India's Covid Crisis Decimates Country's Middle Class

[Riaz Haq]

Indian economy shrank 7.3% in fiscal year 1920-21, its worst performance since independence in 1947. Nearly 230 million middle class Indians have slipped below the poverty line, constituting a 15 to 20% increase in poverty since Covid-19 struck last year, according to Pew Research. Middle class consumption has been a key driver of economic growth in India. Erosion of the middle class will likely have a significant long-term impact on the country's economy. “India, at the end of the day, is a consumption story,” says Tanvee Gupta Jain, UBS chief India economist, according to Financial Times. “If you never recovered from the 2020 wave and then you go into the 2021 wave, then it’s a concern.”  

India's Economic Performance Since Independence. Source: Bloomberg

Mainstream Indian media have long been afraid to cover the incompetence and failures of Prime Minister Modi's government. But this is finally changing with the COVID pandemic hitting India's newsrooms. Dozens of Indian reporters and their family members have died after being infected with coronavirus. 

Middle Class Decline in India, China. Source: Pew Research

The disastrous turn in the situation on the ground couple with the change in media coverage have brought focus on Modi government's failed policies in handling the deepening health crisis and its devastating impact. The images of large numbers of people gasping for breath and dying on the streets for lack of oxygen have shocked the world. The covid crisis has exposed the hollowness of India's super-power delusions fed by the country's western boosters who see it as a counterweight to China. An example of such western propaganda is a recent novel by retired US Admiral Janes Stavirides. 

Increase in Debt-to-GDP Ratio During Pandemic. Source: Business Sta...

Prime Minister Modi's government has taken on significant debt to cope with the crisis of covid pandemic. As a result, India's debt-to-gp has increased 17% to 89.3%, the third highest among emerging economies. By contrast, Pakistan's debt-to-gdp has risen by a mere 1.6% to 87.2% during the pandemic, according to figures released by the IMF.  

Modi's Hindutva Rate of Growth in India

The authors of "2034: A Novel of the Next World War" portray Indians as heroes whose statesmen-ship de-escalates World War III, negotiates peace and helps India emerge as the new global superpower. Patel, the Indian uncle character of the Indian-American deputy national security advisor Sandeep Chowdhury tells him, "America’s hubris has finally gotten the better of its greatness." The authors imagine the United Nations headquarters moves from New York to Mumbai after the war. Had this book been written after watching thousands of Indian victims of COVID19 gasping for breath and dying daily on the streets of New Delhi, I think Ackerman and Stavridis would have conceived  and developed a completely different plot line for their novel.  

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[Riaz Haq]

#India’s Biggest Job Creators Being Killed by #COVID19 #Pandemic. Small businesses employ over 110 million workers & are the nation’s biggest non-farm employer. Their revival is key to getting jobs on track for domestic demand and #GDP growth. #Modi. #BJP https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-09/india-s-biggest-...

Small businesses may be the bedrock of the Indian economy, helping expand its industrial base and creating jobs by the millions, but the pandemic has shown it’s better to be bigger, according to research by Societe Generale.

The so-called micro-, small-, and medium-enterprises haven’t benefited much from the government’s stimulus steps such as liquidity and loan moratorium, forcing them to let go a large swathe of their employees, Kunal Kundu, an economist with Societe Generale GSC Pvt. in Bengaluru, wrote in the report. While the bigger companies sailed through with a minor blip, he said.

Read: $277 Billion Package May Not Give Immediate Boost to India

Given that small enterprises account for more than 110 million workers and are the nation’s biggest non-farm employer, Kundu said their revival is key to getting jobs on track, and, in turn, domestic demand.

Here’s how Kundu sees small companies faring poorly compared to larger ones:

MSMEs, which have a much higher staff cost-to-sales ratio, saw a 10.5 percentage point drop in the ratio between the second and fourth quarters of 2020, while the drop for the larger companies was only around 5 percentage point
Despite large-scale layoffs, MSME’s margins continued to suffer not just because of high and rising input costs, but also because of a sharp increase in their financing cost
Small businesses also face a double whammy on the tax front. Currently, these businesses are liable to pay consumption tax as soon as they raise an invoice, irrespective of whether or not the invoices have been settled. Failure to pay goods and services tax, in turn, leads to an additional burden in the form of penalties

[Riaz Haq]

#Indian Rupee Slides Toward Year’s Low as #India’s Trade Deficit Widens. India’s widening trade deficit & elevated commodity prices are bearing down on the #currency , reinforcing a recent downward trend pushing it toward a new low for the year.- Bloomberg


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-11/rupee-slides-tow...

https://twitter.com/haqsmusings/status/1414378178777272322?s=20


After months of wild volatility in the rupee, India’s widening trade deficit and elevated commodity prices are bearing down on the currency, reinforcing a recent downward bias and pushing it toward a new low for the year.

