Mango festival and clinical trial of drug made of cow dung & urine lead Gujarat’s battle against COVID  

Amango festival was inaugurated in Ahmedabad this week. At a time when most public functions are being put off, the fortnight-long mango festival reminded people of Prime Minister Modi’s self-confessed love for the fruit and reflected the doggedness of the state government to pretend that all’s well; that it is business as usual. It is actually unusual when most public events are being put off in the wake of the pandemic.

All is not quite well in Gujarat. The last few weeks exposed the ‘Gujarat’ model, which lay in tatters. Doctors and nurses went on strike in Ahmedabad demanding protective gear. The death toll due to COVID-19 rose in Ahmedabad and the Gujarat High Court in caustic comments asked how many times the health minister had visited the civil hospital to supervise things.

Justifying the low number tests done in the state for COVID-19, the Gujarat Government told the HC that if more tests were conducted, as many as 70% of the people in Ahmedabad would have tested positive for COVID-19; and that would certainly have caused panic. The admission appeared to support the social media post of Vijay Nehra, an IAS officer who was replaced as Ahmedabad Municipal Commissioner. Nehra fell foul of the government after claiming that Ahmedabad, a city with a population of seven million people, could end up with 800,000 COVID-19 cases.

Even as 169 people died of COVID19 in Ahmedabad district between May 19 and May 26 (the death toll in the state stood at 938 on May 27), doctors complained that they were being asked to test healthy people and submit negative reports to suppress real numbers.

The Gujarat Government’s permission is required before testing even elderly patients lying in the ICU or on ventilators. And in a large number of cases, the permission has been delayed or denied. Many of the patients died while waiting for the permission to come. The state government clearly wants to deny any failure on its part; or any link between the high number of COVID-19 deaths in Ahmedabad and the ‘Namaste Trump’ event on February 24.

Rajkot is also again in the news for the wrong reasons. Rajkot had hogged the headlines in May when a company with close links to the PM and other BJP leaders claimed to have manufactured a cheap ventilator. The Virani family, one of the major shareholders in the company, was in the news for having gifted to Prime Minister Narendra Modi the Rs 10 lakh suit in 2015, sparking controversy and forcing its auction. This time chief minister Vijay Rupani emerged from his self-imposed quarantine to endorse the ‘ventilator’ named Dhaman-1.

As many as 230 of Dhaman 1 were ‘donated’ to the Ahmedabad Civil Hospital but doctors soon raised the red flag. They were not ventilators at all, they complained. They were actually ambu bags used for giving artificial respiration and pumping in a limited volume of oxygen when nothing else is available.

Rajkot is again the city where Rashtriya Kamdhenu Ayog, set up by the central government last year with a corpus of Rs 500 Crore, is set to start clinical trials of an Ayurvedic drug to treat COVID-19 cases. The drug is based on Panchgavya, a concoction made with cow’s dung and urine, milk, curd and ghee, the last two derived from cow’s milk. Clinical trials will be held in Rajkot, Ahmedabad and Surat before they are tried outside Gujarat.