The inaccurate poultice of statistics.

"Had India clamped down on border movements, say, in the first week of February 2020, the spread of the virus would have been controlled. But it is always easy to be wise after the event," wrote Chairman of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister Bibek Debroy. It must have slipped his mind that the then President of the US Donald Trump visited India at the end of February and was greeted with an elaborate reception at Motera Stadium in Ahmedabad in Gujarat, which has since been renamed Narendra Modi stadium exactly to the day of Trump's visit. Giving a long list of subsidies, Debroy wrote, "Rural India was relatively unscathed from both covid and the lockdown." Rural India includes those who were working in cities, known as migrant labor, tens of thousands of whom were suddenly left penniless and hungry, and resorted to walking hundreds of miles back to their villages, often with little children. "The average Indian household lost about Rs 25,000 in income", while "the bottom 10% of India's households lost 30 percentage points more of their income than the top 10%", wrote Lahoti, Jha and Basole. The rural poor were the worst hit. "The bottom rural decile lost 54% of their incomes in the covid months, while the richest decile experienced a loss of 16% in rural areas. In urban areas, the corresponding numbers are 39% and 21%, respectively." "One year later, the lockdown that caught them by surprise is over and many migrants who had lost their jobs have made it back to towns and cities but life is akin to the proverbial square peg in a round hole," wrote Economic Times. "The total number of migrant workers who returned to their home states was 1,04,66,152 (over 10.4 million)", with  "Many people lost their loved ones in their perilous journeys undertaken, some succumbing to heat and hunger and some caught in accidents. In May last year, 16 migrants sleeping on the tracks were run over by a train in Maharashtra." "The tragedy took on myriad forms and is still continuing." To save money for the government, "A recent discussion paper by the Niti Aayog has suggested a reduction in the coverage of beneficiaries under the National Food Security Act (NFSA) from 75% of the population in rural areas to 60%, and from 50% to 40% in urban areas," wrote Prof Himanshu. "The food subsidy for this year, at Rs 4.22 trillion, is partly explained by payments of past dues to the Food Corporation of India (FCI). So is the next year's food subsidy budget of Rs 2.4 trillion." "The high food subsidy is actually a result of the mismanagement of food procurement and storage by the government." "A government-appointed committee led by Prof M Vidyasagar of IIT Hyderabad had estimated that in the absence of the lockdown, infections could have risen to more than 140 lakh (14 million) by the end of June, and the peak load of active cases would have been around 50 lakh (5 million)," wrote Amitabh Sinha. There could have been over 2.6 million deaths. This either/or calculation is useless. We will never know what would have happened if only flights, hotels, restaurants and movie theaters were shut down and the rest carried on with social distancing, masks and hand sanitizers. As an economist Debroy is happy with statistics, but suffering is individual, as proved by harrowing stories of desperate attempts to survive. Self-congratulations do not seem appropriate.