Covid 2.0 and The Failed State

On May 16, 2014, Narendra Modi powered himself and his party to a historic win, marking a return to a single-party majority after 25 years of coalition governments. His feat was a result not just of his stirring oratory but also because he held out hope at a time the Manmohan Singh-led UPA government was embroiled in corruption scandals and afflicted by paralysis of governance. On May 13, 2013, we put Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on our cover with the title ‘Dr Dolittle’. In our November 23, 1998 cover story, ‘Unfit to Govern’, we outlined how Atal Bihari Vajpayee had presided over the political drift, economic stagnation and administrative paralysis for seven months. Vajpayee, we had said then, was on the verge of joining PMs like Rajiv Gandhi, VP Singh and PV Narasimha Rao, who inspired hope only to dash it.

Prime Minister Modi and his party were re-elected in May 2019 because people still believed he was a man of action and would deliver good governance as he had repeatedly promised. It is cruelly ironic that today we have to witness our citizens gasping for breath and dying like flies because of an acute shortage: of hospital beds, drugs, oxygen cylinders, ambulances, hearses, even a place to cremate the dead. In the eyes of many, the state has collapsed and failed its citizens, denying them their most fundamental right— the right to life. The tragedy is that it didn’t have to be this way.

For two weeks in a row now, we have been seeing a daily increase of over 300,000 cases and an average of 3,200 deaths a day for the past week. On May 4, India accounted for 46 per cent of the world’s Covid-19 cases and 25 per cent of its deaths. We let the virus, which essentially knows just one task—how to survive by replicating itself rapidly—outsmart us. It would be disingenuous to suggest a year later that we did not know how it would strike. Vigilance and preparedness were always going to be our primary weapons in the battle against this microscopic enemy. Instead, on January 28, 2021, Prime Minister Modi proudly declared to the World Economic Forum, “A country with 18 per cent of the world’s population has effectively controlled Corona and saved humanity and the world from great misfortune.” Not so. The great misfortune has befallen us. We threw caution to the winds. The political class, including the prime minister and the home minister, went into full campaign mode in the five states going to polls in the next six weeks. Massive election rallies and religious gatherings were held without care for Covid protocol. With the economy opening up nearly a year after one of the world’s severest lockdowns, people returned to business as usual, again with scant regard to social distancing and masking norms.

A sharp dip in cases this February — from a peak of over 90,000 in September to just over 9,000 — prompted a collective nationwide sigh of relief. ‘Have We Knocked Out Covid?’, we asked in our cover story dated March 1, 2021, even while cautioning against complacency. A slump in Covid did not mean Mission Accomplished because we knew so little about the virus. We did not know then that there were multiple, and possibly far more lethal, variants in Brazil, South Africa and the UK. We let our guard down — catastrophically, it now seems. We did well to mitigate the spread of the virus in the first wave. Our early success bred relief laced with hubris that we Indians had somehow evaded the second and third waves that had devastated other countries. The central, as well as state governments, failed to anticipate the second wave.

Our cover story, ‘The Failed State’, compiled by our bureaus, uncovers the extent of this negligence. We look at 10 aspects — ignoring early warning signs, shortage of trained medical staff, lack of health infrastructure, failure of testing, tracing and tracking, shortage of essential drugs, the collapse of the medical oxygen supply system, failure to leverage technology to fight the virus, shortfall of vaccines and negligence of institutions in curbing super-spreader events. All these elements have combined to produce the tragic story of apathy, complacency and neglect.

For instance, India formed a genome-sequencing group to detect and warn of mutant strains only by December 2020. The group should have sequenced at least 80,000 samples by February 2021 but managed to do only 3,500. The same slackening was visible in RT-PCR tests, crucial to test and treat Covid patients. From February to July last year, India increased the number of laboratories that could conduct RT-PCR tests from 14 to 1,600. But between December 2020 and May 2021, the government added only 249 new labs for testing samples. The alarming spread of the virus in the second wave has meant that it takes four to five days to get test results instead of 12 hours earlier. The delay in diagnosis delays treatment.

