Why India needs a pandemic law desperately

Source: www.moneycontrol.com

-- Prosenjit Datta (Former Editor of Business Today and Businessworld magazines)

Link to this article: https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/why-india-needs-a-pandemic-law-desperately-5228231.html

India has been using three outdated laws to decide its response in the Covid-19 pandemic. This needs to change.

If the government of India’s reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic so far has seemed arbitrary, simultaneously dictatorial, vacillating and rather haphazard in implementation, you could at least partially blame it on the lack of a comprehensive national law and protocol that is designed for any kind of a pandemic. It has instead largely depended on three laws, none of which were originally designed for the kind of challenges it faces today and which contributed to much of the confusion that has been seen since the decision to lock down the country in the last week of March 2020.

In this respect though, India is not alone. It finds itself in the company of practically every country in the world because none of them created a proper pandemic law despite 194 countries signing the World Health Organisation’s International Health Regulations (2005) (IHR). The IHR required the signatories to prepare national plans for pandemic preparedness. Yet, almost none of the countries got around to creating a comprehensive set of rules and a plan to deal with a national or international health scourge.

The US, under George Bush, did see a bill for a comprehensive pandemic preparedness and response being introduced in 2005 and passed the next year. However, the bill, after being passed, saw erratic funding from the government, and though it was modified in 2018, it was found sorely lacking when the novel Coronavirus swept through the country.

Ditto for the European Union that passed something called the Decision 1082/13. This required member states to prepare individual national plans. But as the experience shows, almost none of the member states had a real plan ready bar Germany.

India was also a signatory to the WHO IHS. However, it too does not have any sort of pandemic preparedness protocol or plan. It has depended on three laws – the short Epidemic Act of 1897 that was itself a response to the bubonic plague sweeping the world; the National Disaster Management Act of 2005, which was designed to quickly shut down and isolate a small portion of the country in the event of a natural disaster like an earthquake or a cyclone. And finally, in the initial days of the pandemic, Section 144 that authorises local authorities to ban gatherings and treat people who break the law as rioters.

The trouble with these laws is that they have allowed local administration to arm themselves with wide powers and treat the problem as a law and order issue – focusing more on keeping people indoors and punishing those who try to go out for essential work instead of looking at proper protocols that would suit a national health emergency.

Seeing the issue as a law and order problem creates its own set of hazards. The first one is that people who are seen as violating the law are treated as criminals. This has resulted in undue force being used to turn back migrant workers desperately trying to reach their home states after the lockdown has robbed them of food, shelter and, employment. It is also seen in the guideline, later withdrawn, which held that the management of a factory that received permission to operate partially would be treated as a criminal if any worker inadvertently got infected by the virus.

Would a pandemic law have solved all the problems that have cropped up after the lockdown? No, but a pandemic law is the first step to clearly define both what the powers of the government are in a situation like this and formulate a set of rules that provide the framework for action. It would be the first step for a proper pandemic protocol and action plan.

It can be argued that all these are ideas after the fact and would amount to nothing more than closing the stable doors after all the horses have bolted. But that would be the wrong way to look at it.

Before Covid-19, four separate pandemic threats had cropped up though none of them went on to become as widespread as the current one. The original SARS – or severe acute respiratory syndrome – was also caused by a virus much like this one, which had crossed over from an animal to humans. Then there was the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS) that had a fatality as bad or perhaps worse than Covid-19. There was also the Swine Flu, which jumped from pigs to humans. And finally, there was Ebola, far deadlier if only the number of people to die after catching the disease was to be counted.

The WHO IHS was a response to the growing threat of a possible pandemic from viruses that mutated quickly. The reason the original SARS, MERS and Ebola did not become global threats was because the transmission of those viruses did not jump from one person to another so easily. More importantly, most of them did not infect others until the symptoms had already started showing up in the patient. The problem with the current novel Coronavirus is that it can be spread by asymptomatic carriers who infect everyone they come in contact with days before any symptom appears.

The reason we need to create a pandemic law and action protocol even after this current attack has been brought under control is the viruses have started mutating. We will probably have to live with a threat of a random virus periodically causing havoc from now on. And that is why the lessons of the current pandemic should not be allowed to go waste.