A STATE OF UNFEELING

It had been raining heavily in Unnao, an impoverished district in the hinterlands of Uttar Pradesh. The Ganga flows through it. The rain swelled the river and turned the banks into slush. The river gave up the dead—nine hundred putrefying corpses of villagers who had been buried in graves barely three feet deep. They were too poor to afford wood for the cremation. Before, wood for a pure cost around Rs 500. It now costs between Rs 1,500 and Rs 2,000, with priestly duties and samagris adding up to around Rs 10,000. The same week, over a dozen doctors who had been doing Covid-19 duty in the villages around quit. The reasons they gave were no surprise: official arrogance. After trudging through village streets and unpaved roads from noon till evening, risking their safety and that of their families by treating and examining coronavirus patients, the doctors had to return to the district headquarters several kilometres away to give their daily reports. The drug supply from the government was insufficient. The CMO and CMS insulted them regularly. They were blamed for the failure of the field teams to contact trace patients who had provided wrong phone numbers and addresses. In short, these two incidents sum up how the massive state of Uttar Pradesh tragically bungled the Covid-19 response.

The Centre has its share of blame for the terrifying debacle haunting India. But to absolve the states of ignorance, failure to perform, police highhandedness and corruption will be giving an incomplete picture of the unfolding horror. Stories of official neglect, corruption and lack of accountability by state governments and elected representatives of both BJP and other parties abounded in Delhi, Maharashtra. Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Kerala, Karnataka and Gujarat to name a few. Says BJP’s IT Cell chief Amit Malviya, “In India’s federal structure, delivery of health services is part of state’s responsibility. After the first wave, which was successfully contained under the overall guidance of the central government, states demanded a higher say, which they were given soon after. Despite repeated advisories, financial support and personal intervention of the PM, as early as Sept-Dec of 2020, neither did the states set up oxygen plants nor did ramp up medical infrastructure to handle the second wave. Not just this, they constantly used lockdowns, vaccine and vaccination drives as tool for scoring brownie points. The opposition relentlessly campaigned against indigenous vaccine, prompting people to opt out, leading to several deaths during the second wave.” Earlier, BJP National Secretary and spokesperson Mr Bijayant Panda Panda had made a similar point to the Guardian. He blamed the Maharashtra government for not bringing the Covid-19 caseload under control so that there would have been no chance for the emergence of the new variant that is roiling the state and the rest of the country now. Both BJP leaders have a point. True, the Narendra Modi led government, rejecting the advice of experts and scientists who do not parrot its narrative, misread the pandemic’s curve by miles. Mr. Modi’s stern lockdown brought down cases drastically and Health Minister Harsh Vardhan declared in March that India was "in the endgame" of the pandemic and Mr Modi was an "example to the world in international co-operation". In exhilaration, it exported millions of doses of vaccine as a foreign policy move, but failed to keep enough for Indians. There were more committees that oxygen plants, cylinders and concentrators, all spouting contradicting advice. As deaths and cases spiraled and oxygen became scarce, the Opposition and many non-BJP states trained their guns on the Union government targeting Mr. Modi himself. A senior Union Minister deplores this stance, “When the country is facing a once in a century crisis, Modiji has always tried to build Team India. Though the health is state subject, it did not only review and forewarn the states, but has been keeping a constantly dialogue with chief ministers. It is unfortunate that some people are trying to politicize the issue and pass the buck.”

The buck does stop at the desk of the CMs too. Delhi, the capital of India became a raging battlefield, both viral and political. Mr. Kejriwal announced free medicines, surgery and clinical care to the poor. But the lack of a strategy to implement water supply and sanitation in resettlement colonies and slums created a gigantic health crisis. Delhi Police, which has no experience in health care was given sole charge of public health enforcement. A critical reason why cases soared in the first wave was that rt-PCR testing pace was at tortoise speed—on 1 April, only around 2,500 samples were tested. Tracking pace crawled. Two weeks later, Delhi had double the number of laboratory confirmed positive cases than next-door Rajasthan. If cases had been detected on time, prevention, treatment and containment would have been far more successful. Delhi and the Centre do share a dismal mistake; both failed to utilise the lockdown to expand medical care infrastructure. Delhi mismanaged its resources. Otherwise, when the second wave struck, many more quarantine centres and temporary hospitals for critical patients would have come up by now. The Delhi high court accused the state Government of “behaving like the ostrich with its head in the sand” by refuting that the medical infrastructure was not a car crash. By mid-June 2020, there were only 8,000 Covid beds to treat 19 million Delhi residents. Medical personnel were woefully short. The ward committees were not asked educate and inspire citizens to help the government effort—Covid misinformation had spread fear among the people. Politics mucked up the response—the state government circled its wagons and was not charitable with facts, while it did not question the Centre or demand its help as a federal right. The state health department did not strengthen the mohalla clinics nor were thet monitored regularly. ASHAs were not linked to them to give the poor better access and facilities. Members of marginalised communities who suddenly found themselves jobless did not get food. Handing over public health work entirely to police was a mistake and it was disillusioning. In short, failing to build on trust and popularity, neglecting a public health approach that could have helped cope with the problem with limited medical care facilities was a fault. Delhi’s population is around 2 crore, which means its total vaccine requirement is about 4 crore. At Rs 250 a jab, the Delhi government’s vaccination bill will be around Rs 1000 crores. Apart from floating a global tender to buy vaccines, it has announced only Rs 50 crore. If the Centre had ‘Vaccine Maitri,’ the Delhi government announced ’Aam Aadmi Free Covid Vaccine’, that smacked of political credit. After the Supreme Court’s order to supply oxygen to Delhi, the Kejriwal government received 730 MT of oxygen and offered to give the surplus to needy states. For over a month, the city’s health infrastructure plunged into unimaginable chaos as oxygen ran out, beds and medication were unavailable, and scores of people died every day. The present oxygen crisis in Delhi hospitals has occurred despite the Delhi government purchasing 4,500 oxygen cylinders and tanks. An RTI application filed by activist Vivek Pandey revealed that between July 2020 and April 2021, the state government did not buy a single ventilator or set up enough

