India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi Sunday asked forgiveness from his country's poor as the economic and humanitarian price of public health quarantine worsened across the country for 21 days and criticism mounted for the lack of adequate planning before making the decision.
Moody announced on Tuesday a three-week quarantine imposed in India to limit the spread of the Coronavirus, but the decision had a thunderbolt for millions of poor Indians because it left many of them hungry and forced tens of thousands of unemployed immigrants to flee the cities and walk hundreds of kilometers back to The villages from which they came.
"I would first like to ask for forgiveness from all of my people," Moody said in a speech to the Indians broadcast on radio. He added that the poor "will surely think 'what prime minister is this that has exposed us to these enormous troubles?'" He urged citizens to understand that there was no other option.
"The steps that have been taken so far ... will give India victory over Corona," Moody said.
The confirmed cases of coronavirus in India on Sunday rose to 979, and deaths to 25.
On Thursday, the Moody government announced a $ 22.6 billion economic stimulus program to provide direct financial and food aid to the poor.
In an opinion piece published today, Sunday, Abigit Banerghi and Esther Duflo, two of three who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2019, warned that more aid was needed for the poor.
"Without that, the demand crisis will turn into an economic meltdown and people will have no choice but to disobey orders," they said in the article published by the Indian Express.
The closure is expected to exacerbate the hardships of India's economy at a time when growth has already slumped to a six-year low.
There appears to be widespread support for strong measures to avert a catastrophe caused by the Coronavirus in India, which has a population of 1.3 billion and suffers from a weak public health system.
But opposition leaders, analysts and some citizens are increasingly critical of the implementation of these measures. They say the government appears to have been surprised by the mass movement of migrants following the announcement, which threatens to spread disease in remote areas.
As the local media circulated pictures of migrant workers walking long distances to return to their homes, political opponent Raoul Gandhi wrote on Twitter: "The government had no contingency plans for this displacement."
The "Moody Made a Catastrophe" tag was released on Sunday in India.
Police said four immigrants were killed Saturday when a truck hit them in the western state of Maharashtra. A police officer said that a migrant collapsed and died in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh also yesterday.
Today, Sunday, several hundred immigrants gathered in a square in the town of Paypad in the southern state of Kerala to demand the provision of transportation to return them to their towns.
The central government called on states to provide food and shelter to unemployed workers, and Moody's supporters blamed the state governments on Twitter for failing to implement the closure appropriately.