You are Ravi Gupta living in Ranchi. You have noticed that the number of children leaving the state of Jharkhand to work in other states is one of the major causes of illiteracy in the state. Write a letter to the editor of a national newspaper expressing your concern about the high rate of illiteracy and suggest ways to enhance the literacy level in the state. Please answer this question soon, I need this urgently.
Answers
It is important to note that countries that have so far done a relatively good job of containing the coronavirus pandemic have refrained from imposing a complete, nation-wide, curfew-like lockdown. These include Singapore, Taiwan, Germany, and Turkey. Even China, where it all started, placed only the Hubei province under complete lockdown, not the whole country.
But Prime Minister Narendra Modi has put 1.3 billion people under a curfew-like lockdown. Since the authorities are using the word ‘curfew’ in the context of issuing passes, it is fair to call it a national curfew.
A national curfew for 21 days will definitely go a long way in reducing the transmission of the deadly virus. But what happens after 21 days? The virus won’t disappear after that. Not until we get a vaccine, and it will take at least a few months to vaccinate every Indian even after a vaccine has been developed. A few months is a very optimistic estimate. In other words, we are in this mess for years.
Like these other countries, India could also have avoided the need for a national lockdown had it done what those countries are doing: testing, testing, testing.
India’s 21-day national lockdown should thus be seen as buying time to create a massive testing infrastructure, so that even asymptomatic people could be tested and quarantined. That’s the only way to manage the coronavirus pandemic until we get drugs and vaccines to administer en masse.