'The Narendra Modi government is procuring 5,000 ventilators from a Rajkot-based firm which has already been accused of supplying breathing machines to Ahmedabad’s largest COVID-19 hospital that doctors there say are not up to the mark. The firm’s current and former promoters have had close associations with top BJP leaders – with at least one business family, The Wire has established, linked to the controversial gift of an expensive suit to Prime Minister Modi. This procurement is being done through state-run HLL Lifecare, according to Gujarat’s principal health secretary Jayanti Ravi.
'...As the number of COVID-19 deaths and new cases continues to surge in India, the media briefing by the health ministry on Wednesday was less about actual numbers and more about drawing a comparison to show how India apparently did better than the world in general and worst-affected nations in particular. But the ministry did not provide any comparisons between the number of tests conducted in India and other countries...'
'The much touted Rs. 20 lakh crore relief package announced by Prime Minister Modi and detailed by the Union finance minister has turned out not to be a relief package at all. Instead of offering a fiscal stimulus, she has urged enterprises of all sizes to borrow from banks to tide over the immediate crisis. To millions of poor people staring at prolonged starvation, all she has offered is an additional allocation for the MNREGA programme.
'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 number of Covid-19 deaths in Delhi has been under the scanner for discrepancies between the government figures and those the hospitals have reported, leading to an upwards revision to 115 until Thursday, 14 May. But now, data accessed by ThePrint raises new questions about even this revised number of deaths in the city. The consolidated figures for Covid-related deaths provided by the designated cremation and burial grounds in the national capital is 443, which includes confirmed as well as suspected cases...'
'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.
'To Narendra Modi, Covid-19 is not so much a disease as a deus ex machina. Before he announced the largest lockdown in human history on 24 March, the Indian prime minister was submerged in a pool of self-engineered crises. Citizenly protests against his legislative disfigurement of Indian secularism had erupted in every major city, more than four dozen lives were devoured at his doorstep in February in the worst religious bloodletting in Delhi since the 1984, unemployment was soaring, and the economy was poised to post the slowest pace of growth in a decade.
