Policy Paralysis Causes India’s Massive COVID Crisis

Disasters even if natural are either accentuated or alleviated by human actions. Pandemic last year might have caught the nation by surprise. Governments are surely not fully prepared to meet the once in a 100-year challenge. But, a year later, even a cursory examination reveals that the second wave in India is manmade caused by policy paralysis. Politicians are conveniently blaming each other or the people for COVID-19 inappropriate behaviour. But, the fact remains is that the trajectory of the pandemic has given us sufficient time to learn and act. Political hubris, premature triumphalism, and exceptionalism emanating from the false sense of national pride are the reasons for this policy paralysis.

The narrative of policy paralysis during the second UPA regime has catapulted Narendra Modi to the highest echelons of power. Though Modi may succeed in averting political cost due to policy paralysis unlike his predecessor due to TINA (There is no alternative) factor and saffron social engineering, the nation is certainly succumbing to the human cost of policy paralysis. This government avows for minimum government and maximum governance. But one illustration will suffice to unravel the true character of the governance at least of COVID matters. News website Scroll reports that in October 2020, already many months late – the Modi government floated tenders for 162 oxygen-producing units to be set up at 150 district hospitals across India. The cost – just Rs 201 crore, fully financed by the PM CARES fund. Today, six months later, only 33 have been installed. Alas! India is gasping for oxygen.

India is touted as the world’s pharmacy, true, it accounts for 60 percent of the world’s vaccine manufacturing. Yet, India’s vaccination is proceeding at a snail’s pace. At this rate, India would at best vaccinate only 30 percent of the population by the end of 2021, while epidemiologists suggest 80 percent of its population for a nation to attain herd immunity. Who is to be blamed for it? Certainly not the scientists. Even as foreign nations signing contracts with the Serum Institute of India (SII), the government of India was in deep slumber. While the United States and Europe liberally funded research and signed advance purchase orders even before vaccine was discovered, India’s response was too little and too late. The government of India sanctioned a loan of Rs 4500 crores to SII and Bharat biotech only after the daily new caseload in India touched a whopping three lakh.

The double mutant strain of novel coronavirus was first detected in India on October 5, 2020, as per a report in Quint. Only in January 2021, a COVID Genomics Consortium – a network of 10 labs was created to speed up genome sequencing in India – with a budget of Rs 115 crore. The Central government did not give Rs 115 crores to the Department of Biotechnology! They were told to find the money on their own. And the department was able to allocate the first amount of Rs 80 crore, only on 31 March 2021 – six months after this deadly strain was detected, reveals the Indian Express report.

Doctor Srinath Reddy suggests that atleast five percent of the test positive samples have to be sent for genomic analysis to understand the mutations and new variants. This is essential to understand the infectivity, lethality, and the clinical manifestations of new variants so crucial for covidmanagement.

Despite TablighiJamat’s experience, early in the pandemic and the government in its official releases doing religious profiling of COVID cases, the government did not find it necessary to prevent an unprecedented congregation of lakhs of people in KumbhMela. Election rallies turned into super spreaders as India’s top political leadership revered political pilgrimage.

The post-pandemic budget saw no real increase in health expenditure as fudging of figures remained a political craft. Thus, the second wave is manmade and a result of policy paralysis, a word widely found in the saffron lexicon. As there are no answers to these probing questions, government of India takes pride in deleting tweets rather than the deadly virus from India.

-By Prof K Nageshwar

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