Pandemic has laid bare flaws in healthcare

Almost 220 years ago, a three-year-old girl in Mumbai became the first Indian recipient of the smallpox vaccine. This was just around five years after British scientist Edward Jenner invented the smallpox vaccine. This was possibly the first case of vaccination outside of England, but it firmly placed India on the vaccination map.

Slowly and steadily, India became the pioneering base of vaccines. The cholera vaccine was tested and developed in the 1890s in India, and so was the vaccine for plague. For over two centuries, India acquired expertise in vaccination that no country has ever possessed.

One of the most significant boosts came when our then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi made immunisation one of the five technology missions. India became a stellar example of vaccine production, delivery and last-mile logistics. The massive two centuries of progress in vaccination has come to naught, courtesy the monumental incompetence of the Narendra Modi government.

In 2004, when the tsunami struck the Indian Ocean, the government led by Manmohan Singh took a historic decision — he announced that India will not accept foreign aid, stating that India now possesses the resources and potential to take care of itself. India had reached a stage of development where it could take care of its own needs without external help. Post the 2004 tsunami, a massive cyclone adaptation exercise was initiated to create a vast infrastructure to safeguard people against such disasters. Subsequently, the Indian example of preparedness was cited globally as a country that could ward off the devastation unleashed by natural disasters.

Today, because of the missteps of the NDA government, India has again become an aid recipient, with almost 40 countries having donated to relief operations in India, stumbling from a donor to a receiver.

The image of India has suffered an unprecedented dent, which might take a generation to make amends. Two months ago, Indians were proudly announcing that as part of the Quad agreement, the country will produce one billion doses of the Covid vaccine to be primarily sent to the Indo-Pacific and that India will also take the lead in humanitarian assistance. Today, in May, this announcement is not even finding a mention as the world is trying to get its act together to help India.

Besides abandoning other countries where India was busy making commitments of aid and relief, the Union Government seems to have abandoned its own people and states as well. By asking states to purchase their own vaccines, the Union Government has abdicated on its responsibility and conceded a virtual defeat in governance. How can India now claim to be a global pharmacy or the world’s largest producer of vaccines when the government itself is now abandoning its own states during its darkest hour?

Handling the pandemic is the singular biggest failure of the Union Government since independence. Let me enumerate a few aspects. Despite its massive team of experts and Centrally funded institutes at disposal, the Union Government failed to anticipate and inform the states of the impending catastrophe. Individually, each state cannot and does not have the experts to deal with such situations. That is the reason why our first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had created the Central institutes.

If the early warning systems failed, so did the delivery systems. Out of the 320 ventilators supplied by the Union government to Punjab, over 280 are faulty. Oxygen supplies have failed to arrive, vaccines are in short supply, medicines are not available, and the situation is more or less the same with PPE kits. This amounts to criminal negligence.

Third, over-centralisation has meant that bureaucratic red-tape is holding up aid that is arriving from abroad. NRIs and international community have provided help, but it remains stuck in the Byzantine bureaucracy. The Punjab Chief Minister has repeatedly asked the Centre to consult the state governments while formulating their Covid plans because it is in the towns, cities, tehsils and districts that the plans have to be implemented. The Union Government can continue issuing advertisements, patting its own back, but it should listen to the states in order to save people’s lives.

Petty politics has overpowered national and humanitarian interests. The PM participated in political rallies, and he was featured prominently in what are described as super-spreader events. If he is encouraging tens of thousands of people to attend his events, how can we ask people to stay indoors?

I hope urgent measures are taken to remedy the situation. It should commence with a nationwide free vaccination campaign — the way so many successful immunisation campaigns have happened in the past. This should be a concomitant to expansion of domestic vaccine production. The PM will do his image no harm if he can allocate Rs 35,000 crore from the nebulous PM’s relief fund to this cause. The Union Government must immediately cease the controversial Central Vista project and divert these resources to combat the pandemic. It must also abandon the farm laws that will pauperise the farmers and abet profiteering. The government must quickly come out with a pan-India citizen relief package based around food supply and direct cash transfers for the poorest sections of our country.

In every previous crisis or blunder, PM Modi has escaped through his characteristic bluster. This was possible because he could control sections of the media. That influence is waning because journalists are seeing the distress of their fellow citizens first-hand. They refuse to buy into the government’s spin-doctoring. In fact, India has lost some of its finest journalists in the line of duty in the Covid pandemic. But this sacrifice will not go waste. Professor Amartya Sen wrote that an alert media can prevent a famine, citing the Bengal famine, when the colonial government tried its best to suppress information, but an active media ensured that the picture of death and government callousness reached the world. The Indian media’s selfless service in the last few months has firmly put the focus on this government’s incompetence in managing the crisis.

Modi should realise that the time for equivocations and obfuscations is gone. It is time to show real results.