oxygen plants and hire the necessary number of oxygen tankers to supply hospitals. Says Panda, “The efficacy of state governments in dealing with the pandemic and especially the second surge has varied dramatically. For instance, Assam and Delhi demonstrate the sharp contrast. Assam installed all the 8 oxygen plants funded by the union government last year, arranged for cryogenic tankers for storage, transport & distribution, it added hospital ICU beds & Ventilators, & also placed orders for large quantities of Remdesivir, which is why it has not seen any panic about any of these issues. On the other hand Delhi could manage to install only one of the 8 O2 plants funded by the union govt. neither did Delhi arrange for Cryogenic tanks to receive & distribute O2, nor did it add even a single new ventilator or ICU bed, let alone ordering Remdesivir or vaccines.’

As the crisis worsened in Delhi, the Grim Reaper scythed through Uttar Pradesh which had gone into deial—Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath denied an oxygen scarcity in the state and threatened to arrest anyone who claimed so. A young man who appealed for an oxygen cylinder on Twitter was booked by the cops. The state was a pandemic nightmare of neglect, police intimidation, questionable data dissemination and political and bureaucratic mismanagement. A common refrain heard in the streets, hospitals and on social media was that ministers and MLAs were nowhere to be seen—they refused to step out for fear of catching the virus, leaving people to fend for themselves. Nepotism was a problem in the state as it is elsewhere in the country. Anuj Awa sthi , a local reporter of Kanwhizz Times in Rae Bareilli had written that the district’s oxygen supplies were being diverted to a larger city. The Yogi government issued him a show-cause notice.

Intimidation was the first response by Mr. Adityanath who ordered officials to use national security laws to seize property from anyone they deemed spread rumors about shortages to “spoil the atmosphere.” The atmosphere ha already already been spoiled and how. In Varanasi, Prime Minister Modi’s constituency, the state administration failed to anticipate the second wave which is playing hell with the moribund health system of UP. The BBC reported what the Indian TV channels did not—that patients could not find hospital beds, oxygen, or ambulances, and it takes a week to get a rc-PCR test. Most pharmacies have run out of basic medicines like vitamins, zinc and paracetamol. "With the most basic medicines in short supply, people are even taking expired drugs. They say it's a little less effective, but at least it's something," a local medical professional told the reporter. The return of migrants for Holi on 29 March was a major cause for the pandemic’s second wave. Rejecting advice from health experts, the state government went ahead with panchayat elections on 18 April—over 700 teachers on poll duty died of the virus. A Varanasi resident drove 30 kilometers every day to stand in line for up to five hours to refill an oxygen cylinder meant for his ailing aunt. The Allahabad high court ordered a week's lockdown in Varanasi on 19 April, saying the pandemic had "virtually incapacitated our medical infrastructure" which UP challenged in the Supreme Court and won. With the district administration imposing intermittent weekend curfews and with most businesses and shops shut from fear, thousands are losing their livelihoods and the virus is still spreading. The question over numbers Varanasi has so far recorded 70,612 infections and 690 deaths. But 46,280 - or 65% - cases were recorded since 1 April. The official Covid death toll for the district hovers most days around 10-11. On Sunday, the government data put it at 16. But everyone I spoke to in Varanasi dismissed these numbers as a fiction. A long-time city resident, who lives close to the Harishchandra and Manikarnika ghats - the two main cremation areas on the banks of Ganges river - says funeral pyres have been burning non-stop for the past month. 'Wherever you look, you see ambulances and bodies' Deadly Covid wave rips through small-town India Earlier, the two locations between them would have 80-90 cremations a day, but for the past month, the resident said, he believed the number has risen to roughly 300-400 a day. "How do you explain this increase?" he asked. "These people are also dying of something? Most reports say they had a cardiopulmonary failure. How are so many people, including young healthy individuals, suddenly dying from a heart attack?"

In 2013, Swami Sobhan Sarkar , a local sadhu in Unnao dreamed that King Rao Ram Baksh Singh, who had participated in the 1857 Mutiny, buried 10000 tons of gold under his fort. Sarkar managed to persuade Union Minister Charan Das Mahant of the Congress party to get the ASI to become gold diggers. At around 2 pm on 18 October, digging beganm but gave up the search after finding no treasure. The current MP is another godman, Swami Sachchidanand Hari Sakshi Ji Maharaj. The tragic story of Unnao is that under the rain sodden dreams of development, there is only fool’s gold.

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