| I visited India in Dec 2020, so here's my personal take on this based on what I saw. The first lockdown in India was very severe and it basically made the second lockdown pretty unpopular in the business community, at least initially. The dithering contributed to even bigger second wave. The reasons behind the lull between the first and the second waves were not entirely clear, and some people assumed that the herd immunity is being reached. Combined with the desire to return to normalcy after a harsh lockdown, it falsely assured people that the worst was behind them. This created the perfect conditions for a bigger second wave. Finally, the state and every petty official was intoxicated by the powers they weilded during the first lockdown, and they forgot that with great power comes the great responsibility. They unnecessarily focused on tiny things such as fining people Rs. 500 at the traffic lights, while not really understanding the new information on how virus spreads, what are the best ways to tackle transmission and so on. People should have been given the liberty to be outdoors with proper face covering when there was good airflow. They shpuld have known that meeting indoors with poor airflow was the biggest threat. This wasn't communicated properly. Some government officials did take decisions proactively to save their own district. For example, see here https://youtu.be/Sa4vCG1oY6M But unfortunately, this was the exception rather than the norm. |
The complete celebratory attitude with a mild (covid) winter made them forget all the planning that they did not even order their vaccines (at least the numbers they needed). Just in case this seems like a critique of the government, let me add both the people and the government were irresponsible, but a cautionary message from top would have helped and that did not happen in time.