Covid-19: India basking in global aid?

India’s reversal of fortunes

There is a strange, even a bizarre, sense of self-satisfaction, if not self-congratulation, among officials and policy wonks about the international aid from more than 40 countries, including China, flowing into India in the wake of Covid-19’s second wave. Foreign Secretary Harsh Shringla, at a press conference on April 29, listed the countries from where medical and oxygen equipment was flowing into India, which includes Uzbekistan, Guyana, Egypt, Bangladesh, apart from the United States, Russia, South Africa, and others. What could have been a moment of embarrassment is turned into one of satisfaction and triumph, an example of the huge goodwill that India enjoyed among all countries, the rich and the powerful, and the small and the poor.

Contrast this with the aid, with or without strings, that came India’s way in the mid-1960s, especially the PL480 wheat shipments from the US as India battled crop failure, famine and mass starvation. Those who wince in recalling that period did not seem to feel any sense of humiliation today as they tried to portray how quickly US President Joe Biden had, after the telephone conversation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on April 26, organised the dispatch of oxygen-making equipment, raw materials for the manufacture of vaccines, and ready-to-use vaccine stocks, and tweeted later that as India was there for America, so America is there for India. It was meant to seem like an exchange between two countries standing on equal footing.

Also read: India’s strict rules on foreign aid snarl Covid-19 donations

Yes, India is capable of shopping in the global markets for all the equipment and pharmaceutical materials, including raw materials and ready-to-use vaccines, and it does not have to depend on aid as such. The only obstacles for the shopping could be the tariff barriers, intellectual property rights issues, and the scarcities in the global supply chains. In a time of pandemic, there is not enough of the essential materials like medicines to go around. India, as a matter of fact, was expected to fulfil some of the gaps, especially in the manufacture of vaccines at low cost. But India has its own struggles in coping with the pandemic emergency, and it may not be able to play its rightful role in the global exchange of goods and services.

It is quite easy to enter the feel-good cocoon and declare with the Victorian poet that God’s in His Heaven and all is well with the world. The prime minister’s public relations machinery would want this to be the theme song. But this would require ignoring the inconvenient facts that Indian hospitals do not have enough ventilators or medical oxygen supplies to deal with an emergency, or that there are not enough medicine supplies, including vaccines, in the country. The government and the policymakers are required to address these shortages and even plan to avoid such exigencies. This would require an honest appraisal of the existing systems and policies, and an admission that all is indeed not well.

No opinion-maker seems to feel the need to observe that this is a reversal of fortunes in India’s position when last summer Prime Minister Modi made the loud and magnanimous offer of sending out medical aid to other countries, and how India would fulfil its self-assigned role of the ‘pharmacy of the world’, and he had even given the spin that Atmanirbhar Bharat affirms the ancient India motto of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam. The pouring in of international aid at a time of acute shortage of critical medical components should serve as a revelation that India is seriously lacking in essential things. Any self-respecting country would have shopped around for all that it needs at this time -- as India did during the Kargil conflict in 1999 when international orders were placed for coffins and they were delivered much after the end of the skirmish -- and not wait for global aid. What is curious is that the Modi government did not feel the need to buy the medical equipment that the public health system needed to combat the Covid-19 surge because it seems to be labouring under the delusion that Atmanirbhar Bharat does not need to import life-saving medical equipment and materials.

There have been knee-jerk decisions by the Modi government to buy vaccines from the global, specifically US, market because it has become evident that the indigenous production of vaccines by the Serum Institute of India and Bharat Biotech may not be sufficient to meet the target of vaccination of nearly a billion people.

The pandemic-ravaged India of 2021 is not the India of the mid-1960s, when it depended on shipments of wheat under PL480. It is better placed today than it was 50-60 years ago. But it must be realised, especially among those in power and those who are in the business of projecting ‘Brand India’, that the country has a long way to go before it is possible for ordinary Indians not to have to desperately run from hospital to hospital for a bed with oxygen or ventilator. Everything should be done to remedy this woeful lack of capacity.

The pouring in, and official acceptance, of international aid after a long gap is a grim reminder that India is still neither powerful nor rich enough to serve the needs of its own people fully on its own. There can be no national pride when the wails of the people are much too loud to be drowned by propaganda, or by the stony silence of governments. Cynical spinmeisters cannot turn the generous global aid to Covid-distressed India into a tribute to India, the emerging power.