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1. Boosting Vaccine Supply — India’s Job

Domestic demand for Covid vaccines is set to ratchet up, as a larger population cohort comprising anyone 45 years of age or older turns eligible for the shot. India and the US are the largest manufacturers of Covid-19 vaccines, and India must step up its capacity to meet rising domestic and international demand. Curtailing exports for the time being will make more vaccines available for domestic needs but does nothing to augment global supplies. Putting unused capacity to produce vaccines is the fastest way to raise output, while removing restrictions on export of vaccine inputs imposed by the US.

India has supplied 60.5 million doses of the vaccines to some 80 countries, including 17.7 million doses through the Covax facility for low-income countries. The government has already asked Serum Institute of India (SII) and Bharat Biotech to increase production. SII is manufacturing 60 million doses a month, and Bharat Biotech four million. Both companies have said they are going to raise production — SII to 100 million a month, and Bharat Biotech to 20 million.

The government must ensure fast evaluation of trial data of other vaccine candidates and smoothen the process of approval. It can, and must, facilitate transfer of know-how to companies with vaccine production facilities but without vaccines of their own. If intellectual property rights (IPRs) stand in the way, the government must buy out the IPR and make vaccine know-how available for free as a global public good.

The US has invoked a Korean War-era law, the Defence Production Act, to restrict the export of vaccine inputs, to increase domestic availability. This, in turn, has made specialised bags and filters, cell culture media, single-use tubing and specialised chemicals scarce, and slowed down vaccine production. Apart from asking the US to lift such export bans, India could also look at developing substitute sources for these items. India must increase its supply of Covid vaccines, rather than restrict exports. The world depends on it: the less well-off directly, and the rest, indirectly.

2. Full statehood to solve tussle over Delhi

The tussle between BJP that holds office at the Centre and its self-proclaimed challenger the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has resulted in denial of self-rule for the two crore people of Delhi, a population larger than many countries of the world and bigger than several states in India.

The Centre’s move to designate the lieutenant governor (LG) as the government in Delhi, via legislation that also requires the elected so-called government of Delhi to get the LG’s clearance for any executive decision, is a matter of regret, as it curtails the democratic rights of the people of Delhi to be governed by a body that they can periodically hold to account, just as people in other regions hold their elected governments to account.

A sustainable solution is to delineate afresh the area that the central government requires absolute, direct control over, to secure unhindered operations, retain that in a municipal body functioning under the central government, and to transfer the rest to a full state of Delhi, where an elected state government would have all the powers and responsibilities that any other state government has. Such an area needs to be a great deal bigger than what is governed, at present, by the New Delhi Municipal Corporation, where the principal seats of power, such as Parliament, Rashtrapati Bhawan, the Supreme Court, North Block, South Block and assorted ministries are located.

Washington DC has a population of seven lakh and an area of 177 sq km. Delhi has an area of 1,480 sq km. Clearly, there is scope to carve out a capital territory to be directly under central control, while leaving the bulk of Delhi to form a state of its own. The sooner this is done, the better for all concerned, in particular, the people of Delhi.

3. Modi in Dhaka: India-Bangladesh ties have hit the right stride, let’s keep it that way

That PM Modi is landing in Bangladesh today to begin his first foreign trip after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic highlights the close relations that New Delhi and Dhaka have come to enjoy. There’s no denying that history binds the two nations together, given the key role that India played in Bangladesh’s liberation struggle. There’s therefore a nice symbolic symmetry to the fact that India’s PM will be chief guest at the 50th anniversary of Bangladesh’s founding, which also happens to be the birth centenary year of its founder father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

Many had wondered about Bangladesh’s chances of success at the time of its birth, when it was seen as an ‘international basket case’. But today Bangladesh’s emergence as a vibrant nation has pitched it as South Asia’s contemporary rising star. Under the leadership of current PM Sheikh Hasina it has registered steady economic growth and is on target to leave the list of least developed countries by 2026. It, in fact, overtook India in per capita GDP last year and, as per World Bank estimates, is projected to post positive GDP growth for 2020-21.

