How India became the world’s COVID-19 capital

How India became the world’s COVID-19 capital

Day and night, the ambulance sirens sound on Indian streets thousands of kilometers apart. Over the last month, the coronavirus pandemic has turned into a tidal wave. Hospitals overrun by floods of patients, people dying for want of an oxygen cylinder, social media a ticker tape of SOS calls, crematorium fires burning 24 hours a day, abandoned corpses washing up on the banks of the Ganga — the scenes are horrifying and have captured the attention of the entire world. It is the worst public health crisis in the history of independent India. No one who has lived through it will ever forget it — or entirely recover from it. And every Indian is asking: How did we get here? For, although a pandemic is a biological entity and to some extent inescapable, the way it spreads has a very significant social component. So significant that sometimes economic well-being is sacrificed in order to contain it. In fact, that was precisely the message conveyed by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi in March last year, when, with just a few hours’ notice, he enforced the world’s strictest pandemic lockdown. This March, though, as cases began to rise again, Modi and his