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Modi announced a national curfew with little notice. We’ll be left with the great Indian discovery, the zero. Why should he worry about the economy?ĭemonetisation and GST resulted in killing demand, and this poorly planned national curfew will kill supply chains. He won a national election despite disastrous economic policies that gave us a 45 year-high unemployment rate. The economy isn’t on Modi’s radar either. If we survive the pandemic, we won’t survive the impending economic collapse. He will leave the tough things to state governments and focus on the right optics to sustain his political ratings through a tough period.Īlso read: India’s perfectly-timed lockdown & wartime efforts to find Covid-19 cure Modi does not have the patience or the interest to deliver on these nitty-gritty details, he’s probably working on his next grandiose ‘address to the nation’ to be applauded for his oratory. Another deliverable is isolation centres, temporary hospitals in indoor stadia and quarantine facilities that are fit for human beings. The deliverable is how many people got tested, how many doctors have protective gear, how many ventilators the government managed to manufacture or buy overnight. The deliverable is not how many people clanged pots and pans or how many obediently followed Modi’s advice of staying indoors. This is turning out to be another demonetisation, with the typical Modi problem of mistaking theatrics for achievement. Sadly, the evidence so far suggests that the Modi government does not have the capacity to think through the details of planning and execution. The responsibility is his more than anyone else’s, but state governments will also be put to test. These 21 days are Modi’s last chance to fix these two problems. The lack of widespread testing, as well as the lack of PPEs (personal protective equipment) for doctors, is a scandal. You have to be really naive to believe India’s official numbers of coronavirus patients - and then there are those who have died of sudden pneumonia without being tested or counted as coronavirus deaths. We need fast testing, cheap testing, easily available testing - and a well laid out mechanism to quarantine a person the moment she is found positive, without letting her infect others, including medical staff and family members. Sadly, Narendra Modi’s two national addresses have done little to address this concern about India not taking the mass-testing approach. That’s the only way to manage the coronavirus pandemic until we get drugs and vaccines to administer en masse.Īlso read: Modi’s Covid-19 lockdown speech shows he doesn’t learn from past mistakes, or doesn’t care to India’s 21-day national lockdown should thus be seen as buying time to create a massive testing infrastructure, so that even asymptomatic people could be tested and quarantined. Like these other countries, India could also have avoided the need for a national lockdown had it done what those countries are doing: testing, testing, testing. In other words, we are in this mess for years. A few months is a very optimistic estimate. Not until we get a vaccine, and it will take at least a few months to vaccinate every Indian even after a vaccine has been developed. But what happens after 21 days? The virus won’t disappear after that. Since the authorities are using the word ‘curfew’ in the context of issuing passes, it is fair to call it a national curfew.Ī national curfew for 21 days will definitely go a long way in reducing the transmission of the deadly virus. Even China, where it all started, placed only the Hubei province under complete lockdown, not the whole country.īut Prime Minister Narendra Modi has put 1.3 billion people under a curfew-like lockdown. These include Singapore, Taiwan, Germany, and Turkey. It is important to note that countries that have so far done a relatively good job of containing the coronavirus pandemic have refrained from imposing a complete, nation-wide, curfew-like lockdown.