Thus, Bangladesh has managed to grow its economy despite the pandemic while simultaneously registering lower Covid deaths per million than India. Moreover, Bangladesh is actually ahead of India in several human development indicators such as immunisation, hunger mitigation and fertility rate. That much of Bangladesh’s surge happened in Hasina’s time, even as she dramatically improved relations with India, shows how much regional cooperation can be achieved in South Asia which mostly has a sorry history of the opposite kind – of regional antagonism or at least neglect.

Credit should go to both the Modi and Hasina regimes for working to revive bilateral connectivity and transit – long neglected by previous governments. Which is precisely why, at a time of improving relations, Indian politicians shouldn’t be raising the anti-Bangladeshi pitch on issues such as CAA and NRC to score domestic political points. In any case Bangladesh’s surge in living standards – it may have surpassed eastern India in this respect – and success in garments and textile industries which already employ millions, mean that the problem of illegal immigration belongs more to the past and there’s little point being overly exercised about it today. India and Bangladesh share a special chemistry now. Let’s focus on building on that fact by improving the trade, connectivity and people-to-people relationship.

4. Our stressed selves: Pandemic’s psychological toll is harder to tally, but don’t neglect it

While the physical and economic toll of the pandemic is being quantified in various ways, this is harder to do with its psychological consequences. But there’s little doubt that the burden of stress, anxiety, depression and mental health disorders has risen dreadfully over the past year. Of course our brain is much more individual than say our lungs, so there are no one-size-fits-all solutions here. But more openness and empathy in conversations, better understanding, and good support infrastructure can make a world of difference.

On children, whose education and home and play have taken strange shapes, the impact has been monumental. There’s a school of thought that children are resilient and this will help them withstand the pandemic well, provided proper material and emotional support is available. But again, the journey of each child is different. Consider the schoolgirl whose allegations of sexual harassment in the wake of last year’s #BoisLockerRoom scandal were followed by her ex-classmate’s suicide, and who’s now set to face trial for abetment to suicide at a juvenile court. The diverse vulnerabilities indicated here predate the pandemic, but they have proliferated in the forced isolation with our screens.

Last year the nation was convulsed by Sushant Singh Rajput’s suicide and last week saw the shocking suicide of young wrestler Ritika Phogat. Attempt to suicide was a punishable offence until 2017, when the law was changed to recognise the causality of “severe stress”. It’s likewise time to remove abetment to suicide from the statute books. While the above acts speak to the wider mental health challenge of our times, they’re also deeply individual choices. What we must learn from these is to address mental health issues with sensitivity, compassion and trained counselling.

5.Covid-19 throws up a new challenge

New variants of the coronavirus have spread in India, particularly in Maharashtra and Punjab. The two states have recorded some of the sharpest increase in cases over the last month, with Maharashtra contributing more than half the new cases recorded across the country daily. Health authorities have held off on concluding that the variants are responsible for the surge, but experts believe a correlation is likely, given what the world knows about Sars-CoV-2 mutations. In several countries, most notably in the United Kingdom (UK), at the outset of winter last year, a variant set off a runaway outbreak — not unlike what appears to be building in India at the moment.

A variant of the Sars-Cov-2 arises when the pathogen picks up multiple changes in its genome. It is natural for viruses to mutate when they replicate as they spread within a population. Molecular clock calculation estimated that the Sars-Cov-2 picked up two mutations on average every month. But the virus also picks up a combination of mutations that could change how it affects individuals — it can become less or more infective or lethal. In August, scientists in Singapore said they found a mutation that was milder — but in line with laws of evolution, it was overtaken by variants that were “fitter” in spreading. In mid-November, the first such significantly fitter variant arose in the UK, triggering a wave that the country took months to surmount. Scientists believe this sort of evolution will become a large part of the new normal.