A pandemic report card

It has now been exactly four months since the nationwide lockdown was first imposed. In this period, the number of cases has continued to grow, particularly sharply in recent weeks and days. There are now about 1.3 million positive cases recorded, though given India’s testing rates, the true number is perhaps several multiples of that. In a very short time, there will be about 500,000 active cases, with 150,000 of those in Maharashtra alone.

This seems an apposite moment, therefore, to take a step back and consider how the Union government has performed when faced with this unprecedented crisis. Let’s consider the positives first, and then the negatives.

The pluses

First, the government took the threat seriously, and relatively early. Even when I flew back to New Delhi on one of the last days before international flights were shut down, there were temperature checks and attempts at social distancing at Delhi airport. Let us not minimise the importance of actually accepting, when told, the threat that Covid-19 poses. Many of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s fellow populist-nationalists across the world took much longer than he did to accept the gravity of the situation. President Bolsonaro of Brazil did not take it seriously even after he himself tested positive for Covid-19, tearing his mask off in the middle of a press conference to announce the result.

Second, it was willing to risk a proper lockdown to try and control the spread. A prime minister less sure of his personal popularity than Narendra Modi would have hesitated. But we know from the reaction to demonetisation, if nothing else, that Indians are by and large willing to sacrifice a great deal if this prime minister tells them it is necessary. The prime minister did not hesitate, in the speech, in which he announced the lockdown, to trot out all the rhetorical flourishes that he usually saves for campaigning. We can laugh at the various candle-and-thali things that he asked us to do; but it is also true that, by the time he was done, pretty much everyone in this country knew there was a dangerous virus abroad and that they needed to stay away from each other.

Third, the government has understood that this is a public health crisis before it is an economic crisis, and it is an economic crisis because it is a public health crisis. Thus economic packages have been of the form of relief and liquidity provision, rather than a demand stimulus. This is wise.

Now, the minuses

First, the government has not managed the flow of people or goods within the country efficiently and effectively. In a pandemic, people need to stay put. In a country with many poor migrants, their welfare should have been the first concern — because if they did not feel reassured, they would set out for home and carry the coronavirus outside containment zones. This is, unfortunately, exactly what happened. The sacrifices made by many during the lockdown were thus wasted. The economic hit, meanwhile, was intensified because there was no clarity about local and state borders and lockdowns. The Union has the Constitutional responsibility to manage inter-state trade and commerce, and it has failed to do so.

Second, testing capacity has not been scaled up sufficiently. This is not to say that efforts have not been made. It is that in a country as large as ours, the identification of emerging hotspots depends crucially on widespread testing, innovative methods, and quick results. This has been a failure across the country; actual tests conducted are well below the installed capacity, which itself is a fraction of the potential capacity. The government has also begun to play games with tests. In Delhi, it has claimed success prematurely. The success is nothing of the sort, given it comes from two sleights of hand. Tests have been conducted more intensively in areas, such as South Delhi, where the virus may not have progressed as much as in others. Meanwhile areas like Northeast Delhi are massively undertested.

Second, the “flattening” of the Delhi curve coincided with the replacement of the gold standard RT-PCR tests with the far less reliable antigen assays, which often fail to detect cases. Officials are searching for various absurd metrics — “recovery rate”, “positivity rate” — to try and spin a spreading pandemic as a success. They should not insult the country’s intelligence in this manner.

Finally, the government has not stopped petty politics in the middle of this crisis. It has sought to destabilise successive state governments through defections in this period. It has used the virus as an excuse to harass others, like West Bengal. This is a moment at which national cohesion and cooperation between the state and Union governments is essential. 

Instead, the political, as opposed to the administrative, wing of the government is treating the pandemic as just another opportunity to seize power. India has failed to respond to the pandemic effectively because its efforts have been disorganised and disparate. And the impulse to divide rather than unite is a primary reason for that.