It’s been quite shocking to see the numbers climb here in India. A year ago, we had an ill planned and devastating lockdown across the country. Like the article

It’s been quite shocking to see the numbers climb here in India. A year ago, we had an ill planned and devastating lockdown across the country. Like the article briefly mentions, the economy tanked and worse, millions of migrant workers were left without jobs and without a way to get back to their homes (and be with their families if they were anyway going to be jobless and starve). Now the Prime Minister and the Home Minister have mostly left it to the states to deal with this. When numbers (to the extent that they could be relied on) started going down around August or September last year, a lot of complacency set in. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Home Minister Amit Shah (along with many others in the ruling parties) declared victory. Many politicians themselves have been irresponsible and got infected by participating in large gatherings (following the adage, “do as I say, not as I do”). The PM even boasted early this year in an international economic summit about how India had shown the way to the world in handling COVID-19 — what way, I have no idea. The beliefs that Indians were generally immune to SARS-CoV-2 and that a country with more than two thirds of the population being quite young didn’t have much to worry about were quite strong. There have been unsubstantiated beliefs in technology as something that can single handedly beat this. Last year, the central government and its bureaucracy decided that app based contact tracing would defeat this and released apps (announced as open source but with late and outdated releases of the source code)...this in a country where smartphone usage is minuscule and having GPS and background location tracking on 24x7 for it to collect and save data on servers without good privacy policies was necessary. That app became a gatekeeper to get into places that wanted to see your status (which was just a set of questions to answer) as green. Now that vaccines are available, the same push for using the flawed biometric resident number (called Aadhaar) to track and even decide whether to provide vaccines has been slowing things down a lot. Officially, Aadhaar is one of several identity documents accepted for vaccination. But practically, providing any other government identity document means having to argue with data entry operators (who have been instructed to insist on Aadhaar) or waiting to speak to senior officials to escalate matters. Recently, they have been making it mandatory to authenticate with some sort of biometrics when the Aadhaar number is given (one of the aims of this is to capture more/better photos and use for facial recognition). With a massive population of nearly 1.4 billion, I don’t understand how all these barriers are going to help (note that there is also an uninformed unique health ID being created for people on the back of the vaccination efforts). Vested interests and those who have only one technology solution for every problem seem to be running the show. Late last year, India got truly lucky with this pandemic. One can only hope that we get lucky once again, with how things have been handled by the governments.