As Covid-19 spreads across the country, Indian’s turn to online petitions to pressure authorities to better tackle the pandemic Mumbai: As the head of a non-profit working on road safety and emergency medical care, Piyush Tewari is used to interacting with the government.
But when he decided to mobilise a campaign around the need to expand Covid-19 testing, he knew that in-person lobbying would be impossible, given the restrictions imposed following the outbreak.
So, in mid-March, he started an online petition asking the union health minister to “provide testing kits and preparedness instructions to all 700 district hospitals in India medical colleges and private hospitals" and “undertake, on a war-footing, the training of community health