India’s lockdown has turned into a huge misadventure, senior Congress leader M. Veerappa Moily said as the government today said that the country will have to learn to live with the novel coronavirus. Moily, who handled several ministries including petroleum & natural gas, power and corporate affairs in the UPA government, said that the country should not have gone into a nationwide lockdown and that the life of 1.3 billion people cannot be allowed to be paralyzed.

“The lockdown is a default measure and not an objective solution,” Moily told IN. He also said that the crude approach has brought up serious questions on governance. “It shows they [the BJP] don’t understand governance,” Moily said.

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Prime Minister Narendra Mody imposed a nationwide lockdown on March 25 and extended it twice.

Moily prescribed a stimulus package equivalent to at least 15 per cent of the GDP.

The migrant laborers and daily wage earners have been the worst hit by the sudden lockdown.

“It is shameful how the migrant laborers have had to suffer, it just shows that they are no one’s children, and the recent deaths of the migrants on the railway tracks just shows that,” the Congress leader said. The death of 16 migrant laborers, who were run over by a cargo train near Aurangabad yesterday, as they fell asleep on the tracks while walking to their home town in Bhusaval in Madhya Pradesh shocked the country.

“This kind of approach has not been taken by any country, and whatever the case may be this kind of a reaction is not the solution, it has never happened in the past,” he pointed out. He said that a district-wise analysis was required and not a full lockdown.

“There are two components to the whole problem, one is testing and then treatment for those who are infected and two is to continue with economic activities. You cannot shut down the whole economy,” the 80-year-old leader said, adding that the stimulus package so far announced was nothing but “peanuts.”

Despite the lockdown, which was intended to break the chain of transmission, the number of coronavirus cases is about to touch 60,000, prompting many to question the efficacy of the measure. Several think tanks and rating agencies have projected a negative to nil growth rate for India in the current financial year.

Economic activities must be allowed to resume at the earliest, Moily said. “Life should go on, you can’t paralyze life,” he added..