Innholdsfortegnelse for May 17, 2021 i India Today

When Param Bir Singh, commandant of the Maharashtra Home Guards, wrote a letter to Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray on March 17 in his capacity as the Mumbai police commissioner, alleging that then home minister Anil Deshmukh had given police officers a target of Rs 100 crore to be collected from bars and restaurants every month, little did the police force know that the allegation would open a can of worms. An IPS officer of the 1988 batch, Singh has been in the eye of the storm ever since. His batchmate, Rashmi Shukla, too has come under the scanner for allegedly leaking confidential information. Now, the two top IPS officers and the state government are locked in a legal battle. First, Singh approached the Bombay High Court on March 31, challenging…

Massed pyres and serpentine queues of shrouded bodies. Gasping, terrified men and women pleading to be accepted as patients. The broken and bereaved mourning their dead. In New Delhi today, as in any Indian metro, the roads are silent, the bazaars are shuttered. But approach any hospital and you’ll rediscover the familiar clamour of the Indian street, rising to a crescendo in the once hushed ICUs—now rent with the shouts and moans of the desperate and the dying. Of course most of us are hunkered in our homes, carpeing our diems and visiting such scenes through our screens when we’re not fielding calls and text messages from family and friends, or friends of friends, pleading for a hospital bed, an oxygen cylinder, Remdesivir, more oxygen. Expressing our sympathies on Facebook…

THE DISTRICT HOSPITAL IN Bihar’s Gopalganj district received three ventilators from the Centre in September last year. These were among the 60,000-odd ventilators the government had procured, for nearly Rs 2,000 crore, in response to the Covid pandemic; roughly 17,000 of them were dispatched to the states. But this April, when some patients at the Gopalganj district hospital needed to be put on ventilator, the life-saving devices could not be used due to a manpower crisis—the support of an anaesthetist was not available. The unfortunate incident highlights the ill-preparedness of the nation’s medical infrastructure at the time of a raging pandemic. Indeed, there is a massive shortage of beds, ICUs, ventilators, oxygen and life-saving drugs. But as renowned cardiologist Dr Devi Prasad Shetty, chairman and executive director of Narayana Health,…

IN 2020, INDIAN AUTHORTIES widely used the T3 protocol (test, treat, track) in the battle against Covid-19. However, in 2021, none of the states most affected by the second wave appear to be following it, with mandatory quarantining also falling by the wayside. This is a major factor behind the rapid spread of cases in the second wave. The situation in Madhya Pradesh, for instance, is typical of what is taking place in most states. “The T3 protocol was deployed very effectively from April to August last year,” says a top official in the state government, asking not to be named. He says that these efforts began to slacken after August, and with no pressure from senior officials or political leaders to ensure that district collectors maintained it, contact tracing…

WHEN THE NARENDRA MODI-LED Union government announced the nationwide lockdown last year, the number of Covid cases in the country stood at 618. Exactly a year later, even while the country had 3 million active cases and the total tally had crossed 11 million, India was preparing for the Kumbh Mela, one of the largest religious congregations in the world, scheduled to begin from April 1. While experts across the country cautioned against holding the event, the admin- istration turned a deaf ear to those appeals. At the event itself, even while state government advertisements paid lip-service to Covid protocols, it was clear to all but the most credulous that it wouldn’t be possible to observe the protocol at this mela of millions. Tirath Singh Rawat, chief minister of Uttarakhand, declared:…

With the number of Covid-19 infections surging—India recorded 368,147 new cases and 3,417 deaths on May 3, according to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare—several states have imposed strict restrictions on public movement and variously calibrated lockdowns. Judging from public statements by heads of industry bodies, India Inc. appears to be on board with these steps—for instance, on May 2, Uday Kotak, MD and CEO of Kotak Mahindra Bank and president CII (Confederation of Indian Industry), called for “the strongest national steps including curtailing economic activity to reduce suffering”. Sanjiv Mehta, chairman of FMCG giant Hindustan Unilever, has called for micro-containment centres to check the spread of the virus. On May 2, the Supreme Court also urged the Central and state governments to “consider imposing a lockdown to curb…

LAST NOVEMBER, WHEN COVID cases in Delhi peaked to over 8,500 daily, a majority of the patients requiring hospitalisation struggled to find beds. Even temporary additional facilities set up earlier in June failed to handle the extra load of patients. The four temporary facilities included a 10,000-bed centre in Chhatarpur, run by the ITBP, with at least 1,000 oxygen beds. Similar but smaller facilities had been set up in Dhaula Kuan and at the Commonwealth Games Village. But, in February, when daily cases dropped to below 200, the Delhi government declared victory over Covid and the four additional facilities were dismantled. Two months on, as the second Covid wave struck, Delhi witnessed an unprecedented shortage of hospital beds. Average daily cases peaked to over 25,000 and the city was gripped…

