Are the Government's COVID death figures accurate? : Prime Time With Ravish Kumar

 Ravish Kumar is a prominent Indian author, journalist and media personality. He works as the Senior Executive Editor of NDTV India. He hosts a number of programs including the channel's flagship weekday show Prime Time, Hum Log, Ravish Ki Report and Des Ki Baat. His highly convincing oratory skills and his practice of presenting news backed up with facts and evidence is highly appreciated by everyone. He has twice been conferred with Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award for the Best Journalist of the Year and became the fifth Indian journalist to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2019. Here, We shall be seeing the summary of episode of one his series where he talks about the Government provided figures of Deaths due to COVID-19 and whether they can be trusted.

According to the Government figures, the deaths due to COVID-19 are about 3 lakhs. But if we talk about the unofficial sources and their statistics, these figures go way higher. The minimum number of death they state based on approximations is about 6 lakhs which just the double of government provided figures. And It can go to a maximum of 42 lakhs in the worst case scenario where approximately 700 million of India have contracted Coronavirus until now (Courtesy: "New York Times" Newspaper)

If the unofficial reports are correct, they portray a threatening image where in actual, the number of people dying is 3 to 4 times more than what is being recorded. In one of reports made by doing a survey of villages of Rajasthan, it came to light that in the district of Shri Ganganagar having 3034 villages, the recorded deaths are just 48 whereas if we talk about just 28 villages out of these, about a total of 517 bodies have been cremated in the last 50 days.

Ravish also sheds light on the utter carelessness of central as well as state government in handling the 2nd wave of pandemic as well as vaccination drives. In a village of U.P., about 20 people were given a wrong injection of some other disease. If we talk about M.P., some people were given a first dose of covaxin and second dose of covishield. In Bokaro, a bank employee, despite being on oxygen supply, was forced to come to work. Several such other incidents were told to let us know about the grim condition India (especially in the villages) is facing right now.

The next topic of discussion was how imports from China to India have increased despite the tensions between the two nations and the ongoing Indian movement of boycotting Chinese products. According to the journalist, the idea of "Atma-nirbhar Bharat" is indeed a scam by the Modi Government. The report concludes by stating the ongoing "Kisaan Andolan" even after 6 months and how the protestors and Government need to discuss about coming to an agreement to put an end to this movement amidst the ongoing Corona crisis.