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Excerpts, aspects and perspectives from different news agencies discussing how the Indian lockdown worked out to be a total disaster.
India's Hurried Decision to Impose Nationwide lockdown was ill-planned & worst conceived!
Alluding to the Hindu epic, Ramayana, the Prime Minister said, “For 21 days, forget what is stepping outside. (Imagine) there is a Lakshman Rekha on your doorstep.”
Modi would later allude to another Hindu epic, Mahabharata, in equating the challenge of the 21-day initial lockdown to the 18-day battle.
Barely four hours after his announcement on March 24, at the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world slept, India went into its first coronavirus-induced lockdown. And 68 days, 1,73,763 positive cases and 4,971 deaths later, on May 31, the ministry of home affairs issued an order announcing a phased reopening or ‘Unlock 1’ by dint of which almost all prohibitory orders were lifted, except in containment zones. In the preceding 24 hours, there have been 10,956 new cases and 265 fatalities.
As India approaches the end of its lockdown, the Central government has been at great pains to emphasise that the lockdown has “saved lives”. On May 22, for instance, the government touted a study by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and claimed that the lockdown had “saved between 1.2 – 2.1 lakh lives”. Such claims involve a comparison of the current figures for deaths with those obtained by extrapolating the early growth rate of the pandemic. But a little reflection shows that this is not the right metric to use to gauge the efficacy of the lockdown.
This is because even if 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 long, ill thought-out lockdown has pushed the country headlong in the deep end of the economic conundrum that it faces. And the worst hit, both by the disease and the lack of money, are the poor. The world became witness to the labourers’ crisis that unfolded in India. The politics over it has been detestable too. And the late response and initial stonewalling towards the miseries of the poor is typical of Prime Minister Modi. While the critics expected it by drawing the example of Narendra Modi’s silence during the demonetisation mess, his supporters brushed off the labourers’ crisis as inevitable.
Amit Shah is known to be his master’s voice. So when he admitted the other day that there may have been lapses on the part of the government in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, he must have done it on authority.
Unlike many other parts of the world, such as East Asia or Europe, where the re-opening of the economy has usually accompanied a dip in their infection curve, India re-opened while its curve was still steeply increasing.
However, in our case, in various states across the country, medical facilities are rapidly running out of resources.
Just because we are a poorer country than many others does not mean that we can somehow afford to lose the vast number of people who will be killed if the virus sweeps uncontrolled across our population.
We are also a country with a poorer health system than many others, so we have to accept in addition that our death rate will be higher.
Some work by the Centre for Policy Research's Partha Mukhopadhyay published recently in the Hindustan Times argues that India's mortality rate is in fact among the highest in the world: 'Instead of being among the lowest, India's age-adjusted death rate is actually higher than Italy's'.
An economy that loses elements because it operates for months, with social distancing, at 10 to 20 per cent below its potential will hurt many Indians.
But an economy ravaged by millions dying will not look much better.
Remember that, in the 1918 influenza epidemic, 12 million to 17 million Indians died, of a much smaller population.
And remember also that it was the second wave that killed -- in the fall and early winter.
Source:
https://thewire.in/government/india-covid-19-lockdown-failure
https://thewire.in/government/indias-lockdown-has-failed-heres-what-we-can-learn-from-it
https://theprint.in/opinion/lockdown-to-unlocking-narendra-modi-failed-every-step-of-the-way/441247/
https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/opinion/amit-shahs-confession-betrays-modi-frustration-lockdown-impact-fits-into-a-pattern-of-failures
https://www.rediff.com/news/column/lockdown-definitely-not-a-success/20200627.htm
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