Opinion: Is lockdown a solution amid crumbling health infrastructure?

India reported 1,61,736 new Covid-19 cases and 879 deaths in the last 24 hours. As of now, India’s active Covid-19 cases stand at 12,64,698, while 1,22,53,697 people have recovered from disease so far.

At this juncture, social media is abuzz with pictures and videos of blaring ambulances, queues outside hospitals, multiple pyres being burnt in crematorium and similar horrifying sites.

So, a question of everyone’s mind is – are we inching towards another lockdown?

The answer to it lies in the government, whose apathy and gross negligence is widely visible to see on the streets of the country, be it in Mumbai, Lucknow or Surat.

A government, which should have ideally prepared a robust health infrastructure in all these months since last year, remained busy in thumping it back or preparing for some or the other election. If the credit for declining Covid-19 cases went to the ‘visionary leadership’ of one individual why not this blame of today’s ghastly, dreadful situation also go to him?

Or will we keep ourselves busy with the vastly overused excuse of – why should government only do everything? The answer to that would be, health is a state subject. We pay taxes for receiving good health facilities. If government won’t or can’t take care of the health of its citizens in such a situation of global pandemic, what else is it good for?

This wave of pandemic shouldn’t have caught us off guard, there were enough indications from different countries about how bad it might get. But still we choose to ignore them.

Now that the governments – both of many states and the centre, have failed us the citizens badly, are we going to now again witness a lockdown. Will it again lead to labourers going hundreads and thousands of kilometers on foot once again?

As per indication, a lockdown is most likely in Maharashtra from April 15. Even in UP’s capital, a minister had warned of imposing the Weekend lockdown. In Delhi, while CM Arvind Kejriwal has clarified that a lockdown won’t be approach, the national capital already has night lockdown and more restrictions might get imposed in days to come.

Meanwhile, Kejriwal has also requested for the postponement of CBSE board exams. He also said that according to reports available with him, 13,500 cases have been reported in the last 24 hours in Delhi, which in itself is record high.

So in days to come, we can witness a lot many changes happening around us, all thanks to governments which kept sleeping till people started to die on streets. However, elections as we can see may continue as it is.