WHEN A HARRIED Naresh Indulkar, a resident of Mumbai’s Thane, went searching for three vials of Remdesivir for a relative in critical condition in hospital, it took nearly six hours to find a pharmacy with stock. “Rs 22,000 a vial,” whispered the man behind the counter, though the marked retail price was only Rs 1,800. Distraught, Indulkar returned to his apartment. A glimmer of hope appeared in the form of a reply from his neighbour to an appeal he had posted on his residential society’s WhatsApp group. On calling him, the neighbour came up two floors and offered Indulkar three spare vials of Remdesivir he had. “He had bought eight vials—at a premium—to treat his father,” recalls Indulkar. “Five sufficed, and as thanksgiving, he offered me the rest at the marked…

VACCINE PRODUCTION IS AN AREA in which India had a head-start over even many developed nations. India is among the world’s largest manufacturers of vaccines, and early human trials of vaccines, including of one developed in the country, had shown great promise. The Centre knew that if these vaccines were cleared for use, India would have a reliable shield against the virus. By August 2020, even before the first wave had peaked, the central government had set up a National Expert Group on Vaccine Administration (NEGVAC) for Covid-19 to work out a comprehensive vaccination policy. NEGVAC invited FICCI (the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry) to help assess the national capacity for inoculation. In partnership with EY, a consultancy, it submitted a strategy paper that estimated India would need…

Rajasthan’s newly minted, state-sponsored Chiranjeevi Health Insurance Scheme has come at a time when it’s likely to be better appreciated by its beneficiaries. It universalises healthcare in the state—free for the poor and dirt cheap for the rest. “I am close to realising my dream of ensuring that nobody in the state ends up spending their lifetime savings on hospital expenses,’’ said chief minister Ashok Gehlot to INDIA TODAY. The emotional register of that pitch is designed for maximum impact. For beneficiaries of the National Food Security Act, small and marginal farmers, contract workers, destitute families that receive ex gratia payments from the state government, the insurance cover of Rs 5 lakh will be free. For the others, the cover will come at an annual premium of Rs 850. All…

FOREWARNED IS FOREARMED. This maxim holds good for all nations trying to combat the waves of Covid-19 that threaten the world today. Yet the Narendra Modi government, which had acted with alacrity during the first wave, was surprisingly complacent, not keeping track of mutations of the virus that could trigger a second wave of infections—as it did in the US and the UK and is now doing in India. When the first wave raged, barring two institutes, the Delhi-based Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB) and the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad, there was no coordinated national effort to sequence Covid samples to detect the most dominant variants and to ascertain if any threatening mutations had occurred. It was only on December 21, after the…

WHEN THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION declared Covid a global pandemic in early March last year, India had 14 RT-PCR testing labs. By end-March, the country had added 106 Virus Research & Diagnostic Laboratories (VRDLs). Far behind countries such as South Korea and the US initially in terms of the number of tests, India beefed up its testing capacity quickly. By April 2020, we had 166 labs for testing and by July 1,600. The number of daily tests shot up from 1,500 in April to 200,000 in June, and 1 million in October. By the time the first wave subsided in November, India had 2,257 Covid testing labs, the average wait time for a result was 12-24 hours. These achievements were due to three reasons. For starters, 14 centres of excellence…

ONE OF THE BIGGEST LESSONS for medical institutions from the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic was that more than ventilators and ICU beds, what was essential was an adequate supply of oxygen in hospitals to treat critically ill patients. Nonetheless, when the second wave of the pandemic arrived earlier this year, India’s medical oxygen supply network collapsed. There were a variety of reasons for this failure, primary among them the massive surge in demand for oxygen as case numbers spiked. Though production has been ramped up—from 700 metric tonnes (MT) per day in February to 9,000 MT per day in early May—India is still struggling to cope with the demand, with the pandemic adding over 300,000 cases per day since April 25. An affidavit from the Centre to the Supreme…

IMAGINE AN OLA OR UBER app which showed cars all over the city but with none assigned to you, no payment gateway and no analytics. Would this system have worked? Unlikely. And this has been the defining feature of Covid’s second wave—chaos. Hospitals are besieged by patients looking for beds, oxygen and intensive care facilities. Covid call centres set up by states are flooded with calls. Many patients directed to hospitals by call centres found that no beds were available. There have been reports of corruption and nepotism in the allotment of hospital beds and black marketing of medicines and oxygen cylinders. In Delhi, the city worst hit by the second surge, the state government set up a helpline only on May 4—nearly two weeks into a crisis over oxygen…

THE AFTERMATH The striking mandate in the assembly election will help the CPI(M) consolidate the party’s political base in the state and lay the foundation for a longer innings in power. With his voice growing stronger within the party, Pinarayi is free to pick the team of his choice. In 2016, he had to accommodate senior party leaders and political stalwarts like Dr Thomas Isaac, G. Sudhakaran, T.P. Ramakrishanan, M.M. Mani, A.K. Balan and E.P. Jayarajan in the cabinet. But this time around, his team will be a strange mix of former ministers like K.K. Shailaja, K. Radhakrishnan and A.C. Moideen, as well as novices like K.N. Balagopal, party central committee member M.V. Govindan and former member of Parliament M.B. Rajesh. Sources say Pinarayi has a clear idea about the…