15/05/2021 - Governance | Mainstorming

IAS Parliament 3 years

KEY POINTS

· The Covid-19 crisis is forcing us to evaluate our priorities. It is important that the government executes and implements the delivery of vaccines and healthcare services on a war footing.

· The panchayat is now pivotal for tackling the Covid-19 epidemic as the virus has reached the villages and is rapidly ravaging the countryside.

· State officials and district commissioners should actively report both positive numbers and deaths as it is important to have the right data.

· If the state government underreports the numbers or fudges the data, it will harm, rather than help, the state as it will get a lower allocation of oxygen and more deaths will follow.

· In a village, families with Covid-positive members should be given kits consisting of medicine, thermometers and oximeters.

· It is important for the caregivers to know the oxygen level if they need to understand the severity of the infection. Village homes do not have oximeters or even thermometers; providing these should be an immediate task.

· New Delhi will have to make tough-minded strategic trade-offs, deliberately prioritising military modernisation and joint force projection over the ground-centric combat arms formations required to defend territory.

· Chinese troops continue to camp on previously Indian-controlled land, and worse, India may jeopardise its long-term leverage in the more consequential Indian Ocean Region.