We also forgot a basic lesson from the first wave, that medical oxygen and not ventilators were the most essential weapon in our fight against Covid. In October, the government floated a global tender to import a war reserve of 1 lakh tonnes of medical oxygen, sufficient for a month’s supply but then scrapped it. It woke up again in April this year to float another tender for 50,000 tonnes of oxygen, but the damage to hospitals had already been done. The bureaucratic bungling had patients in India’s worst-affected states dying for want of oxygen. Imported aid is being delayed at airports because of bureaucratic snafus.

Vaccination drives across a country with the world’s largest producer of vaccines are faltering because we do not have enough vaccines in stock. We launched the world’s largest vaccination campaign without ordering the doses, it seems. Last year, US President Donald Trump, despite his scepticism of the virus, placed an order for 650 million vaccines for a population of 330 million. India bought just 370 million vaccines for its 1.3 billion people. We knew last year itself that the two companies shortlisted for producing the Covid vaccines could manufacture only 110 million vaccines a month—at which rate it would take India nearly two years to produce the 2 billion doses required to protect its adult population. India has fully vaccinated close to 30 million people, but at the moment, the vaccination rate has dropped from 3.4 million per day on April 6 to 1.8 million on May 4. Paradoxically, the government opened up vaccination to everyone above the age of 18 on May 1, which made the vaccine eligible population go up to 840 million. Given the dire shortage of vaccines, emergency measures are needed to increase their supply if the deadly march of the virus is to be stalled. The government did not stockpile drugs, and manufacturers stopped placing orders for pharma raw material when cases started falling by December. The shortages have now led to hoarding and black marketeering, with vials that cost Rs 1,800 selling for 10 times the price.

State after state dismantled the healthcare infrastructure created during the first wave in the misplaced belief that the pandemic had ended. Makeshift hospitals were folded up, staff disbanded and little effort was made to augment medical infrastructures like ventilators and oxygen tankers. The Delhi government shut down four additional facilities with around 12,000 beds it had built in the first wave — these would have been a critical asset when the national capital became the epicentre of the second wave with over 25,000 daily cases in April and beds in short supply. The augmented infrastructure may not have catered to the massive increase in daily cases but, at the very least, it would have meant not having to start from scratch. States built war rooms, but these stood in isolation. India is a federation of states, but viruses know no boundaries. A country that is an IT superpower should have had no trouble setting up interlinked war rooms across states to pool resources with dashboards throwing up statistics for decision-makers — from the availability of beds to oxygen supplies and telemedicine solutions.

One of the hallmarks of a democracy is accountability, where institutions outside the elected government act as checks and balances against it. Democracy does not disappear between elections. There is a moral responsibility for governing well, and if there are failures or mistakes, there must be consequences for those responsible. There have been several times in the past where ministers have resigned because they felt responsible. Among the memorable instances were railway minister Lal Bahadur Shastri resigning on November 25, 1956, after a rail disaster killed 152 passengers, and VK Krishna Menon for the 1962 China war debacle. In 1992, the minister of state for commerce P Chidambaram resigned over the 15,000 promoters’ quota shares he and his wife purchased in a scam-tainted firm. In 1987, defence minister VP Singh resigned after being questioned over the appointment of a US detective firm to probe bribes in a defence deal. In 1993, civil aviation and tourism minister Madhavrao Scindia did the same after an air crash, although all the passengers survived. There is a moral behind these examples, which this government seems to have forgotten. While a national tragedy unfolds before our eyes, no heads have rolled. No one has been held responsible. The Union health minister specialises in issuing homilies that all is well. The bureaucracy seems to be suffering from brain fog as cases and the death toll mount. No one really knows who is in charge, the states or the Centre. Each is doing what it knows best — passing the buck. The prime minister has yet to assure the nation how he intends to bring the situation under control. Other cabinet colleagues are conspicuous by their absence.

This is the time for collective leadership and cooperative federalism. A time for chief ministers of all states to act swiftly, in unison with the Centre. A time for governments and society to work together to combat this grave threat to our lives and livelihoods. A time for all of us to stand up and demand accountability from those whom we have elected to serve us. Prime Minister Modi is known for his technocratic governance, attention to detail and getting things done. This is the time for him to stand up and be the leader he is meant to be. Otherwise, the prospects are terrifying.

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