 Hello and let's talk about the Prime Minister's speech to the country yesterday. Mr Modi was everywhere at 8pm again yesterday, talking about the value of self-reliance, the crisis being an opportunity for India, and proposing a large financial package, the details of which will be announced today. The other major announcement was regarding lockdown 4.0, the details of which will again be announced later. All in all, it was a speech with a lot of leads but no real clarity, especially when many Indians are worried about what happens next. We know that the lockdown is being eased but there seems to be no real flattening of the curve yet. So, how is the government planning to deal with this issue? We'll discuss this but first here are some details. As of 8am today morning, the total number of COVID-19 cases in India was 74,281 with 47,480 active cases. The total number of deaths stands at 2,415. Yesterday 3,525 new cases were reported with 122 deaths. So far, 1.85 million tests have been conducted. The highest number of active cases is in Maharashtra, followed by Tamil Nadu and Gujarat. Prime Minister Modi announced that Rs 20 lakh crores would be spent to address the fallout of COVID-19. He pointed out that this is 10% of the country's GDP, a point which was widely celebrated by supporters on social media. However, this amount includes a liquidity injected by the RBI into the system and previous financial package. Indian Express says that the total amount spent by the government this year in fresh allotments may be only over 4 lakh crores. The concrete details will be announced by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitaraman at 4pm today. 12.2 crore jobs have been lost due to the impact of the coronavirus in April. We talked to News Clicks Prabir Pulkai as the on this issue. Thank you Prabir so much for joining us. The Prime Minister delivered his speech yesterday. He announced his financial package which the numbers are big but there's been a lot of debate about whether it's actually going to be worth that much. And more importantly, there seems to be no real clarity about how the country is going to handle the disease, especially with the rising number of cases. So before we go to some of the details, do you think that the government is kind of struggling without a strategy right now? Well, let's put it this way. Government has had really one strategy for the coronavirus, novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 infections, which was a lockdown. Okay, so apart from that, the whole understanding of the epidemic that this was going to be with us for quite some time, this could give us the lockdown, could give us a breathing space within which we had to really create the necessary infrastructure for a long-term engagement with the epidemic, which as we have said a number of times in our shows and also with other experts we have had, that meant follow-up, testing, contact tracing, isolating the people who are infected and looking after your health system because the secondary source of the infections today are again the hospitals because if we don't provide protective equipment to them, they will be infected, they will infect others and of course they will infect the patients as well as their colleagues. All of that we have seen and even today the hospital scene seems to be quite poor and that means that your frontline workers who are struggling to contain the disease get taken out. The contact tracing, all of this is again relatively weak and the testing numbers are not going up. If you look at Wuhan today, the Chinese are saying they're going to test in 10 days, the whole city of Wuhan, 10 million people, 11 million people, 1 million tests per day, just one city and we are struggling at the moment something like 60, 70, 100,000 tests if we can do that per week. So if you take the tests that we are doing at the moment we are around the 100,000 mark if we give the government some credit. But the point is that this is not nearly enough and we need much more testing today than what we are doing. If we don't do that then we will really not identify where are the clusters, where are the people who are the new foci of infections. So the cycle of new infections will keep on continuing. Lockdown breaks the chains of transmission by breaking a lot of those links but it doesn't end in. And even under lockdown we are talking of reproductive rates of 1.21 or so which roughly translates to about 8%, 9% rise per day which is what we are seeing. And at that rate we will still double in about 10 to 11 days. Now that is still not containing the epidemic. It's a slow growth of the epidemic and when you lift the lockdowns obviously the numbers will only increase. So the fact that we did not use the lockdown to put all these things in place is now visible and we will probably see now rising numbers. If you look at the basic figures also you will see that really it's 10 to 12 hotspots that are providing the largest numbers. So that would have been the focus that we should have seen and we should have also seen much more co-option of the state governments. Even now the central government even as late as yesterday the directions to the states war was okay you can give your suggestions but we will issue the notifications. So the entire centralization of handling this epidemic still continues. This cannot be handled unless it's also decentralized. Central planning, central policies, central supplies, central planning for finances particularly money being given but at the same time it has to be implemented to the state and local level and that's what is missing. Also missing of course is people's participation. They are supposed to be locked down at the most clap but that's about it. There is nothing more that they can or should do. So the people's participation is also the missing element here because all they are being asked to do is to basically stay locked down, follow instructions and clap. There is no participation in the community in how they can contribute to combating the epidemic and all these measures if they're not taken a centralized top-down approach which is what is being followed is not likely to bear fruit and also the fact that it's entirely as we have commented earlier a police come centralized approach that is that is what is being implemented and it doesn't really help in helping us in this particular phase of the epidemic. Right and the other key question is regarding the steps for the economic package as well. So Finance Minister Nirmala Sitaraman has scheduled to announce the details today evening at four o'clock but it's nonetheless first of all it is surprising that the government is did not decide that ahead of the Prime Minister's speech nothing was announced and already it is quite too late for a lot of steps because a lot of the economic impact has already been seen in very harsh ways. You can see that there is one 22 million Indians who have lost their jobs. This is CMI figures who normally are touted on the front page of most papers when anything positive comes out but when it's the workers who are losing jobs it is sort of been written off the front pages. Now the US job losses are still big news but Indian job losses are not. Now if you look at the package that is being announced it seems to focus primarily on giving liquidity to business houses that's the intent of it. Yes there are talks about the farmers, the migrant workers, the poor, how transfers will be made, the Jandhan Yojana will have to see how much it translates in terms of actual money transfers but what has been the demand of a lot of the opposition parties in the left that the Mandrega program now needs to be upped so that that provides a support to the unemployed or the people particularly in rural areas. But you know the Mandrega has not been to the liking of the capitalist class because it acts as a wage push that it sort of gives the floor of wages that you can offer and obviously with the current mood of the government which is labor reforms and that again more they did talk about it yesterday the laws labor all of this if you see the directives that are being issued by