>> It feels like citizens have been left to fend for themselves.

It's almost sort of Darwinian where it's up to you if you survive.

♪♪ >> Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today, a look at India and the world's worst COVID crisis.

Just months ago, India was praised for its pandemic response.

Today, record highs daily for new cases and deaths, a 40% positivity rate in Delhi, a desperate need for supplies, vaccines, medical equipment.

I'm talking about that and what it means for the rest of the world with the Delhi-based, award-winning journalist and author Barkha Dutt, who lost her own father to the virus just days ago.

But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

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At First Republic, our clients come first.

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Additional funding provided by... ...and by... >> 1.4 billion people, the second largest population in the world.

Experts feared the worst for India -- widespread poverty, densely packed urban areas, and nowhere near the healthcare infrastructure required to handle a pandemic.

But as the epicenter of the COVID pandemic kept shifting -- Europe, then the United States, then Brazil -- India seemed to have been spared.

Cases dropped and India got its vaccination program underway in January.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared victory at the World Economic Forum.

Within weeks, those words would come back to haunt him.

#ResignModi exploded in social media and anger at India's government is growing alongside new infections and record-setting death tolls.

Hundreds of thousands of new infections daily that we know about, already more than 200,000 reported deaths, though experts say that number could be 5 or even 10 times higher.

Epidemiologists fear the infection rate could be as high as half a million per day, known by August, with as many as a million dead.

India, as one newspaper headline put it, is a ship adrift.

So how did this happen?

Despite being the world's biggest vaccine manufacturer, rollout of shots has been incredibly slow with fewer than 10% of the population having received a single dose.

And while Prime Minister Modi has supported widespread use of masks and vaccine uptake, he's also being blamed for recent super-spreader events in his nation, allowing millions of Indians to gather for campaign rallies and the massive religious festival Kumbh Mela.

Modi has proven himself to be immune to political challenges in the past, including vast protests over his anti-Muslim citizenship law in 2019 and ongoing demonstrations from farmers opposed to Modi's agricultural laws.

But the situation in India today is a catastrophe.

Hospitals and morgues overwhelmed, funeral pyres in the streets because crematoriums cannot keep up with the mounting number of deaths.

International aid has begun to pour in much needed oxygen and ventilators, AstraZeneca vaccine from the United States, Sputnik V from Russia.

But the worst is yet to come, with the peak of this deadly wave not expected until mid-May.

What does this all mean for India, for Modi and for the world?

That is the topic of today's conversation.

Barkha Dutt, so good to see you.

Thanks for joining the show.

>> Thanks for having me, Ian.

>> So, of course, I want to talk all about this catastrophe as it's hitting India, your home country.

But just a few days ago, you lost your father to coronavirus.

My heart goes out to you.

Can you talk a little bit about him and what happened?

>> Yeah, in fact, Ian, when you reached out, my father was ill, but like many other people, I was hopeful that he would recover.

You know, we've been told that this was a treatable illness for the most part, that, you know, more people recover than did not.

And I was trying to keep calm about it because I am relatively an Indian of privilege.

I have access to private medical care.

We had a team of excellent doctors monitoring him.

But at home, like many elderly people, he was scared to go to hospital.

He thought, you know, he may never make it back alive.

He didn't want to be alone in what he feared might be his final hours.

As it turned out, and as so often happens with COVID-19 cases and we're seeing a lot of this with the second wave in India, he suddenly deteriorated.

And on the day that he deteriorated and we realized that we'd have to take him to hospital, the hospital is an hour away from where we live.

And I rushed around to try and find an ambulance.

The ambulance that arrived was really a rickety old second-hand car, a van that had been repurposed as an ambulance.

It did not have any paramedics.

It had a crew of one, a driver.

It had a single cylinder.

The driver assured me it would work.

I was too panicked.

I jumped onto the front seat, my dad at the back.

The ambulance snarled through traffic.

We do not even have a green corridor, despite plaintive pleas to the cops here to allow a free sort of passage for ambulances.

We do not have that.

And as we raced to the hospital, by the time we reached the hospital, we found that the cylinder had not worked in this private ambulance, nothing to do with the hospital.

And when we reached the hospital, the hospital told us that he'd have to be wheeled straight into ICU.

>> The cylinder, the oxygen cylinder in the... >> In the ambulance.

>> And how long did it take the ambulance to show up from when you called?

