Champaran Diary

Last year, during the first wave of the Covid outbreak, while sitting in faraway Mumbai, I often wondered how my home state Bihar was able to manage the pandemic situation so well des­pite having no proper healthcare infrastructure. Relatives from my native East Champaran district were a boastful lot: Biharis have a superior imm­une system, they are the grassroots people with a hotline to Mother Nature, their per capita consumption of vitamin D is better than that of the residents of Rann of Kutch, corona is a damn metro thing and what not! Do you think the coronavirus can do anything to us, they asked. In all seriousness, none of it sounded like empty boasts; they actually believed in such theories. And I have reasons to suspect that the Bihar government also bel­ieved in the same hypothesis. Going by the flagrant lack of preparedness on its part in dealing with the second wave of COVID-19 cases now, it seems they went...