COVID-19: Prominent names who feel the lockdown may be a failure in India

Former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan, in an interview with Bloomberg, said the lockdown may not be enough to prevent the virus from spreading and will lead to immense hardship for the poor of the country.

“This is a serious concern because not only does the lockdown keep people from going to work, it keeps them at home which is not necessarily that pristine isolated place, but can also be a slum where people live together,” Rajan was quoted as saying the Bloomberg report.

Rajan, in fact, added the magnitude of the problem will only increase in the locked down India as the country lacks infrastructure needed to deal with an issue like COVID-19. He insisted on using all resources to tackle the crisis.

Rajiv Bajaj, in an interview with Business Standard, termed the lockdown unnecessary saying that it will only lead to disruption at the least. “The best-case scenario is eight weeks of disruption. Nobody knows what the worst is,” he was quoted as saying in the report.

According to Bajaj, the lockdown will be ineffective as most people at high-risk are above 65. “When 99.9 per cent of the most vulnerable are above 65, I see no logic in this sweeping lockdown in a country in which 94 per cent are below 65. We should have kept the seniors home, closed public spaces, and allowed the rest of us to keep life moving forward,” he said, as quoted in the report.

Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, in an interview with The Indian Express, said that the lockdown may slow down the spread of the virus but the government would find it difficult to control once it enters the urban slums.

They also highlighted that unless the virus is completely eradicated within the 21-day lockdown, which seems unlikely, the cases might increase when it is lifted, the report added.

According to them, another challenge in achieving complete control over the virus is that unknown carriers can spread it to people not related to them.

Jayaprakash Muliyil, a well-known Indian epidemiologist, formerly associated with CMC, Vellore, who has deeply studied data trends of diseases and past outbreaks like SARS, says India’s lockdown efforts may not immediately show a flattening of the curve, adding that sustained efforts for containment will be necessary.

“India has a very diverse population. For many, survival is an important priority – day to day work, looking after children, finding job, earning money. In this, we have a challenge - How many people actually understand what is going on? The information that trickles down to rural India is very often sketchy. Even amongst educated people, the actual mental picture of the disease and its transmission is rather sketchy," said Muliyil.