Whether Lockdown is the Only Alternative?

As a citizen of the world’s largest democracy, we must have to admit the fact that a backward, superstitious and impoverished country like India could not compete with developed nations in many aspects of polity, economy and over and above in the quality of sustenance of life.

- Kishor Kumar Kalita

Indeed, we are very much dependent on those developed countries in scientific instruments, technology and particularly in medical science. Therefore, before imitating the strategies and ways adopted by the developed countries to combat a catastrophe, we should scrutinize and review those ways to avoid the negative consequences of such simulation.

This time when most of the developed countries of the globe assumed lockdown as the only measure to combat the Covid-19, India without appraising the adoptability of such measures in its own geographical context, announced the same for the country and has totally ignored to presume the unpredictable damages that may be resulted from a complete lockdown. As the Prime Minister Narendra Modi granted only three to four hours to its citizen to prepare for a complete lockdown, a sizeable population working in the urban and sub-urban areas, mostly the migrant workers, manual workers and the members of the unorganized sector, have to counter with a number of dreadful consequences. We have seen that thousands of migrant workers had to walk hundreds of kilometers to reach their native villages without any food and water and they had been harassed by the police and administration many times in the midway of their journey back home.