PremiumAs such, some states stopped short of using the word lockdown even as they stopped most commercial activity and movement. Rajasthan called its curbs a public discipline fortnight, MP coined the term corona curfew, and Karnataka chief minister B.S. Yediyurappa picked the phrase close-down.
Even as calls grow for a nationwide lockdown to stop the pandemic, a series of state-level curfews and lockdowns over the past week has already taken the number of states under significant curbs to 21. Ten days ago, just five states had statewide lockdowns.
States that have imposed such curbs now account for 81% of India’s population.
Premium Premium The rest of India has night curfews, as in Telangana, or strict curfews in only select cities, as in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.
On a lockdown stringency index run by the University of Oxford, India is now at its highest level of strictness since October 2020, just after the first wave peak.
The curbs, as well as growing public fear of covid-19, have led to a sharp drop in public movement, from 89% of normal at March-end to 62% as of 1 May, shows Google data.
Wary of an adverse economic impact, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had on 20 April urged states to use lockdowns only as a last resort.
As such, some states stopped short of using the word “lockdown" even as they stopped most commercial activity and movement. Rajasthan called its curbs a “public discipline fortnight", Madhya Pradesh coined the term “corona curfew", and Karnataka chief minister B.S. Yediyurappa picked the phrase “close-down".
Jharkhand went under a “health safety week" on 22 April.
In much of India, weddings and funerals have caps on the number of participants, while retail shops have timing restrictions.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday said a lockdown was “now the only option" left. Dr Anthony Fauci, a top US public health official, has also made a similar suggestion.
Prabhat Jha, director of Toronto-based Centre for Global Health Research, said that instead of a nationwide lockdown, “a coordinated set of short breaks in major cities might help slow the surge". “There is so little economic activity anyway, so I’m not sure how much better it would be with a lockdown," he said. “A lockdown would be a bad idea if it distracted from other steps that would be more effective, such as increasing emergency oxygen and releasing anonymized data on every tested case, deaths and vaccination."
K. Sujatha Rao, a former Union health secretary, also expressed the need for transparent data and a solution to the oxygen crisis. She said a nationwide lockdown like the one imposed in 2020 would only hurt the poor. Instead, only the districts reporting more than 100 daily cases could be subjected to a lockdown, while other districts of concern—those with 50-100 daily cases—could be targeted with stringent localized containment zones, she said.
Even without a nationwide lockdown, public movement has shrunk below June 2020 levels in 11 major states. June 2020 was the last month of the nationwide lockdown last year. Relative to the pre-pandemic times, mobility is the lowest in Delhi (34%) followed by Chhattisgarh (39%). This has also begun to hit economic activity across India, high-frequency indicators have shown.
In the two weeks since Modi’s address, India has reported 5 million new covid-19 infections and nearly 44,000 deaths.
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