That’s the view of traders who’ve seen the rupee whipsaw from being Asia’s best performer in the first quarter to its worst in April when another wave of Covid-19 infections took hold.

This volatility and the prospect of tapering by the Federal Reserve have also reduced the attractiveness of India’s currency for carry trades, adding to its headwinds.

“We expect oil and broader commodity complex prices to remain elevated in the short term, which will weigh on India’s trade balance,” said Standard Chartered Plc’s Parul Mittal Sinha. “We maintain a bearish view on the rupee,” said Sinha, who heads the bank’s India financial markets and macro trading for South Asia.

Standard Chartered and RBL Bank Ltd. forecast the currency to depreciate to 76 per dollar by year-end, while their peers at Deutsche Bank AG have a slightly less pessimistic projection of 75.

The rupee closed at 74.6350 on Friday while Brent crude, the benchmark for India’s oil imports, was around $76 per barrel, up more than 45% since the start of the year.

Amid the devastating human toll that the coronavirus is taking in India, the rate of increase in new infections is slowing, which is improving the prospects for reopening the economy. But as the Covid curve flattens and consumers and businesses become more active, demand for imports is also set to increase, weighing on the currency.

Updated trade data due Thursday are expected to confirm the deficit widened to $9.4 billion in June, from $6.3 billion in May. Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd. estimates that billion dollar deficits will continue and average in the “double digits” as the economy reopens.

Technical indicators also point to further depreciation of the currency given dollar-rupee’s moving average convergence-divergence gauge, a measure of momentum, remains above zero in bullish territory. The pair has room to run before reaching resistance at April’s peak of 75.3362.

Yet even RBL Bank’s domestic markets head Anand Bagri, who expects the rupee to weaken, sees pockets of support for the currency, including inflows for equity offerings.

Notable among these is a $1.3 billion initial share salesfrom Zomato Ltd., and Paytm’s bid for shareholder approval of a $2.2 billion stock sale that would set in motion the process for the country’s largest ever debut.

The Reserve Bank of India also has $600 billion of currency reserves to draw on to curb any sharp fall in the rupee.

‘”We expect the RBI to remain proactive with its FX intervention strategy to ensure limited volatility in the rupee and to prevent excessive rupee depreciation from feeding into inflation,” said Kaushik Das, chief India economist at Deutsche Bank.

[Riaz Haq]

Sashi Tharoor: #India besieged by #Covid19, rising #poverty, falling #GDP growth & tensions with #China & #Pakistan. #Modi's embrace of the #Quad with the #US, #Japan and #Australia should be seen in this light: it is shield, more than sword https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3140393/coronavirus-... via @scmpnews

The Hindu nationalist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) government in India led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi marked the seventh anniversary of its ascent to power a little over a month ago without any of its customary fanfare. The subdued air around the government’s conduct reveals a country in many ways under siege.
First of all, the deadly coronavirus has besieged India, with the authorities’ response to a devastating second wave bordering between the inept and the irresponsible. So far, close to 400,000 people have lost their lives, though unofficial estimates place the toll much higher. More than 30 million people have been infected; many have had to struggle for basic supplies of medicines and oxygen in the last three months, as hospitals overflowed and the health-care system buckled under the pressure. Only 4 per cent of Indians are fully vaccinated, the government having failed to order sufficient doses even while it was boasting that it had done the world a favour by preventing a major calamity.
Next, the economy is under siege. The GDP growth rate has cratered, thanks in part (but not only) to the draconian nationwide lockdown imposed in March 2020 and fitfully renewed since. Some 75 million people were pushed below the poverty line in 2020 and 97 per cent of Indians reported becoming poorer during the last year. Unemployment figures are at the highest levels ever recorded. Tens of thousands of micro, small and medium enterprises (especially those employing fewer than twenty people) have been forced to close. India’s middle class is estimated to have shrunk by 32 million in the last year. It is clear that both lives and livelihoods have been in jeopardy since the Modi government’s re-election in May 2019.

