The Political Fix: Why Kejriwal tried to reserve hospitals for Delhi residents, plus Friday links

All the links you need on Indian politics and policy.

Welcome to this Friday Links edition of The Political Fix by Rohan Venkataramakrishnan, a newsletter on Indian politics and policy. To get it in your inbox, sign up here.

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‘National’ Capital Territory?

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal made a controversial decision last week. His government decided that public and private hospitals in Delhi would be reserved for residents of the city, with only those run by the Centre being open to all.

His justification, as we explained here, was that his government had prepared the city’s medical infrastructure keeping Delhi’s numbers in mind, but if he were to throw open the capital’s borders, patients would stream in from elsewhere.

Kejriwal claimed in normal times, 60-70% of Delhi’s hospital beds are filled by non-residents, and pointed out that he had consulted the public and an expert committee.

Immediately afterwards, however, the Centre-appointed Lieutenant Governor effectively overruled him. Despite some initial combative comments from Aam Aadmi Party – “BJP would be responsible for any deaths in the city” – Kejriwal said that this is “not the time for disagreements” and made it clear that all patients would be treated.

The Delhi chief minister’s proposal, despite the public and expert consultation, was always going to be on shaky legal territory. And for a politician who has thrived on confrontation, Kejriwal accepted being overruled rather quickly. Why?

Here is one potential answer:

“As of now, the Capital has 9,179 beds — 4,929 occupied and 4,250 vacant — and 582 ICU beds set aside for treatment of Covid patients…

The two-and-a-half months of lockdown were meant to help the Capital prepare...

During the same time, Mumbai (which is testing 17,956 per million population, as opposed to Delhi’s 13,180 per million), has set up 330 Covid care centres with 48,247 beds to quarantine high-risk people. Another 25,619 beds have been set up for asymptomatic and mildly ill patients.

Delhi, so far, has 344 beds in Covid health centres and 5,824 in Covid care centres (both are of mild/moderate cases).”

Horror stories of people unable to find a bed at a hospital have been turning up all week in the capital. And the Centre also flagged its concerns this week:

“Based on current trends, the presentation made to the states projected that Delhi will see 91,419 cases by June 30.

The Cabinet Secretary red-flagged possible infrastructure shortages, noting that Delhi has been facing a shortfall of ICU beds since June 3, and will see a shortage of ventilators from June 12, and isolation beds with oxygen from June 25. Currently, Delhi has 3,368 isolation beds with oxygen, 582 ICU beds and 468 ventilators.”

These details bring up one obvious question: Was Kejriwal relying on a cynical parochial gambit just to buy political cover for the Covid-19 mess that Delhi looks likely to go through over the next month?

False comparison

India is now the fourth-most affected country when it comes to Covid-19, with almost 300,000 cases.

A survey conducted by the Indian Council of Medical Research found that 0.73% of people in 83 districts had been exposed to the virus. This was put forward as evidence of the success of lockdown (a question we tackled a couple of weeks ago), but also makes it clear how many people remain susceptible.

The peak is still well ahead of us. And if you were keeping track, India still claims there is no community transmission, even though Delhi doesn’t have a source of infection for 50% of those infected.

India claims that it is still in a better place because mortality is far lower than in other countries. But Partha Mukhopadhyay makes an important distinction here. The death rate is low, but older patients are dying at twice the rate they were even in badly hit Italy:

“The bottom line is our aggregate CFR [Case Fatality Rate] is low because we have more young patients than other countries who are not expected to die. However, in India, they are dying at a rate much higher than expected, which means that India has a much higher CCCFR [Concurrent Cumulative Case Fatality Rate] than it should given the experience of other countries.

Instead of being among the lowest, India’s age-adjusted death rate is actually higher than Italy’s, which, as seen in Figure 1, has among the highest aggregate CCCFRs.”

Linking out

• Read all of our coverage of the Coronavirus Crisis here. In particular, we had a whole week’s worth of Supriya Sharma’s dispatches from Varanasi. And don’t forget to contribute to the Scroll.in Reporting Fund to ensure we can bring you more journalism that scratches beneath the surface.

  

• Andy Mukherjee this week writes about India’s economic nationalism, which we tackled on Monday, saying “what makes India's lurch troublesome is that the pace and direction of economic nationalism may be set by domestic business interests.”

• The Indo-Chinese situation continues to be tense. Reports make it clear that both sides deployed troops all along their (undefined) borders, and not just in the areas where clashes took place. Read these pieces by Pravin Sawhney and Lt Gen HS Panag.

• Read this thread:

• A survey of community health workers done by Article14 and Behanbox “found that 75% of states had not paid the Covid incentive [a Rs 1,000 per month honorarium] when the survey was conducted. Even regular honorariums in 69% states were delayed, in some cases for up to five months. And not a single state was paying the regular incentives for activities such as immunisation that were suspended during the lockdown.”

• Former RBI Governor Duvvuri Subbarao says it would be wrong to ask the central bank to waive even interest on outstanding loans for the duration of the lockdown, as a petition in the Supreme Court demands.
  “Is it fair to bail out borrowers at the cost of savers? It is not as if savers are a well off class who can bear this cost. Most of them are small people – pensioners, for example – to whom the interest on their deposits is a significant source of income. Besides, they too were impacted by the lockdown. Is it they who should be forced to bear the burden of supporting another affected group?

• Two interesting outcomes of the Covid-19 crisis and the lockdown: Business is boomign for quack YouTube doctors and as lakhs of migrants return to their villages, police are dealing with a surge in property disputes.

That’s it for this Friday links edition of the Political Fix.

As always, if you have feedback, other links or just funny GIFs to send in, write to rohan@scroll.in. And, if you find it useful, please do share this newsletter!