On Covid-19 lockdown, PM Modi to strike a balance between saving lives and livelihood

PM Modi is looking at the possibility of creating 3 zones - red, yellow and green - depending on the Covid-19 cases that have been reported

Updated on: Apr 11, 2020, 10:38:29 IST

Hindustan Times, New Delhi | By Shishir Gupta

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi will hear out all the Chief Ministers on their views and suggestions on whether to lift or extend the lockdown, but his decision will be communicated directly to people closer to April 14.

In his Covid-19 lockdown decision, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to take into account that there are 400 districts that haven’t had a single case of coronavirus disease (PIB)

On April 9 and 10, PM Modi had six hours of presentations made by his principal advisors and empowered groups each to strike the balance between life and livelihood as India does not have the medical infrastructure to handle the community transmission of the coronavirus.

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“The easiest call to make is to extend the lockdown, the toughest one is how to lift it so that India does not go into negative growth,” said a senior member of one of the empowered committees.

On Thursday, Prime Minister Modi heard his key advisors led by Principal Secretary PK Mishra, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, Principal Advisor P K Sinha, Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba, CEO NITI Aaayog Amitabh Kant and Additional Secretary (PMO) AK Sharma.

It is understood that while all were in agreement to save Indian lives, they also wanted economic activity to be revived as the ports are jammed with containers and major port cities like Mumbai and Chennai are hit by the pandemic.

“We have to revive activity in ports so that essential containers are locked behind non-essential containers and hence required to be removed. If we start the essential activity, then the patrol constable on the road must learn to distinguish between the essential and non-essential,” said a senior official.

It is understood that one of the proposals to revive economic activity with a graded lift of lockdown was to demarcate the country into red, yellow and green zones. The Red zones with major corona activity will remain sealed, the yellow with very limited number of cases will be monitored but movement will be allowed and the green zones will be allowed to come back to normal.

“ There are some 400 districts in this country that are not affected by the virus. We may look at opening them to activity and take a graded call on other districts by labelling them in yellow and green zones. One must not forget that the harvesting season begins from April 14 and India is a largely agrarian economy ,” said an official.

While PM Modi went into micro details including supply of PPE, HCQ and masks at these meetings, it is understood that he will study the full impact of lockdown over this weekend to decide on the final call. Given his credibility with the masses, PM Modi’s decision will be followed to the last word.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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