[Riaz Haq]

#Indians Sell Their #Gold As #Covid 2nd Wave Pushes Millions Into Poverty. Many Indians who had clawed their way out of poverty face grim job prospects as #lockdowns crippled the #economy. #Modi #BJP #Hindutva #Islamophobia #coronavirus #pandemic https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/coronavirus-indians-sell-their-gold... via @ndtv

Paul Fernandes, a 50-year-old waiter in India, last year took out a loan using his gold as collateral to pay for his children's education after losing his job on a cruise liner. This year, he is selling his gold jewelry to meet expenses, after failed attempts at starting a home business and finding another job.
"A gold loan is after all a debt that I am taking on," he said from his hometown in the coastal state of Goa. "Selling my jewelry means I am not obligated to pay someone back along with an additional interest on that."

With the pandemic pushing millions into poverty or bankruptcy, many Indians are now turning to their last resort: selling their gold jewelry to make ends meet. In rural India, the biggest bullion buyer, a brutal new wave of the virus has had a catastrophic impact on the economy and incomes. With fewer banks around, people in rural areas rely on gold in times of need as it can be easily liquidated.

The likelihood of financial distress caused by the second wave is much higher and it could lead to more outright sales of gold, unlike in 2020, when consumers chose to take out loans against their stash of the metal, according to Chirag Sheth, a consultant at London-based Metals Focus Ltd.

Gross scrap supplies, which include old gold melted to make new designs, may exceed 215 tons and surge to the highest in nine years if a new wave emerges, he said. For a nation that imports almost all its gold mainly from Switzerland, higher local supply will also limit overseas inflows.

"You already had a financial problem last year and you got out of that problem through gold loans. Now again, you are having financial problems this year with a potentially third wave on the way, which can again mean lockdowns and job losses," said Sheth. "We can expect distress sales in a big way in August and September when the third wave could actually set in."

Many Indians who had clawed their way out of poverty face grim job prospects as lockdowns crippled the economy. More than 200 million have gone back to earning less than minimum wage, or $5, a day.

Signs of Distress

In an initial sign of stress among consumers, Manappuram Finance Ltd., one of the nation's biggest gold loan providers, auctioned 4.04 billion rupees ($54 million) of gold in the three months through March from loans that turned sour following a sharp drop in prices.

That compares with just 80 million rupees auctioned in the prior nine-month period. The jewelry was sold as Manappuram's borrowers -- typically daily wage earners, small time entrepreneurs, and farmers -- couldn't afford to repay the money.

[Riaz Haq]

#India’s #Economic Recovery Stumbles with decline in both #manufacturing and #services sectors, which contribute more than two-thirds of India’s #GDP (gross domestic product). #COVID19 #BJP #Modi #economy #pandemic https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-28/india-s-recovery...

India’s economy showed signs of cooling in June as the slow easing of localized lockdowns hurt activity, a factor likely to encourage monetary policy makers meeting next week to consider keeping interest rates at record lows to foster a durable recovery.

Contractions in both manufacturing and services sectors, which contribute more than two-thirds of India’s gross domestic product, pulled the needle on an overall activity indicator to 5 from 6, a level not seen since February and the first downward shift since May 2020 data. The gauge uses a three-month weighted average to smooth out volatility, and a move left signifies loss of momentum.

[Riaz Haq]

#India's staggering COVID-19 death toll could be 6 million, by far the highest #COVID19 death toll in the world -- greater than the #US at more than 811,000. #Modi #BJP #pandemic #Delta #OmicronVariant - ABC News - https://abcn.ws/30UZSLO via @ABC

New research suggests that India’s COVID-19 death toll during its first and second waves might have been significantly undercounted, with the actual number potentially 12 times higher than the official stats -- over 6 million people.

That would be by far the highest COVID death toll in the world -- greater than the U.S. at more than 811,000.

India was devastated by a crushing wave of the delta variant in April and May, with supply shortages, makeshift clinics and images of funeral pyres burning nonstop.

