By Ranjona Banerji
Monday morning saw our brave news outlets brimming with over-excitement. India has overtaken the US population in vaccines! Yaay! We are the greatest et cetera. That is, almost everyone carried the press release from the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Others tweeted the number with great fervour and glee! More than the population of the United States!!! Woo hoo!!!
The population of the USA is over 32 crore. India vaccinated over 32 crore people.
Wow! Or is it?
Well, none of the “reports” (ie regurgitated government press releases) I read put this number in context. Forgive me if I missed a little squeak of journalistic cynicism anywhere.
Should we put the population of the United States in context?
India’s population is 1.39 billion or 139 crore.
The population of the United States is 330 million or 33 crore.
India has an extra zero (yaay!) but anyway.
According to Our World in Data, the United States had vaccinated, June 27, 2021, over 54 percent of its population at least once.
Because of that extra zero, India has managed to vaccinate just under 20 percent of its population at least.
This major difference explains the level of opening up in different vaccinated nations.
Maybe our eager-beaver journalists and TV anchors forgot that India is the second-most populous nation on the planet. The most populous nation on the planet, that which is not named for its transgressions into Indian territory in Ladakh for instance, claims to have vaccinated 1.1 billion people once, that is at about 43 percent of its population. Naturally, no government press releases with comparisons to China were released.
The temerity of the Union Health ministry cannot be ignored. The chart issued on Twitter, with the Prime Minister’s face on it, puts up countries like the UK and Italy to compare to India. We can swallow up many of those countries and no one would notice!
Sadly, while we were thrilled with India’s massive vaccination figures, this article appears out of Madhya Pradesh. Turns out that people in Madhya Pradesh claim that they have received vaccinated certificates without being vaccinated! How happy we were last week that on International Yoga Day, Madhya Pradesh managed to vaccinate 17.42 lakh people.
O dear.
https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/madhya-pradesh-record-vaccination-13-year-old-among-fake-beneficiaries-2474531?amp=1
Kudos to NDTV for this report. Lifts the doom and gloom about mainstream media cowardice.
But one suspects there is no hope for our most senior journalists, editors, commentators and TV anchors. Many continue to live in their Modi-Modi La-La Land.
Those in the 60s and above cut their eye-teeth during the heyday of the Congress. They were trained to attack the government of the day, and many set the standards which younger generations wanted to emulate. This rigour however ended in 2014. The excoriation which earlier governments were subjected to was packed up in a suitcase and placed in some forgotten secret place.
And thus, most of the biggest names forgot the basic lesson. And invented the “blame everyone else for Modi and Shah and BJP messes” game. They’ve spun this tune out for seven years now. Rather than blame Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government for India’s problems, they still somehow manage to find a scapegoat. Right now, it could just be a random goat walking down the street. If he was walking on a field, he might have been able to stop the latest Modi disaster, that stupid goat!
It is a great shame and pity that these were once our most admired journalists.
Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She is also Consulting Editor, MxMIndia. Her views here are personal