New Delhi: The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the lives and livelihoods of people across the globe. As the world completes a year since coronavirus was declared a pandemic by WHO, we take a look at how India led the fight against the deadly virus and came out a winner.
On Wednesday, Zee News Editor-in-Chief Sudhir Chaudhary spoke about how the pandemic changed the lives of billions of people and how India, under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, managed to deal with the crisis much better than the rest of the world.
India celebrated Holi a day before the WHO declared the coronavirus a pandemic but the colours of the festival and the happiness it brings faded too soon. PM Modi appealed to the people on that day to not participate in Holi Milan programmes and to avoid going to crowded places. The PM was himself was following those rules and asked people to do the same.
However, at that time there was fear, nervousness in the mind of the people and everyone was worried about what India will do when countries like China, America and others in Europe seemed helpless against the coronavirus. Everyone felt that India would prove to be the weakest link for the world in this war.
But all these projections turned out false and today India is not only in a position to win this war, but we are also teaching the world how to do it.
After several major setbacks, India's economy is now recovering rapidly. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, India's economy will be the fastest-growing economy in the world in 2021. It will be ahead of China and America.
Today, the country has received two vaccines against the virus and both of these have been developed in India. The world's largest vaccination campaign is going on in India and so far 20 million people have been vaccinated.
Today, when the pandemic is completing one year, it is important to understand how India won this battle. India won this battle with restraint.
In March last year, when the situation was quite worrying, the Modi government was working on a plan to get the country out of it. The lockdown was the first major step in this direction.
The world's largest lockdown was implemented in India on March 24 last year. Successive lockdowns were enforced as people stayed in their homes for months.
The government identified various risk zones and categorised them into Red, Orange and Green Zone. There was a lot of criticism of these policies of the government and it was also said that people are being discriminated against. But despite the odds, the government did not buckle under pressure and finally, the positive results showed.
In the initial days, there was a shortage of masks in the country. But India ramped up the production of masks and sanitisers and met the demand. Today, India is exporting high-quality masks to other countries. India has also become the second-largest country in the world in the production of PPE kits.
Before the lockdown, there was only one laboratory in the country to test the coronavirus in the country. But now this number has increased to over 2300.
India has also been at the forefront in vaccine production. So far a total of 58 million vaccine doses have been exported to 66 countries in the world.
