Coronavirus: India’s north-south divide deepens as it battles rising infections
- While the north is home to most of India’s 1.3 billion population, there are more testing centres in the south with indications that more tests are being done there
- The most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, where infant mortality is 10 times worse than Kerala, has 11 virus testing facilities for 235 million people
Fault lines of political power versus development have long existed, with the north’s larger population and use of the dominant language Hindi making it a natural power base, while the states and union territories in the south – home to about 300 million people – have traditionally enjoyed stronger health care and education systems.
This divide has been further exposed by coronavirus testing to determine the extent of the outbreak, with close to half – 97 of 202 – of government-run and private testing centres for Covid-19 located in the southern states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, the union territory of Puducherry and the south-western state of Maharashtra, though these combined only contain about one-third of the country’s 1.3 billion people.
And while the government agency tasked with overseeing testing, the Indian Council of Medical Research, has stopped issuing state-by-state breakdowns, numbers collected from various state administrations suggest an overwhelming majority of testing samples have come from southern states.
Of the 127,000 samples tested between late January and Wednesday this week, more than half were from the states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Maharashtra.