There was a sense at the time that the number of deaths was an undercount and a study in July indicated that deaths could be 10 times the official toll, although that research had limitations.

MORE: EXPLAINER: Why India's pandemic data is vastly undercounted
The new study, by researchers in the U.S. and India from the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy, a public health research institute in Washington, D.C., indicates that the “reported COVID-19 deaths greatly underestimated pandemic-associated mortality” and was particularly acute among older and poorer people.

According to government statistics, India logged 478,007 COVID-19 deaths from the beginning of the pandemic, marked at Jan. 3, 2020 to Dec. 21, 2021, and nearly 35 million cases during that time.

The study -- which is focused on the Chennai District on the country's southeast coast -- indicates the number is likely much higher, finding that that the death rate there was 5.2 per 1,000, "a 41% increase over typical mortality levels in the city.”


The study uses data on "all-cause mortality" within the district, i.e. the death rate from all causes of death for the population in the given time period are considered.

“On the nationwide figures, the 5.2 deaths per 1000 resident would indicate over 6 million deaths nationwide if the results could be extrapolated to the entire country,” Professor Ramanan Laxminarayan, an economist and epidemiologist and the study's lead author, told ABC News. He is the founder of the University of Washington's Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy in DC, which contributed to the project.

Deaths were substantially higher in older age groups.

Greater increases in mortality were observed in communities with lower socioeconomic status during the second wave of infections from March 1-June 30, 2021, but not during the first.

Laxminarayan said that there were limitations to the study -- Chennai, as an urban area, might have been more affected than many parts of the country which were rural.

“But by the same token, Chennai has some of the best public health and healthcare facilities in the country and so the mortality rates in Chennai were likely lower than in other parts of the country,” he added.

The study notes that the true burden of disease is still “uncertain” due to restrictions in disease surveillance and a lack of official death records.

[Riaz Haq]

In last 5 years under #Modi, income of poorest 20% #Indians fell 53%, the 2nd lowest quintile (lower middle class) saw 32% decline in their household income. Upper middle (20%) & richest (20%) saw their household income rise by 7% and 39% respectively #BJP https://indianexpress.com/article/india/income-of-poorest-fifth-plu...

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While the pandemic brought economic activity to a standstill for at least two quarters in 2020-21 and resulted in a 7.3% contraction in GDP in 2020-21, the survey shows that the pandemic hit the urban poor most and eroded their household income.

Splitting the population across five categories based on income, the survey shows that while the poorest 20% (first quintile) witnessed the biggest erosion of 53%, the second lowest quintile (lower middle category), too, witnessed a decline in their household income of 32% in the same period. While the quantum of erosion reduced to 9% for those in the middle income category, the top two quintiles — upper middle (20%) and richest (20%)— saw their household income rise by 7% and 39% respectively.

The survey shows that the richest 20% of households have, on average, added more income per household and more pooled income as a group in the past five years than in any five-year period earlier since liberalisation. Exactly the opposite has happened for the poorest 20% of households — on average, they have never actually seen a decrease in household income since 1995. Yet, in 2021, in a huge knockout punch caused by Covid, they earned half as much as they did in 2016.

How disruptive this distress has been for those at the bottom of the pyramid is reinforced by the fact that in the previous 11-year period between 2005 and 2016, while the household income of the richest 20% grew by 34%, the poorest 20% saw their household income surge by 183% at an average annual growth rate of 9.9%.

Coming in the run-up to the Budget, the task for the Government is cut out.

“As the Finance Minister is finalising her budget proposals for 2022-23 to give shape to the roadmap for economic revival of the country,” said Rajesh Shukla, MD and CEO, PRICE, “we need a K-shaped policy too that addresses the two ends of the spectrum and a lot more thinking on how to build the bridge between the two.”

[Riaz Haq]

#India Is Stalling the #WHO's Efforts to Make Global #Covid #Death Toll Public. Over a third of the additional 9 million deaths are estimated to have occurred in India, where the government of PM #Modi has stood by its own count of about 520,000. #BJP
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/16/health/global-covid-deaths-who-i...

An ambitious effort by the World Health Organization to calculate the global death toll from the coronavirus pandemic has found that vastly more people died than previously believed — a total of about 15 million by the end of 2021, more than double the official total of six million reported by countries individually.

