PR takes you only up to a point; it is honesty and transparency that count
We have set the world record for the highest number of COVID cases a day, and also the record for the highest number of COVID-related deaths a day. Stories and pictures of what India has been going through the past few months are difficult to digest – long lines of ambulances outside hospitals carrying COVID patients struggling to breathe; lack of medicines, hospital beds and oxygen; patients administered oxygen in cars and ambulances outside hospitals; uncontrollable grief and sorrow and a pervading sense of helplessness and hopelessness; the desperate struggle to survive; scared, unemployed and hungry migrant workers in the cities forced to get back to their homes in the smaller towns and villages… I can go on and on but this has been the broad picture across India in April and May. Not to forget, the horrifying images of floating bodies in the Ganges and half-buried corpses in the region as deaths from the country’s coronavirus surge broke records. The general perception