>> It took about an hour for the ambulance to show up and then an hour's ride to the hospital.

And in that traffic, snarly traffic, even though there's a curfew and a lockdown, no oxygen as it should have been functioning, dangerous drop.

He gets wheeled into ICU.

He ends up on a ventilator swiftly.

I'm haunted by his last words.

He said, "I'm choking.

Please treat me."

He believed in science.

He believed in the medicines.

The doctors did their best.

But that one ambulance ride haunts me.

You know, I just feel like that played with his life, and the nightmare didn't end then, Ian.

We went to cremate him.

I must tell you that I've personally been reporting on how cremation grounds across India are running short of space.

It isn't just the hospitals that are overrun.

When we went to cremate my dad, there were four other families who had arrived at the same time in the exact spot we were supposed to cremate him.

There was an argument.

There was a fight.

We had to seek the help of the police just to cremate my father.

And it just really -- it was like becoming the story that I report.

That said, it's crushing for me.

And I don't even know how I'm keeping calm talking to you.

But I want to underline that I'm cognizant, that I'm luckier than most.

Yes, I lost my father.

Yes, I'm an orphan.

My mum died when I was in my teens.

But I think of the people I meet outside the hospitals that have shut their doors to this country's poor, who do not have access to the medical care that my father had, who do not have an opportunity to even fight for their lives, who do not have any of the privileges that I had and I tried to give to my father.

And I think of them, and I've said this before, as the orphans of the Indian state.

And so while I'm crushed, the reason I'm talking and the reason I'm sharing his story is because it's necessary, even in this midst of personal tragedy, to be aware that the calamity all around me is so much worse for hundreds of thousands of Indians.

>> We are hearing stories that the healthcare system, not just in terms of the ambulances, but ICUs, oxygen shortages, vaccination shortages, you name it -- everything.

Treatment is just nowhere close to the scale of the epidemic crashing around you right now.

Talk about how it was when you got to the hospital and also what you're seeing in hospitals across your country right now.

>> So the people that my heart really goes out to, apart from, of course, the desolate families that are running from hospital to hospital looking for help, is the doctors and the health workers who have been totally betrayed by the absence of logistical backup and infrastructure, who have been totally betrayed by a complacent, callous and incompetent preparation for this second wave.

The health workers are being blamed by angry families when there is no bed or when there is no oxygen or when somebody dies.

We've had hospitals in the national capital of India where, in a single night, 25 patients have died in a premier hospital because there was no oxygen.

And this has happened not once.

It's happened three times this past week alone.

And so you see your health system collapsing, but not because your front-line workers aren't doing what they're meant to, but because policy makers, the government basically dropped the ball on the second wave.

There was a misreading that the worst was behind us, when the first wave was over.

India decided to gift away or export vaccines.

We purchased very few vaccines for ourselves.

We were hung up on a made-in-India vaccine, so we did not give approvals to foreign-made vaccines, all of which we've had to do now, in the midst of this calamity.

We're supposed to have a major vaccine rollout for everyone above 18, but there are no vaccines that are going to power that rollout or not enough anyway.

And through this period of carnage, we've had our politicians, including our prime minister and our home minister and our major opposition leaders, continue to address political rallies that have seen crowds in the hundreds of thousands and not intervened to have stopped religious congregations that have taken place in the heartland.

If this is not mixed messaging, if this is not callousness, if this is not insensitivity, I do not know what is.

>> Talk to me about the mood.

Talk to me about how it feels to be an Indian citizen in that environment.

>> It feels like citizens have been left to fend for themselves.

It's almost sort of Darwinian.

You have a sense of being, you know, starring in your own worst science-fiction survival movie where it's up to you if you survive.

It's because you managed to somehow.

It's because of who you knew or how tough you were, not because the institutions of the state are necessarily available equally for all.

In Hindi, one man said to me at a cremation ground and I translated in English.

He said... [ Speaking Hindi ] Which means "we are now in God's hands."

Basically, what he was conveying was that there was no state representation to turn to, whether at the doors of hospitals or at burial grounds or graveyards or cremation grounds.

There's a great sense of loneliness, of desperation, of despair.

I would call it a heartbroken nation, but I would also call it an angry nation.

My social network timelines are filled with plaintive pleas for an oxygen concentrator, for an oxygen cylinder, for an ICU bed, and people have even stopped tagging official handles.

