India has tightened its Covid-19 restrictions as a surge of infections threatens the country’s robust economic rebound from last year’s devastating outbreak of the Delta variant.
The country’s daily new infections have more than doubled in three days to 117,100 as of Friday morning, while the number of active cases has soared nearly 73 per cent to 371,363.
The surge followed a busy period of social occasions in India, including important religious festivals and holidays and the country’s wedding season.
The capital New Delhi and several states have imposed night and weekend curfews and restricted capacity at hotels, restaurants, malls and cinemas. But authorities have backed off from introducing measures as onerous as during previous lockdowns in the belief the Omicron variant is less life-threatening.
“Corona poses challenges, but it cannot stall the growth process,” Prime
Minister Narendra Modi declared in his first speech of the year.
After one of the world’s strictest lockdowns at the start of the pandemic, India’s gross domestic product contracted a record 24-4 percent between April and June 2020. Last year, it began recovering, growing 8.4 percent year on year from July to September and 20.1 percent the previous quarter, according to official statistics.
But the restrictions to cope with the latest outbreak will affect services such as hospitality and education and “will slow the momentum of [the economic recovery]”, according to Dharma Kirti Joshi, the chief economist at rating agency Crisil.
High unemployment and creeping price rises were hitting India’s poorest, economists said, creating a difficult balance for policymakers between taking care of public health and letting people work.
While Omicron has produced a lower rate of hospitalizations so far, experts warn that the virus is unpredictable. They worry about the potential for a repeat of India’s catastrophic second wave last year, when the Delta variant killed hundreds of thousands and wreaked havoc on the country’s fragile health infrastructure.