There have already been many similarities between the two events that have influenced the economy and people’s lives like none else. Both were announced in a jiffy, arbitrarily and without due process of consultations. Both came into effect in the dead of night and without any notice, with the drama element remaining as a major highlight.

Both began with a lot of hype, and as things stand today, will probably end with a painful anti-climax.

The initial hype over the Covid lockdown is fizzling out, with many of the assumptions going awry. The NITI Aayog, obviously in a command performance, had come out with a report claiming that the lockdown slowed down the rate of transmission and increased the doubling time, which is the period it takes for the number of cases to double, to about 10 days. Both claims have been proved wrong.

Most embarrassingly, the report prepared by V K Paul, NITI Aayog member and head of a key government empowered committee on medical management, had predicted that the country would hit its peak infection from May 3, with the daily addition of new cases at slightly above 1,500, which would then drop to 1,000 cases by May 12, and down to zero by May 16.

Mid-May was the time when the lockdown was extended to its fourth phase as the disease showed no signs of containment. The number of cases has crossed the one-lakh mark, which is multiples of what the NITI Aayog had predicted and touted by the Union health ministry to establish the success of the lockdown.

The lockdown has, of course, helped, without which the infection rate would have been much higher. But the most worrying part is that we seem to be nowhere near the peak, as hotspots in Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat are showing consistent deterioration, increasing the risk of community infection in a big way as the country implements graded withdrawal of the lockdown.

Just as the government failed to anticipate the full dimensions of the reverse migration of workers from the urban to the rural in the wake of the lockdown, it has also made a fateful oversight of the impact of their return to their homes on the containment of the disease itself.

The government had itself informed the Supreme Court that there was a possibility that 3 out of 10 migrant workers going back to their respective villages carrying the deadly virus along with them. But while trying to impress the court with the basic amenities being provided to the migrant labour facing dislocation, the government had also quoted a figure of about 23 lakh workers on the move.

By a simple calculation, this alone will add about 7 lakh new cases to the total number of infections, throwing all government assumptions on the spread potential of the deadly virus into disarray. It is doubtful if the government had thought through this problem in its Covid defence plans as the migrant labourers were never a part of the official scheme of things. This, in fact, has added an unknown quantity to the Modi government’s failure in coming up with a proper response to the lockdown blues.

The highly urbanised containment strategy being pursued by the government in fighting the infection has failed to adequately consider the serious risk of the infection going out of control when the migrants return to their home bases, which do not have the proper infrastructure to handle a pandemic. Concepts like social distancing and quarantine are as impractical and unrealistic as they are alien to the rural setting. The results are not impossible to see.

While such flip-flops in the containment strategy will cost the nation dearly, the response of the Modi government in terms of a stimulus package to deal with the fallout of the lockdown on the country’s economy and people’s lives has been a complete flop, as empty as the vessels that Prime Minister Modi wanted the public to use to create the din that was supposed to applaud the health workers of the country for their selfless service.

It was indeed a noble gesture to salute our frontline health warriors. But real economic problems are not solved through symbols and gestures, which is what the Modi government is attempting to do. (IPA Service)