Former RBI Governor has pulled up the Government and blamed a “lack of foresight, lack of leadership,” for India’s tsunami of coronavirus infections in the second wave of COVID-19 pandemic.
“If you were careful, if you were cautious, you had to recognize that it wasn’t done yet,” Rajan said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “Anybody paying attention to what was happening in the rest of the world, in Brazil for example, should have recognized the virus does come back and potentially in more virulent forms.”
India has been recording over 3 lakh new COVID cases daily for the past 10 days, even crossing a world-high 4 lakhs last week.
Cases in India dropped from November last year.
“There was a sense that we had endured the worst the virus could give us and we had come through and it was time to open up… that complacency hurt us,” said former International Monetary Fund chief economist Rajan, who is now professor of finance at University of Chicago.
India managed the first wave well, but that possibly led to the government not preparing swiftly enough for vaccines for its own population, Rajan felt.
“Some of that may be the sense that we had time. That since we had dealt with the virus we could roll out the vaccination slowly,” he said.
The government is now “getting its act together” and in “emergency mode,” Rajan added.
