Modi govt wasted money on faulty Chinese Covid tests ignoring Indian options- Shashi Tharoor:

The growing storm over the time and money wasted by the Narendra Modi government in procuring rapid antibody testing kits for coronavirus from China, which have now demonstrated a mere 5 per cent accuracy rate, points to serious failures of policy and decision-making on the part of the government and its favoured medical agency, the Indian Council of Medical Research or ICMR.

This week, the ICMR halted testing for Covid-19 cases, admitting to embarrassingly major variations in test results. The entire episode has shown up yet again the abject fecklessness of the Modi government’s unprofessional management of the Covid-19 crisis.Opposition leaders like myself who have raised the issue have been confronted with the usual backlash from the government’s supporters. Their response – disregarding the usual ‘whataboutery’ and gratuitous references to “70 years of Congress rule” (which suggests that today’s BJP trolls have decided to cede Atal Bihari Vajpayee to the Congress!) – made two main points.