard,
but even the goal of conducting 10 million tests to reach the “threshold level
of one percent of the population”, as former union minister Jairam Ramesh
demands remains elusive.
Lockdown flattened the GDP Curve:
Some political
leaders and even industrialists like Rajiv Bajaj have called the lockdown
‘draconian’ measure, which ended up flattening the wrong curve — i.e. the GDP
‘growth curve’ of the country — instead of flattening the COVID-19 spread
curve.[52]
Some businessmen and economists aver that while the number of coronavirus cases
rise at the rate of roughly 10,000 per day after the lifting of the lockdown
since June 1, businesses may take months or even years to recover from the
shock dealt by the lockdown. Some experts have said that social distancing,
even enforced as in a lockdown, is inconceivable in Indian cities, where people
live in overcrowded buildings and shanty town tenements in large numbers.
Prognosis: Silver Lining on a
Dark Horizon
By mid-June India has become the fourth country worst hit by the coronavirus
after the US, Brazil and Russia.[53]
Whereas the disease is on the decline in other parts of the world, the pace of
coronavirus transmission in the country has started picking up dramatically
after the lockdown. Authorities in the states of Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu,
Delhi, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh are fear acute shortage of intensive care
units and ventilators in the coming months. The Harvard Global Health Institute director Ashish K. Jha
fears that India might become “the global epicenter” of the coronavirus
pandemic and believes India has 50,000 unreported pandemics a day already,
which may rise to 200,000 cases a day by August.[54]
Many experts believe the disease has already entered the stage of
community transmission in the country and aver that because of the migrant
workers’ mass exodus the
focal point of the pandemic will soon “shift from urban centres like Delhi,
Mumbai, Ahmedabad to second- and third-tier cities and even district towns”.[55]
The grim prospect of doctors, nurses and paramedics falling sick of the disease
in large numbers is highly worrisome. It seems unlikely for the government to
re-enforce lockdowns given the precarious state of the economy and has few
options other than going for aggressive testing and sequestering as well as
enforcing the wearing of masks.
However, there is a silver
lining amidst dark clouds hovering on the horizon. The Drug Controller General of India (DGCI)
has given approval to three companies to produce
their COVID-19 treatment medicines in India. The companies are Cipla, Hetero
and Glenmark which are now licensed to roll out Cipremi, Covifor and FabiFlu
respectively.[56] All three medicines have
shown efficacious results in tests conducted so far and would slowly be made
available and administered under
strict medical observation. The country is also ardently hoping that a vaccine
would also be produced at least by early next year so that the threat of a
major humanitarian crisis is averted.
[1] Sarah Farooqui, ‘India
Coronavirus Dispatch: Visualizing a Response Moving Forward’, Business
Standard, 5 June 2020
[2] Mukesh Rawat, ‘Coronavirus in
India: Tracking country’s first 50 COVID-19 cases; what numbers tell’, India
Today, 12 March 2020, https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/coronavirus-in-india-tracking-country-s-first-50-covid-19-cases-what-numbers-tell-1654468-2020-03-12
(last accessed on 19 June 2020)
[3] COVID-19 India, Ministry of
Health and Family Welfare, https://www.mohfw.gov.in/
(accessed on 18 June 2020)
[4] Press Information Bureau of
India, Twitter Account
[5] ‘Infections over one lakh, five cities with half the cases: India's
coronavirus story so far’, The Week,
19 May 2020, (accessed on 1 June 2020)
[6] Sagarika Kamath, Rajesh
Kamath, Prajwal Salins, ‘COVID-19 Pandemic in India: Challenges and Silver
Linings’, Post Graduate Medical Journal, 2020, https://pmj.bmj.com/content/early/2020/06/10/postgradmedj-2020-137780
(last accessed on 3 June 2020)
[7] Population density (people per
sq. km of land area), All Countries and Economies, The World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.DNST (last
accessed on 3 June 2020)
[8] Sagarika Kamath, Rajesh
Kamath, Prajwal Salins, ‘COVID-19 Pandemic in India: Challenges and Silver
Linings’, Post Graduate Medical Journal, 2020, https://pmj.bmj.com/content/early/2020/06/10/postgradmedj-2020-137780
(last accessed on 3 June 2020)
[9] Ibid
[10] ‘Key Indicators of Social
Consumption in India: Health’, Ministry of Statistics and Programme
Implementation, National Statistical Office, July 2017-June 2018, Published November 2019, http://www.mospi.gov.in/sites/default/files/NSS75250H/KI_Health_75th_Final.pdf
(last accessed on 5 June 2020)
[11]
Banjot Kaur,
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