“RIGOROUS LOCKDOWN”

Whether India will extend its rigorous lockdown to slow the spread of corona virus beyond its end date next few months or week?

India shut its approx $2.9 trillion economy on 24 March, 2020, closing its businesses too and issuing strict stay-at-home orders to more than a billion people. Air, road and rail transport systems were suspended.

Now, more than two months after the first case of Covid-19 was detected in the country, many people have tested positive and some people have died. As testing has ramped up, the true picture is emerging. The virus is beginning to spread through dense communities and new clusters of infection are being reported every day. Lifting the lockdown could easily risk triggering a fresh wave of infections but we have to observe the entire situation being faced by people.

A harsh lockdown is certain to slow down the disease. I believe India is still at an early stage of the infection. The country still doesn't have enough data on the transmissibility of the virus or even how many people could have been infected and recovered to develop adequate herd immunity.

Many districts have reported the infection. Reports say at least seven states have a third of all infections, and want the lockdown extended. Six states have reported clusters of rapidly growing infections - from the capital Delhi in the north to Maharashtra in the west and Tamil Nadu in the south.

Not surprisingly, the lockdown is already hurting the economy. Many of the early hotspots are economic growth engines and contribute heavily in revenues to the exchequer. Mumbai, India's financial capital and Maharashtra's main city, accounts for more than a third of overall tax collection. The densely populated city has reported many deaths, and numbers are steadily rising. Authorities say the infection is now spreading through the community. Mumbai has made wearing face masks mandatory.

Many of these hotspot clusters are also thriving manufacturing bases. The spread of infection means that they will be under lockdown for a longer period of time.

The services industry, which generates almost half of India's GDP, is also likely to remain shut for some more time. Construction, which employs a bulk of migrant workers, will remain similarly suspended. The unemployment rate may have already climbed after the lockdown, according to a report by the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy.

"The immediate challenge is to ensure that rural India is not hit," says an economist. "Realistically, a complete lockdown cannot be continuously maintained beyond early May. We don't have a choice but to reopen gradually after that."

It is now clear that shutdowns need to continue until transmission has slowed down markedly, and testing and health infrastructure has been scaled up to manage the outbreak, we don't have a choice but to reopen gradually after that."

It is going to be tougher for India with its vast size, densely packed population and enfeebled public health system. Also, no country in the world possibly has so much inter-state migration of casual workers, who are the backbone of the services and construction industries.

How will India manage to return these workers to their work places - factories, farms, building sites, shops - without a substantial easing of public transport at a time when crowded trains and buses can be a vector of transmission and easily neutralise the gains of the lockdown? Even allowing restricted mobility - allowing social distancing, temperature checks and passenger hygiene - would put considerable pressure on the public transport system.

The policy choices are fiendishly tough, and the answers are far from easy. India bungled the lockdown by not anticipating the exodus of millions of migrant workers from cities. The weeks ahead will tell whether the fleeing men, women and children carried the infection to their villages. The country simply cannot afford to make similar mistakes again while trying to relax the lockdown. I believe states should be left to decide on easing restrictions, and decisions "should be based on threat [of infection], which should be determined by extensive testing".

Written By: Vinod Vaidya

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