Devesh Kapur on COVID-19 pandemic in India

“At the same time, given India’s population density, the cramped and squalid conditions in which tens of millions people live, not only will social distancing have limited effectiveness (household members of every infected person will be at high risk), but the loss of livelihoods and access to basic necessities will impose significant human costs. The short-term tradeoff between lives and livelihoods is manifest and nobody really knows where the precise balance lies. Too limited a lockout period risks the lives of potentially hundreds of thousands of people; too restrictive a lockout could result in the eruption of serious social unrest.”

“The threat from a rapid diffusion of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) initially threatened to become India’s most severe health crisis since the Spanish Flu, which killed almost 15 million people a century ago. Increasingly, however, it is spiraling into an economic crisis and could easily spin out of control into a humanitarian crisis. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech conveyed a clear sense of the gravity of the situation. Given the structural constraints — India’s population density, weak health and sanitation infrastructure, and limited resources more generally — the need to slow the spread of infection is paramount. Whether the decision to lockdown the country for 21 days should have come earlier, should have been made with more preparation, should have been longer or shorter in duration, will be intensely debated, but its need is unequivocal.”