MBA/IIM Kashipur/CT

July 21, 2021

From CT Instructors

Assignment 2: Critical Thinking Project (Weight: 30%)

Two opinion pieces that appeared in the Financial Times, London, in the last
week of April 2021, are copied below. The first is by Gideon Ratchman, FT’s
Chief Foreign Affairs Columnist and the second one by Zarir Udwadia, a
consultant physician and researcher in Mumbai, not employed by the Financial
Times.

The two articles present the respective authors’ views on the vicious 2nd wave of
Covid 19 in India that has been described by Delhi High Court as a tsunami.

Your assignment, to be done collectively by each study group, is to review the

way Government of India and State Governments managed the second wave of
Covid-19 pandemic. You are expected to employ the principles of critical thinking
that you have been introduced to. You will need to go well beyond these two
articles and look for additional information and additional personal or collective
experiences that will help you review the governments’ actions appropriately.

Length of review: 1500 to 2000 words

Deadline for submission: 11.55 pm, Tuesday, August 3, 2021

Please note: We (the instructors) don’t belong to any political party or

subscribe to any particular political ideology. We don’t expect any particular
answer from you either as the preferred one. After critically reviewing the claims
in the two articles, you can reject or accept the authors’ views partially or
totally, or offer an alternative way of looking at the mega tragedy that unfolded
in front of us recently. What we are looking for is the quality of your analysis and
ability to gather and employ relevant data and interpret them rationally. You
should be able to look at the elephant in the room as objectively as possible
without being influenced by some of the common mistakes that we have
identified in the first four sessions.

The link to each article is given at the start of the article. If you can access the
articles on FT.com, you will also be able to go through the highly useful reader
comments also. They offer a valuable perspective.

We have set you an assignment on a currently relevant and possibly

controversial issue because we would like you to form your own opinions after
carefully and critically reviewing data and other people’s views.

The submission is on Google Classroom by your Group’s usual representative.

There may be a penalty for late submissions.
➔

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From Financial Times, London

https://www.ft.com/content/fa3096ff-4325-4a02-97fd-89095e44d5c1

Narendra Modi and the perils of

Covid hubris
The resurgence of the pandemic in India holds dangers and lessons for
the world

Gideon Rachman, April 26 2021

“It can be said with pride, India . . . defeated Covid-19 under the able, sensible,
committed and visionary leadership of Prime Minister Modi . . . The party
unequivocally hails its leadership for introducing India to the world as a proud
and victorious nation in the fight against Covid.” Those were the words of a
resolution passed by India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party, just a few weeks ago
in February.

But now India is reeling from a surge in cases. Hospitals are running out of
oxygen and acute-care beds. Mass cremations are taking place in makeshift
facilities. Heart-rending pictures of suffering are being broadcast around the
world. Surveys of mortuaries suggest that the number of Covid-19 deaths may
be two to five times higher than the official figure of around 2,000 a day.

The pandemic punishes hubris. Narendra Modi is not the first world leader to
have paid the price for acting too slowly — or declaring victory too early.

In China, where the virus originated, Xi Jinping government’s first disastrous

reaction was to suppress bad news coming out of Wuhan. In the US, Donald
Trump, then president, repeatedly predicted that the virus would miraculously
disappear. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro addressed rallies of anti-lockdown
protesters. In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson locked down the country too
late. The EU messed up the purchase of vaccines.

But the Modi government has made some distinctive and disastrous errors.
Having called the end of the crisis too early, the Indian government opened up
too fast. Driven by a desire to win the crucial state of West Bengal, the BJP
staged mass election rallies. Modi declared himself “elated” by a large crowd that
turned out to hear him speak a few days ago, even as Covid-19 cases soared.
The Kumbh Mela, a religious festival that allows millions of pilgrims to converge
on a single town, was allowed to go ahead and even promoted by the Hindu
nationalist BJP.

The Indian government failed to use the decline in infection after the first wave
to prepare properly for a second wave. Emergency oxygen supplies were clearly
too low. Despite the fact that India is the world’s largest producer of vaccines of
all sorts, the government was woefully slow to place orders from local

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manufacturers. It also slowed the approval of proven foreign vaccines for Covid-
19, such as the BioNTech/Pfizer jab, while promoting a more experimental
Indian-designed vaccine.

National pride played a part in India’s willingness to keep exporting vaccines,

even as domestic supply lagged behind. The Indian government has promoted
the idea that the country is the “pharmacy to the world”. Geopolitical rivalry with
China, which is using vaccine diplomacy to win global influence, was a
background factor. Delhi’s willingness to export vaccines to the world also
contrasted favourably with the lack of exports from the US and UK. But the
Indian government has now banned vaccine exports. It is also speeding up the
approval of foreign vaccines.

Modi went into this crisis with sky-high poll ratings, but is clearly vulnerable to a
backlash. Having centralised power for many years, he now seems to be shifting
the burden of responsibility for dealing with Covid-19 on to state governments.

India’s plight has worldwide implications. There is still a tendency in the west to
treat the pandemic as a series of national crises in which countries compete to
see who can deal with the virus better. But this is an interconnected global
crisis. As Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health
Organization puts it, Covid-19 is an international fire and, “if you hose only one
part of it, the rest will keep burning”. Eventually, the fire is likely to spread once
again, reigniting in places where it was thought to be extinguished.

