Yet even as India was gripped by demonstrations and violence, the coronavirus was making inroads into society here. The country reported its first case on January 30, but authorities steadfastly insisted that cases were one-offs and no local transmission was taking place. In recent weeks, though, India has seen exponential growth in the number of cases. Today, we are three days into a three-week nationwide lockdown, a heavy restriction on a nation of 1.3 billion people that Modi and his government have insisted will help defeat the virus.
The government is offering little in the way of a safety net. Only after the lockdown came into force, and amid growing outrage, did the finance minister finally announce an aid package. Yet its $22 billion value is a pitiful amount compared with what governments elsewhere have provided: Whereas governments in Britain, Spain, and Germany have offered stimulus plans of up to 20 percent of GDP, India’s amounts to less than 1 percent of its GDP. It provides no help for day laborers or other workers in similar unorganized sectors. It contains no measures for migrant workers. The actual amounts of support—five kilograms of rice or wheat, and one kilogram of legumes, per person for the next three months, coupled with cash transfers, in some cases of 500 rupees, or $7, a month—have infuriated voters. Here in Goa, a lawyer has petitioned the high court to direct the state government to provide essential goods to the people, especially those who are living below the poverty line. [...]
There is, unfortunately, good reason to believe that all of this will not be enough. For one, India is still not testing enough people, having conducted the fewest number of tests of any country with confirmed cases of the coronavirus, at just 10.5 per million residents (South Korea, by contrast, has conducted more than 6,000 tests per million residents). That private laboratories are allowed to charge $60 per test—remember, just $7 a month has been offered as income support for some residents—means significant barriers to confirmation and treatment remain in place. (The government argues that because of the size of the population, widespread testing is not feasible.) The authorities are also not meticulously contact tracing, people are fleeing isolation centers, and measures such as self-quarantines and social distancing are impractical in a country where much of the population lives in dense clusters in overcrowded megacities. Whereas the WHO recommends a ratio of one doctor for every 1,000 patients, India has one government doctor for every 10,000, according to the 2019 National Health Profile. A 2016 Reuters report noted that India needed more than 50,000 critical-care specialists, but has just 8,350. In short, the country’s health-care system is in no position to cope with an avalanche of patients with a contagious respiratory infection in the manner that China and Italy have been doing—India’s continued inability to deal with the epidemic of tuberculosis speaks to that struggle.
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