Analysis: How Covid has exposed India’s data-centric inadequacies

For a country where people often get reduced to statistics given the humongous population, India hardly has any effective data measurement tools that can be relied upon and swung into action amidst a pandemic, as the ongoing Covid-19 crisis has exposed.

The Indian administration doesn’t have data on how many migrant workers lost their lives during the crisis. There is no record of the number of healthcare staff that have died fighting the coronavirus. There is hardly any real-time tracking mechanism to know the nearest hospital having an ICU bed for a patient needing one. There has been discrepancy found in the Covid-19 data reported by the health ministry and that by the Indian Council of Medical Research.