Covid-19 - How The Government Bungled

Behind India’s crumbling Covid management is a combination of factors—poor macro-level monitoring, refusal to heed early warnings, negligent policymaking and complacent citizens

- R. Prasannan And Namrata Biji Ahuja

The warnings had been there—loud, clear, and writ in print. Not just from doomsayers in cyberspace and the Cassandras in distant laboratories, but from revered institutions of governance within India. Cautioning that the country was poised for a nasty second wave of Covid-19, some of them had even listed what needed to be done to save lives. Sadly, the warnings fell on ears deafened by the din of mutual back-patting, hasty claims of victory over the pandemic, misplaced confidence in systemic self-reliance, and boastful assertions that India had become the world’s vaccinator.

Perhaps the most authoritative warning came on November 25, when a parliamentary standing committee headed by Ram Gopal Yadav of the Samajwadi Party, and comprising members of ruling and opposition parties, submitted a report that asked the government to “be prepared to combat a possible second wave... especially in the ensuing winter season and the super-spreading series of festive events”. The wave arrived later than expected, yet it caught the government abysmally unprepared.

The committee had also identified the challenges India faced and assessed the readiness of its health care system. And it made a slew of recommendations to the government: boost the production of oxygen immediately, regulate prices of cylinders and Covid drugs, make hospital beds available, ramp up vaccine production and supply, and administer doses to the poor at subsidised rates. The report today reads like an assessment of everything that has gone wrong with India’s Covid management.