Write an article in about 150-200 words on the statement made .
by our honorable Prime minister "If you can’t handle these 21
days, this country and your family will go back 21 years"
Answers
Answer:
“Every state, every district, every lane, every village will be under lockdown” for three weeks, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the nation on March 24, giving India four hours’ notice to prepare. “If you can’t handle these 21 days, this country and your family will go back 21 years.”
As governments around the world try to slow the spread of the coronavirus, India has launched one of the most draconian social experiments in human history, locking down its entire population -- including about 176 million people who struggle to survive on $1.90 a day or less. Modi’s order allows Indians out of their homes only to buy food, medicine or other essentials. No going to work. No school. No playgrounds.
India’s handling of the lockdown and the ever-spreading virus is a test for the developing world, offering clues to how countries from Bangladesh to Nigeria can fight COVID-19 without forcing their poorest citizens into even worse hunger and further destitution.
While India’s economy has boomed over the past two decades, pulling vast numbers out of extreme poverty, inequality also has grown.
Explanation:
Those near the top can hunker down in gated apartment complexes, watching Bollywood movies on Netflix and ordering food deliveries online. But not Jakhawadiya, who makes a living selling cheap plastic buckets and baskets with her husband on the streets of Mumbai.
For her, the order means 21 days in a 6-by-9-foot room with five people, no work, a couple days of food and the equivalent of about $13 in cash.
She looked at Modi speaking on their little television, spattered with stickers left over the years by one child or another.
“I am so afraid,” she thought.
In this Tuesday March 31, 2020, photo, Mina Ramesh Jakhawadiya, right with her son Ritik Ramesh in her lap watches news on coronovirus as her daughter Guddi Ramesh brushes her teeth in their one room house in a Slum in Mumbai, India. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)
The reasons for the lockdown are clear.
While India had only 536 confirmed coronavirus cases and 10 deaths when Modi gave his speech, it’s also one of the most crowded places on Earth, a nation where social distancing is impossible for millions. The risk is that it could hopscotch from the Himalayas to South India, ravaging cities and villages. Mumbai, for instance, has a population density of 77,000 people per square mile — nearly three times higher than New York City, which crowding helped turn into one of the world’s deadliest epicenters.
Then there’s India’s medical system. Except for private health care for those who can afford it, the medical system barely functions across wide swathes of the country. Public hospitals, especially outside major cities, often have limited supplies, questionable cleanliness and third-rate doctors.
Very few people have been tested, so the true scale of the outbreak is unknown. If India’s hospital system were overrun by COVID-19 cases, it could collapse in days, leaving untold numbers to die.
As a result, many experts say Modi had to act as he did to buy time to prepare.
The lockdown means India has “probably pushed out the epidemic peak by three to eight weeks,” said Ramanan Laxminarayan, an epidemiologist and economist who directs the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy in Washington.
But that logic means little for Indians at the bottom of the economic ladder. For these people — for Jakhawadiya in Mumbai, for a maid walking to her home village in the north, for a watchman bicycling his way across the country — three weeks can be an eternity.