But the release of the staggering estimate — the result of more than a year of research and analysis by experts around the world and the most comprehensive look at the lethality of the pandemic to date — has been delayed for months because of objections from India, which disputes the calculation of how many of its citizens died and has tried to keep it from becoming public.

More than a third of the additional nine million deaths are estimated to have occurred in India, where the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has stood by its own count of about 520,000. The W.H.O. will show the country’s toll is at least four million, according to people familiar with the numbers who were not authorized to disclose them, which would give India the highest tally in the world, they said. The Times was unable to learn the estimates for other countries.

The W.H.O. calculation combined national data on reported deaths with new information from localities and household surveys, and with statistical models that aim to account for deaths that were missed. Most of the difference in the new global estimate represents previously uncounted deaths, the bulk of which were directly from Covid; the new number also includes indirect deaths, like those of people unable to access care for other ailments because of the pandemic.

The delay in releasing the figures is significant because the global data is essential for understanding how the pandemic has played out and what steps could mitigate a similar crisis in the future. It has created turmoil in the normally staid world of health statistics — a feud cloaked in anodyne language is playing out at the United Nations Statistical Commission, the world body that gathers health data, spurred by India’s refusal to cooperate.

“It’s important for global accounting and the moral obligation to those who have died, but also important very practically. If there are subsequent waves, then really understanding the death total is key to knowing if vaccination campaigns are working,” said Dr. Prabhat Jha, director of the Centre for Global Health Research in Toronto and a member of the expert working group supporting the W.H.O.’s excess death calculation. “And it’s important for accountability.”

To try to take the true measure of the pandemic’s impact, the W.H.O. assembled a collection of specialists including demographers, public health experts, statisticians and data scientists. The Technical Advisory Group, as it is known, has been collaborating across countries to try to piece together the most complete accounting of the pandemic dead.

The Times spoke with more than 10 people familiar with the data. The W.H.O. had planned to make the numbers public in January but the release has continually been pushed back.

Recently, a few members of the group warned the W.H.O. that if the organization did not release the figures, the experts would do so themselves, three people familiar with the matter said.

[Riaz Haq]

#India #Covid-19: 'My father did not have to die'. The oxygen cylinder placed under hard vinyl bench on which he lay did not work. His ambulance was slowed by random police checkpoints, his condition worsened before he reached hospital #Modi #BJP @BDUTT https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-61244109

In April 2021, when the news first came that my father had Covid, I was at a crematorium in Mumbai, fighting back tears, as an elderly man in a wheelchair waved goodbye to his wife.

Covid was already my whole life. I travelled more than 30,000km (18,641 miles) by road across India, through the first wave and then again thousands of kilometres by both air and road through the more lethal second spell.

I'd been the chronicler of death and despair; but now the news had come home.

I am forever haunted by my decision to take my dad to hospital in a private ambulance.

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Last summer hundreds of thousands of people died when an unprepared India was hit by a catastrophic second wave of Covid-19 and its health care system buckled. Journalist Barkha Dutt, who was chronicling the pandemic, lost her father to the virus in April 2021. Here she writes on her loss, and other daughters who suffered the same fate.

It's been a year since I have been able to hear music; a year since the death of my father to Covid at the peak of India's insatiable second wave.

So, a few days ago, the faint strains of a familiar tune felt like a jolt to the system.

Guantanamera Guajira Guantanamera…

My hand trembled as I heard the chords of the Cuban folk song that has been variously sung to invoke romance, patriotism, protest and change.

Inside I was shaking.

Memory can be a beast.

For my sister and I, this was Papa's Song that marked the milestones of our lives, played out on scratchy cassettes when we were kids, remastered for an eight-track system in our teens, graduating to CDs when we went to college and finally heard on loop at his desktop. Here, he was surrounded by grandchildren, dogs, meccano sets, and odd looking wires - bit parts of kettles, speakers, coffee makers - machines he was repairing for friends, sometimes opened up for the sheer joy of tinkering with them.

SP Dutt - 'Speedy' to friends and family - was one of the hundreds of thousands of Indians taken by a virus that pummelled our health system into submission. In the wasteland of a nation's grief, April was indeed the cruellest month as oxygen ran out, hospitals shut their gates to patients who died on the streets, vaccines were delayed and elections were mockingly on schedule.

