A lockdown isn’t a goal in itself but just a way to buy time for other efforts to fight covid and flatten its curve The covid health and economic crisis in India has been worsened by the government confusing means with ends.
To refresh our collective memory, experts across the world supported interventions to increase social distancing. The goal was to help governments, private institutions and communities scale up their capacity to deal with the pandemic.
In India, the government appears to have treated the lockdown as a policy end in itself. And its focus has been to better enforce successive versions of the lockdown.