India’s medical fraternity has had it with Narendra Modi.
Dr Navjot Dahiya, vice-president of the Indian Medical Association, a voluntary organisation of medical professionals, has called the Indian prime minister a “super-spreader” of the Covid-19 pandemic. He told The Tribune newspaper that the blame for this devastating second wave lies squarely at the feet of Modi’s government.
“While the medical fraternity is trying hard to make people understand mandatory Covid norms, prime minister Modi did not hesitate to address big political rallies tossing all Covid norms in the air,” Dahiya told The Tribune newspaper on April 26.
Dahiya’s strong statement comes in the backdrop of massive election rallies that were headlined by Modi and his aide, home minister Amit Shah, in West Bengal and other poll-bound parts of India. Not only did the prime minister pull crowds at these mass public events, but he also celebrated them as successes on his Twitter feed.
April 28, 2021
After suffering and recovering last year, India’s online grocers have once again been debilitated by Covid-19’s relentless resurgence.
The Covid-19 crisis has likely not hit its peak yet, but Indians are already experiencing a deja vu of April 2020 while checking out carts as staple products are running out and delivery timelines have become long.
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BigBasket and Amazon on April 18.
Unlike last year, both BigBasket and Grofers claim to have access to sufficient stocks. But they admit that same-day and next-day deliveries are being shipped three or four days later. This may be because of night curfews, weekend lockdowns, and curbs on intercity and interstate travel in several cities, including commercial capital Mumbai and national capital Delhi.
April 27, 2021
Even as a brutal second wave of Covid-19 spreads death and despair through the length and breadth of India, it’s business as usual for the country’s democracy the largest in the world.
Voting and preparations for elections are continuing in several parts of India even as the number of Covid-19 cases in the country break world records, and citizens struggle to find basic healthcare support. On April 26, India clocked 323,144 new Covid-19 cases, which was the sixth consecutive day of more than 300,000 cases in the country.
While the massive election rallies in West Bengal earlier this month were widely criticised, the western state is not the only one conducting polls in the middle of a historic pandemic. India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, is also currently holding assembly elections, and campaigning in the state is in full swing though at a smaller scale than West Bengal.
April 26, 2021
After a hasty and unplanned two-month-long lockdown in 2020 pushed the Indian economy into a technical recession, the Narendra Modi government has made it amply clear that it does not plan to implement a similar measure now even as the country is in the grips of a brutal second wave of Covid-19. In fact, on April 21, prime minister Modi told state chief ministers that they must use lockdowns as the last resort to stop the spread of coronavirus.
But this dismissal of lockdowns does not mean this wave will leave India without serious economic destruction.
Several indicators show that India’s economy is already feeling the stress of the ongoing deadly pandemic wave. While some of this impact is due to local-level restrictions that some state governments have imposed, others are because citizens are choosing to stay indoors.