“You cannot be interested only in business and not about sufferings of people," the Supreme Court said without mincing words, while seeking the Centre’s response to a petition seeking waiver of interest on loan repayments for the period of moratorium announced in the wake of Covid-19, the lockout and its aftermath.

"The problem has been created by your lockdown. This is also not the time to consider about the business. The plight of people has to be considered also. You have to tell us your stand on two things: disaster management act and if the interest on interest will be accounted for," Justice Ashok Bhushan said.

Opposition parties have been saying the same thing, but the government said they were playing politics. It is unlikely that Ravishankar Prasad and company would dare to impute political motives to the Supreme Court.

In fact, the government has been acting like a middleman, at best as an agent, advising businesses, and people, to take loans from banks, for which it said adequate resources have been provided to the banks. The government will have no stake in it. The banks lend the money at their own risk. If the banks earn more, the government will have it both ways, as the banks are mainly owned by it. If they fail, it can leave it to the RBI.

The court said that the government "cannot hide" behind the RBI, which has said that there cannot be an interest waiver during moratorium on term loan repayment as such a move will put the financial health and stability of banks at risk.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has blamed the situation on an ‘act of God’, expressing the inability of the government and disclaiming any role. But, the fact is that it was an ‘act of man’, rather one man, that worsened the problem.

The ‘act’ performed in furtherance of Prime Minister Modi’s eagerness to beat the developed world not only failed to contain the infection, but created untold problems for the people and the economy. The bravado did not last long.

By hindsight, the timing of the announcement of lockdown went so terribly wrong that it was premature and only helped the faster spread of the infection rather than its containment. Worse, when there should have been an effective lockdown in force, we had already been in the Unlock phase. No wonder, the Covid situation today is what and where it is currently.

A Boston Review article on India’s Covid response said it exhibited “a perverse politics of visibility: draconian on high-profile measures such as lockdown, weak on the measures that are less easily observed. The government’s inadequate and impetuous management of the pandemic reflects an effort to win international approval by following the paradigm of advanced economies, without heeding the ethical urgency of providing a robust program of relief, both medical and economic.”

The article, authored by Debraj Ray and S Subramanian, noted that in advanced economies, the cost of a lockdown has been described as “merely” a dramatic reduction in overall economic activity, but for India, with its great sectoral and occupational vulnerabilities, this dramatic reduction is more than economics: it is also the spectre of lives lost—not from Covid-19, but from the severe economic and social dislocations.

The article argues that the Indian government has succumbed to the bias of visibility.”For elites a draconian lockdown is not too difficult to implement, logistically and politically. For the overwhelmingly large and relatively marginal constituency that fails to register on the visibility scale—the casual worker, the dislocated migrant, the subsistence farmer—what needs to be done is far more difficult. That includes upgrading the medical infrastructure to meet the COVID-19 challenge; maintaining essential health facilities to preserve existing preventive and palliative measures against other morbidities; and providing extensive social security to those adversely impacted by the lockdown”.

As the virus now begins to tighten its noose in India, the harder options look unlikely to ever be implemented—the inevitable corollary of a policy that prioritizes visibility above other goals, the article concluded. (IPA Service)