'In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on March 28 constituted a brand-new trust fund for public contributions – the Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations Fund, bearing the catchy acronym of the PM CARES Fund. On Friday, the Prime Minister’s Office refused to provide details about the Fund under the Right to Information Act, stating that PM CARES was not a “public authority” under the definition of the legislation.
'Non-banking finance companies, beware. India has a “non-banking finance minister” now. Nirmala Sitharaman, Union finance minister and the official town crier for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Rs 20 lakh crore” package, has been announcing loan after loan, which is being passed off as evidence of the government’s generosity or benevolence to tide the country over the Covid crisis... However, loans account for at least Rs 6.3 lakh crore of the Rs 10.7 lakh crore worth of announcements made in the first three days.
'...Testing, our Achilles heel, remains behind an iron curtain. The Indian Council for Medical Research, the organisation leading India’s fight against Covid-19 (especially with regards to testing), is a scientific research body. One would expect it to release readily accessible and detailed data on India’s testing numbers and trajectory using graphs and charts on its website. Instead, we see an almost inexplicable antipathy to sharing any sort of data. There is a single daily update on the total number of tests done in India.
'The Narendra Modi government announces a grand stimulus ‘package’ that it claims is worth Rs 20 lakh crore or ‘10 per cent’ of India’s GDP. But barely a fraction of it is new money being pumped into the economy. What is made to look like a stimulus is mostly a grand loan mela. The Modi government is making hungry migrant labourers pay train fare. When this became a political hot potato, it said it was paying 85 per cent per cent of the fare and the state governments were paying the rest 15 per cent.
'In less than a week after National Herald had exposed that the Delhi government has been fudging the death data, the Aam Aadmi Party-led government has stopped including the hospital-wise death data from the daily health bulletin. This will inevitably lead to more cover-ups in the death data from the National Capital and also enable the government to avoid questions about number of deaths in specific hospitals. Additionally, the government has also been under-reporting the number of Covid-19 patients on ventilators in hospitals...'
'Last week, The New Indian Express, one of India’s major English newspapers, pulled down an article that was heavily critical of the Centre’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak. The article, entitled ‘Centre’s COVID-19 Communication Plan: hold back data, gag agencies and scientists’, discussed the government’s reluctance to share outbreak-related data and attempts to muzzle scientists.
'In most developing countries, including India, the quality of data on the cause of death is very poor. This is because most people die in rural areas and at home, a medically certified death in a hospital is rare, and medical certificates more often than not are filled incorrectly. Dr Prabhat Jha, founding director of the Centre for Global Health Research in Toronto, is one of the world’s leading experts on mortality in India. He is a professor of disease control and an expert advisor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as well as various governments...'
'It is time to retire the trite stories about clear skies and clean rivers because of the economic lockdown triggered by the coronavirus pandemic. As environment ministers and state governments make it easier for businesses to restart, the toxic gas leak at LG Polymers’ polystyrene plant in Vizag — killing 11 people and exposing 1,100 to the styrene gas — has reminded the world of the folly of viewing environmental due diligence as an impediment to economic activity.
'When the Indian Council of Medical Research invited bids for the supply of rapid antibody test kits on March 25, it made an elementary mistake: it did not ask the bidding companies to produce an import licence. As a result, companies without a licence to import the kits submitted bids – and won. These distributing companies in turn subcontracted the order to an importer. This had a cascading effect on the price of the kits, with both the importer and the distributors factoring in a profit margin.
'On 26 April, in what can only be described as inadvertent whistle-blowing, a dispute between three private companies over the distribution of antibody kits in India revealed that the centre had allowed the costs of COVID-19 antibody tests to be inflated by nearly 145 percent. In a judgment that favoured none of the companies, it was the Indian Council of Medical Research that suffered the most. The court disclosed that the ICMR offered to pay Rs 30 crore for five lakh test kits, at an inflated price that offered a profit of Rs 18.75 crore to the intermediary companies.
