They light up Delhi’s deadly dark

In Delhi, where the darkness is darkest, not only had vaccines run out but also beds, medicines and oxygen for the dying. Pic/PTI

Something miraculous happens when an incompetent government gives up and steps back into its darkness. The people start lighting their own candles.

In just one month, we have seen the callousness of those we call our leaders. They allowed 4 million people to congregate in a superspreader event while a pandemic raged. The tsunami of Kumbh Mela infections has not even started; it's only April and it's only the world's worst-ever daily tally of new cases.

We have seen the country's leader marvel and gloat over the size of the crowds that met him, maskless and socially undistanced, in Bengal. I have heard the Health Minister smugly declare, like some grandmaster who had planned all his moves, that the country was "in the endgame" of COVID.

That game, alas, has turned out to be a massacre. The government that promised the world "most ambitious vaccination programme" reached barely 9% of its people before running out of vaccines. In Delhi, where the darkness is darkest, not only had vaccines run out but also beds, medicines and oxygen for the dying.

You could subside into sadness and anger. Many do; I did. Someone called Amina didn't.

She works by herself in a spartan apartment in Arpora, Goa, cellphone in hand and laptop open in front of her. She is looking for lives to save in Delhi, her hometown where parking lots have become crematoria and sports complexes are being repurposed for the critically ill. Amina and her friends are a vibrant demonstration of a spirit this government never had - resourcefulness, compassion and initiative.

Amina and two friends formed their WhatsApp group, Fighting Covid, just four days ago. That may not seem like much but COVID-19's second wave in India is not much older either. Three women became eight, and that became 15. It was a simple idea - they would compile a live list of beds, oxygen cylinders, medicines, food deliveries, plasma donors, labs, chemists who did home deliveries and so on. They would make sure this information reached those who desperately needed it.

Amina started with hospital-wise information about vacant COVID-19 beds, updated regularly in a Delhi Municipality app called Delhi Corona. Her friends began scavenging through Facebook and WhatsApp posts, locating other availables - an oxygen cylinder here, someone willing to deliver home-cooked food to families isolated by COVID, a plasma donor.

They posted an appeal on their colony's WhatsApp group, with about 300 families. Two of their phone numbers were accidentally included.

In a city starved of succour, even a glimmer is promising. The post went viral and the phone numbers began to get passed around - and the calls started. By day two, the Fighting COVID WhatsApp group had become one of the many lifelines between stricken, stranded families and rapidly dwindling resources and amenities. The list swelled up so rapidly that they set up a Google Docs file to hold all the data, updating it in real time.

"I learned quickly that the situation is completely fluid. Nothing is valid for more than half an hour," she told me.

Five volunteers were put to work verifying each item of data. They worked the phones, tracing each post back to its origin. They very quickly learned the first lesson of the pandemic - don't call hospitals, pharmacies, oxygen suppliers, labs. They don't answer their phones any more. They're overwhelmed and helpless.

Other self-help groups sprang up in the night - IIT-ians launched an app, Miranda House began posting on Instagram, Art of Living groups posted real-time updates. On Monday morning a Radha Soami group announced that they were setting up 2,000 beds at the Yamuna Sports Complex.

The trickle of information stopped completely at about 3 pm on Sunday. Nothing has moved since then on Amina's mobile screen. Delhi finally had nothing left for the sick and the dying - no beds, no oxygen, no nothing.

Heartbreaking news came from the Radha Soami group. They had the beds but could not find the oxygen and so had to delay their planned COVID hospital. TV vultures swooped down to show long lines of families with their dead and dying, some gasping inside ambulance vans, who had lined up hoping that a bed and oxygen would finally be there for them.

Amina has no idea how many hundreds found help from the information they passed on to them.

I am moved and shaken by these strangers in Delhi's darkness reaching out with flickering candles to others struggling in the same darkness. They are doing, with determination, what this government has walked away from, immersed in its political ambitions and absolute power.

Why does she do it? Amina did not think very long. "Something in me does not want devastation to be the last word. I want to make this mean something more than random death."

Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com

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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.