There is already cause for concern that the UK was too slow to introduce
stringent quarantine measures for passengers arriving from India. That is
particularly dangerous, given the emergence of new variants of the virus in India
that may be more transmissible and vaccine resistant.

Getting medical help to India is now both a humanitarian and a pragmatic

necessity for the outside world, which is beginning to respond. For the US, it
may also be a geopolitical necessity, given that America regards India as a
crucial ally in its growing rivalry with China. The Biden administration’s refusal,
so far, to allow the emergency export of vaccines to India is feeding anti-
American sentiment in the country, which may not be offset by airlifts of
ventilators and other equipment.

The outside world should also guard against the kind of complacency that was
prevalent in India until recently. The fact that case numbers are falling and
vaccination rates are rising in Britain could easily create a dangerous relaxation,
similar to the one that India went through a couple of months ago. A recent
article in The Times proclaimed that “Britain could feel like paradise this
summer.”

The lesson of India is to guard against premature celebration or hubris. Any

improvement in the coronavirus situation should be used as an opportunity to
prepare for future waves and to help the international fight against the
pandemic. India will not be the last country to witness a tragic resurgence of
Covid-19.

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From Financial Times, London.

https://www.ft.com/content/ad200d93-3247-409a-8afb-482234b4655c

Opinion India

India’s Covid wards are like

scenes from Dante’s ‘Inferno’
Black market oxygen, rows of patients struggling to breathe — the
pandemic has cruelly exposed systemic issues

Zarir Udwadia, April 29, 2021

The writer is a consultant physician and researcher in Mumbai

The happiest I have been since the pandemic began was at 8am on the 20th of
January this year. Entering the Covid-19 ward of one of the three hospitals I
work at in Mumbai, I went through the all too grimly familiar routine of donning
PPE to start my rounds, only to be told by the nurse in charge that we had no
new Covid admissions that day. After the relentless battering of the previous
245 days it was a moment of rare bliss. We shared the smile of co-conspirators,
jubilant that fresh daily cases were under 15,000 across India, in keeping with
the continuing decline we were ticking off ourselves at our hospital.

But our joy was short lived: April was truly the cruellest month. Admissions
began to inch relentlessly higher, until on April 26 India set a global record of
352,991 cases a day. Ward rounds are now scenes from Dante’s “Inferno”. Row
upon row of patients waging a desperate struggle to breathe, their cries for help
often falling on deaf ears as overworked medical staff struggle just to keep
going.

Essential drugs are not in stock and, most frightening of all, oxygen, that very
essence of life, is in short supply. It is rationed at all hospitals and so scarce in
some that patients are dying when it runs out. Oxygen cylinders are sold at
black market rates (50,000 rupees [$670] for a cylinder costing 6,000 rupees)
as desperate patients, realising it is futile to even contemplate getting a hospital
bed, prepare for the worst and stock up at home.

How did it all go so horribly wrong in three short months? Just in January the
health minister crowed that “India has flattened the Covid graph” — words
exposed as mere self-assured hubris as the Sars-Cov-2 virus grips this country
of 1.4bn in a stranglehold. Instead of using the space January provided to ramp
up vaccine supply, ensure oxygen plants increased production and reinforce the
importance of social distancing and masking, we allowed massive election rallies
to continue in five states and the Kumbh Mela saw 3.5m pilgrims pack the banks

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of the Ganges. Religious sentiments, political machinations and nepotism often
trump public health principles and common sense in India.

The virus was forgotten for we had already declared ourselves the victors. And
then the second wave struck, as any thinking person knew it would, and struck
with the ferocity of a tidal wave, making the events of 2020 seem like a ripple in
a bathtub. There seems little doubt that this wave is caused by a variant,
probably the now dreaded Indian B.1.617 with two mutations — the E484Q and
L452R. The spectre of global spread of this variant has led countries to race to
close their borders to India. As a physician I can vouch that this strain seems far
more infectious, is probably more lethal, and seems to affect the young more
frequently than the initial wave. Younger patients between the ages of 26 and 44
now account for about 40 per cent of all cases and almost 10 per cent of deaths.

The vaccine saga has been a scandal all of its own. Instead of wooing every
credible manufacturer to stockpile the 1.7bn doses India would need, we basked
in our “vaccine superpower” status. The government got its basic maths
hopelessly wrong: by March, India was supplying vaccines to 74 nations and
exporting far more doses than it had used to inoculate its own citizens. Initial
vaccine hesitancy has now given way to vaccine desperation with densely
packed crowds clamouring to get a precious dose only to find that most centres
in Mumbai have no stock left. With only around 5 per cent of India’s vast
population vaccinated, herd immunity (70 per cent vaccinated) is more than 700
days away.

And so, sadly, India has emerged as the epicentre of the global pandemic, a
country brought to its knees by a tiny virus barely 100 nanometres in diameter.
And we are paying the price of our complacency, mute spectators to this danse
macabre. What the virus has also exposed is that the roots of our problem are
systemic and lie even deeper — in the chronic under-investment and neglect of
public health in this country. India has one of the lowest public healthcare
budgets globally, with the public healthcare system receiving only 1.26 per cent
of the total GDP. This pandemic has cruelly exposed our weakest links — badly
equipped and understaffed public hospitals and chronic shortages of beds. That
coupled with leadership that lacked vision and foresight may just change the
map of India forever.

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