“Even with the second wave, we are very clear that we are not going in for lockdowns in a big way. We don’t want to totally arrest the economy”, said India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday in a virtual meeting with World Bank Group President David Malpass.
While Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka, UP, Chhattisgarh continue to report higher number of daily Covid cases, India is facing a raging second wave, and Maharashtra and other States with serious cases have called for serious restrictions.
Several trade and industry associations have requested the government not to implement lockdown mode but go for restrictions instead. What the Finance Minister said has come as sigh of relief for many industries.
“The local level isolation of patients, or households which have people in quarantines are the methods through which the crisis will be handled, the second wave will be handled. There shall not be lockdown,” Sitharaman said.
But the statement from UK’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson seems to be in contrast with India’s Finance Minister.
Boris said “ the bulk work in reducing the disease (in UK) has been done by the lockdown”, on Tuesday. He stated that the sharp decrease in the death count due to covid-19 is largely because of implementing a 3-month lockdown in UK, and not the vaccination program.
The lockdown in England got over on Monday, and soon in the coming weeks the heavy lockdown will be lifted in Scotland, N.Ireland and Wales.
“As we unlock, the results will inevitably be that we will see more infections and sadly we will see more hospitalizations and death,” the PM warned.
This makes one wonder, ‘Is Lockdown the real life-saver?’ While Boris’ take on lockdown may work for his country, it certainly cannot work as well as it did for the UK, here. On the part of health and safety, it may help the country but it would collapse the newly attained economic progress.
India’s population is 1,380,004,385 (1.3 Billion) whereas UK’s total population is 67,886,011 (67.8 million). Tamil Nadu’s population alone exceeds the UK’s.
India has already been much affected by the previous Lockdown and many feel that another lockdown as serious as the early one cannot be borne by the people especially the poor, daily wage workers and the MSMEs.