It becomes more obvious by the day that our obstacles to tackling Covid-19 are as much attitudinal as practical. Attitudinal problems can c...
It becomes more obvious by the day that our obstacles to tackling Covid-19 are as much attitudinal as practical. Attitudinal problems can complicate the practical ones. For example, plain arithmetic indicated that on May 1, India was woefully short of vaccines to immunise everyone over 18. The programme to do so could only have been announced as a political ploy. It enabled the Union government to diffuse the challenge of procuring enough vaccines.
I wish to propose a change of mindset on three Covid-related issues. My first suggestion may seem banal: please remove the prime minister’s likeness from vaccination certificates. The Union government, whose tax-derived expenditure is consistently packaged as the prime minister’s personal bounty, has offloaded much of the burden of vaccinating the public to the states.
Uniquely in the world, there is no centralised control. The states are left free to fend for themselves, to fight and jostle, deflecting the citizens’ ire from the Union government. Social scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta has called this social Darwinism. A plainer term might be jungle law.
One of these days, the Supreme Court may compel the government to assume responsibility for the entire drive across India for all age groups, and arrange for wider vaccine...