the state government that labor laws can be dispensed with we can have now 14 hour week 14 hour day we can do away with higher and you know any protection to the workers simple higher and fire so handing over the workers completely with the capitalist class but the biggest issue for me apart from that which has been the policy of the central and the BJP governments for a long time it is the fact that they don't respect the constitutional guarantees to the workers that's only one part of it what they're also not seeing is that when Modi talks about demand where is the demand going to be if you up the working hours for the workers which means less employment less employment also means less demand so all of this is essentially in the name of labor reform what you're going to see is what is already in the offing as is already been announced by the state government do away with the protection to the workers and hand them over completely to the those who run the companies also this talk about 14 hour 12 hour days this is medieval this is not a wage slavery this is really slavery and you see an indication of that with the Bangalore construction industry didn't want the workers to leave they wanted essentially bonded leave that's that was the demand that was being made and finally to focus on one of the prime minister's pet themes which is about self-reliance in handling in dealing with his disease so do you think India has actually been able to tap into any of these resources where it comes to addressing COVID-19 or is it just another slogan well let's put it this way we are producing masks and we anyway it are the global pharmacy for the poor so we do produce a lot of formulations particularly what are called generic drugs so that level of self-reliance we always did have our textile industry another you know this level of industry were always effective I think we'd like to analyze the self-reliance bit a little more this is not the Nehruvian self-reliance which means that you also develop the human capability the knowledge base and the people who then understand what is being transferred to us technology this self-reliance means what Modi said yesterday supply chain locate industries here and of course we have invited not Apple who want to transfer a part of the supply chain out of China and we are hoping more such companies will follow suit we have offered them concessions in India to really open their companies so essentially what we are seeing is this self-reliance means essentially transfer companies out from other countries here bring your production facilities either at home or in China to India and we'll provide you land and as you are now saying bonded labor as well so this is the one part of the self-reliance which is different from the Nehruvian self-reliance that we talked about post-47 which had a national consensus behind it so that's one element of the self-reliance but one must also not forget that the global supply chain problems have now become clear that you also need local supplies because if anything disrupts the global supply chain countries are then really scrambling how to beat their whatever demands are and this time it is hospital demands but leaving that out there's one interesting development we must say at least government has started thinking about in you know providing for the local industry providing for the local demand building local supply chains that is better than thinking that only outsourcing your software people outsourcing what is called the call services industry that you take phone calls and that becomes your way of life as it works so you can see that that at least is a welcome change and particularly in the military affairs it's a very important change because earlier we are talking of interoperability with the NATO forces interoperability with the United States which means that we were tying ourselves to the supply chain originating from the United States and that was the substance of what the defense agreements were between India and the United States we've been Ravath had had a three day back two day back here the press con he talked about all a lot of this and Bhadrakumar has written a detailed piece on the implication of Ravath statements so I think one element is India will have to think about not banking or not becoming an adjunct to the American war industry or becoming relatively independent if it does then developing local technologies local capabilities importing technology but not tying yourself completely to them and absorbing the technology this is going to be the battle on self-reliance otherwise there is a very telling picture somebody has put up self and reliance this is an old joke which was there for the always for the monies that when when you talk about self-reliance it's about self and reliance thank you so much for being for talking to us in our next segment we go to Tamil Nadu where women workers speak about the issues they're facing due to the covid-19 crisis contribution of working women in India to the social and economic growth is immense amid the period of novel corona virus and the lockdown majority of the women workers have been affected notably Tamil Nadu has been in the top in terms of number of working women we will look into how working women have been affected these days it is a difficult situation and we are struggling to get food we are not earning anything and even our employers are not helping us in any way rupees thousand is not enough for us government should consider us and our livelihood I'm working in Sipkat last month I had worked for 20 days and was given rupees 7 000 as my salary but I can't run my family with that salary this month I haven't it gotten my salary this novel corona virus is torturing us and we don't know what to do the situation that we are having today is almost like we are going to be talking off before corona virus and after corona virus so in that kind of situation however women first before now after corona virus how are women now so before the corona virus pandemic came and our country was responding to it women were did not have much support but they were going out to work they had a job they did not have time to think because as you know in India women are working for more than five hours only in unpaid care work the difference between men and women in unpaid care work is huge men are working only for 52 minutes in a day for unpaid care work whereas women are working for five hours so even though the stress on them for more work with their families is as also going out to work for a wage the burden on women has always been more and they have basically more than double burden that is the home and work but they also have other burdens which are caused because of their low cost status because of their stigma at the workplace that they don't like to say oh I'm working as a well a curry or domestic worker or even a garment factory worker for that matter there is a stigma attached that they are not that they may be having a relationship outside so their personal life is embedded enmeshed into this and the burdens of work were always there so now after corona what happened the crisis is that the women lost their jobs they have no income even the domestic worker the worker who the woman worker who is sitting is selling her some vegetables in the marketplace or who is selling let us say some small small things in the local market or fish or whatever they are doing to make a small living they have all lost their jobs actually after corona will they be able to recover that we know for the fact that the government of India made a blanket lockdown that means no fishing no agriculture no transport no domestic work no services everything is shut down this is completely unprecedented that means 130 crore people are supposed to not do anything now when they don't do anything how do they feed themselves can a country which has so many people who are not even paid minimum wage who have no security who have no savings we just ask you sit at home that's all we have in this episode of let's stop we'll be back tomorrow with the latest news developments today until then keep watching news click