We could only turn to each other, daughters desperate to save fathers, as institutions collapsed.

In Mumbai, Samridhi Saxena, reached out in the hope that I could help her father with an oxygen cylinder. He was struggling with a rare neurodegenerative disease.

From Patna, Manisha called to say her 53-year-old father may die because the hospital where he was admitted no longer had oxygen.


In Bangalore, 21-year-old Bharini asked me: "How strong am I expected to be?" She lost her biological parents in an accident, now her adoptive mother had died from Covid.

Journalist Stutee Ghosh and I mirrored each other's gnawing guilt - that somehow we were letting down our fathers; but also the guilt of knowing that even in our worst moment, we were better off than hundreds of thousands of other Indians, just because that our dads were in hospital and not stranded on the road.

Her father, like mine, didn't make it. And over the weeks, her grief mutated into rage at "the indignity in death for so many who are dying and not even being counted by the government".

We were bereft. As daughters. And as citizens.

Before my father died, we always valorised our mother, Prabha Dutt, who we lost when I was 13 years old to a brain haemorrhage. As India's first woman war correspondent, who died at 40, she was the stuff of legend.

[Riaz Haq]

Opinion Forget the WHO. India owes its people the truth about covid-19.
Image without a caption
By Barkha Dutt

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/11/barkha-dutt-indi...

That very night in April 2021, the oxygen supply to the intensive care unit of the hospital where Manju was admitted ran out. Manju, just 30, was among 20 patients who died; this was just one case among scores in hospitals across the country. Amid oxygen shortages, hospitals posted desperate SOS messages, families carried bottle-size oxygen cylinders to their relatives, and Sikh gurudwaras that usually feed the poor for free organized oxygen drives instead.

Despite this catastrophe, India’s Parliament was informed this year that there was not a single death from oxygen shortage reported by any state during the pandemic.

The unforgivable erasure of these covid-19 deaths has been underscored again by the recent dispute between the World Health Organization and the Indian government over exactly how many people died during the pandemic. According to the WHO, there were 15 million excess deaths worldwide in 2020 and 2021, more than double the official covid-19 death toll of 6 million. WHO estimated 4.7 million people died in India, a figure nearly 10 times the official number. The Narendra Modi government has fiercely contested the WHO’s mathematical modeling and released official data that shows only a 6 percent increase of all-cause deaths in 2020 from 2019.

I am not an epidemiologist. I can’t speak to whether it's a factor of 10 or 4 that separates the government-acknowledged fatalities from the actual count. But as someone who spent two years traversing the length and breadth of India, I witnessed exactly how and why people fell through the cracks.

Based on my reporting, at least hundreds of thousands of Indians — most of them abjectly poor — would have died overlooked, forgotten and eventually uncounted.

The reasons were manifold. Oxygen shortage led to several hospitals closing their gates to new patients, unwilling to take on the moral and legal liability of more deaths on their watch. Then there was the stigma that made many, especially in rural India, averse to getting tested. Along riverbanks in northern India, bodies were hurled into the water or left in the sand in the cover of night; grave keepers and boatmen told me this was either because the poor didn’t have money to buy wood for cremation or because they were too frightened to own their dead.

There was also the maze of bureaucracy that families had to navigate to get a death certificate listing covid-19 as the cause of death. Those who didn’t get an RT-PCR test but died from covid-like symptoms during the peak of the surge, for instance, were not counted in the tally. In rural India, where primary health-care centers were often closed or abandoned during the pandemic’s peak, a test was often not easily accessible. But in April and May 2021, community leaders in every village I traveled to testified to a sudden spike in deaths in their area.

In the city of Bhopal, 45-year-old auto rickshaw driver Vikas Singh Chauhan died after driving from hospital to hospital in vain. “We don’t have any proof” of cause of death, his wife, Jyoti, told me in tears.

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India is free to question the credibility of the WHO, whose poor handling of the origins of covid-19 has weakened its authority. But it owes an answer to its citizens.

As epidemiologist Prabhat Jha told me, the government could lead its own investigation by asking a question about covid deaths to every family in the upcoming census.

To link the question of how many Indians really died to faux nationalism is in fact anti-national. Indians who died deserve to be so much more than numbers.

How can they not even be that?