India’s Covid-19 scenario is improving overall while several hotspots like Mumbai are raising the nation’s temperature. It is in this context that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is holding his fifth video conference with state chief ministers to assess the ground situations and look at ways for relaxing the lockdown conditions. The infection toll as also death tolls keep rising, they now sitting around 62,000 infections and over 2,000 deaths. Cities like Mumbai contributed largely to this grim scenario, while large parts of India are free of the virus threat and are still facing the brunt of the nationwide lockdown. This is telling on the economy and livelihoods.
It was fine for the Prime Minister to declare a complete lockdown from March 25. The first Covid infection in India was reported in January, but major spreads came since March only. With the nation in shutdown mode for seven weeks, all economic activities have come to a grinding halt. Rating agencies have said India’s growth rate would plummet to zero per cent. China’s would be worse, but that is no consolation to us.
Notably, one-third of the districts – some 230 out of the total 720 – are Covid-free. It is here that the government should concentrate its attention on for resumption of economic activities. Reports are that over 200 specific areas have been identified for resumption of activities.
The governments failed to be pro-active on many fronts. For one, states are losing money heavily from the stoppage of liquor sales as per orders from the Centre. Liquor for large sections of the populace is an essential item, and governments earn hefty sums by way of excise duty. Now, the Supreme Court had to intervene to ask states to consider alternative means of sale, in ways as to avoid crowd formations at liquor outlets. A system could have been introduced long ago for online orders and home deliveries. The governments remained complacent even in these critical times when money was hard for them to come by.
Government servants, other than those from essential services, were allowed to idle away their time for two months. Many of them could have worked from home–as is being done by those in the private sector.
It is easy to declare a wholesale lockdown of the nation. But allowing the scenario to continue even when possibilities of reviving economic and governmental activities are many, will be suicidal. This is not a time for a long-drawn holiday for both the salaried class and the workforce. The economy should get back to active mode soonest and to the extent possible.