Civil society is just tagging each other.

It's almost like people are -- you know, it's now up to us to save ourselves.

That's how I emotionally describe it.

If I were to step back and be a little more clinical about it, I'd say the government has finally hit the emergency buttons.

I think now they are describing it as a once-in-a-century crisis, but a once-in-a-century crisis, if you lose two months, as we have, and critically not purchasing those vaccines and continuing to hold mammoth, mass congregations, those two months is the difference between many, many lives, Ian, lost and saved.

And the other fear that we have in this country is that we may not even fully count our dead.

I say this to you as someone who has traveled across states to multiple funeral grounds.

And when I compare the numbers of funeral pyres, little burials that are taking place, to the official data released from those districts or those provinces or those states, that the gap is humongous.

So the official numbers are bad.

But I can tell you that, in fact, in actuality, the numbers of those dying is so much worse.

>> I want to go back a little bit because it was back I remember when Prime Minister Modi gave his speech at the World Economic Forum.

This was back in January when, I mean, the story not just being delivered by the prime minister but globally was that India was doing a pretty good job.

What created the false confidence and how did they get it so wrong?

>> So I think two things have changed from 2020 to 2021.

The first is that, in 2020, people were willing to forgive the government for making mistakes because the world was grappling.

It was -- you know, none of us knew what to do.

I think the complacency set in because as a percentage of infections, the fatalities seemed to be not as high as the rest of the world at all.

So what we were able to take away from the 2020 data is that, you know, many more Indians were infected again than the official data told you.

The infection fatality rate was actually so low that some experts I knew globally were calling it a mystery, a mystery of science.

The science had no answer to it.

And I still don't know.

I still don't know what happened.

But it doesn't explain to me why we should have got lulled into not needing contingencies.

I will confess that even someone like myself, when India started giving away vaccines, I felt quite proud.

I was like, "Oh, this is the right thing to do.

We're a big country.

We're an emerging power.

We should be helping people in distress."

I had no idea that there would not be enough vaccines for a vaccine program, that, you know, we would have purchased such few vaccines that our bureaucrats would drag their feet on, let's say, clearances for a company like Pfizer or Moderna or even Sputnik.

Even those approvals came much, much later than they should have.

The other mistakes that we made -- and you're right.

I mean, we were all caught up in this, "Hey, the worst is over."

It wasn't just the government.

It's just that we look to the government to put the plan B and C in place.

The other big mistake that we made was to think that there would be vaccine hesitancy in the beginning, that the vaccine rollout would not see a flood of people.

There was some hesitancy in the beginning, but the moment everybody wanted vaccines, there weren't enough to go around.

And finally, there was an overcentralization.

It's now been let go of.

But Delhi and the Modi government was trying to decide which states should get how many vaccines.

Right?

And so when the state of Maharashtra, which had the maximum number of cases, which has India's financial capital, Mumbai, when it said "We've got the most cases, give us the most vaccines," it seemed like a no-brainer to me.

The central government did not oblige, right?

>> So, Barkha, let me -- I want to ask you a little bit more about that.

Is there a backlash?

Is there a feeling that India is too close to the United States?

And where is the U.S.?

Is this going to change the way the Indian government thinks about a country like China?

I mean, how do you see this so far playing out geopolitically, if at all?

>> I think there was some disquiet and anger at the initial responses of the Biden administration.

We know all prominent Indian American citizens did a lot of work in the back channels to get the Biden administration to change its mind.

But you did see from policy makers a disenchantment, a kind of expression of frustration.

I mean, the Quad was supposed to come together to use vaccines as an instrument of almost counter-diplomacy against the rise of China, which has also been using its vaccine program in the region for influence.

And I think that's the game, the geostrategic game that India had got caught up in.

I think in India, there is sometimes a strange sort of feeling that Democrats in government are less kindly disposed towards India than Republicans.

You'll hear a lot of this from the average Indian, as I'm sure you've had on your trips to India.

But I do believe that that hump has been crossed.

It's my sense now that the two administrations are working together.

I still think India would be very hesitant with China, especially given the year-long standoff in the upper Himalayas in Ladakh, which is, by the way, not been fully resolved.

The media isn't talking about it because who has the time?

Yeah, so I think that's where we stand right now.

It's too early to see how that's going to play out.

But I don't see us rushing to China for help at all.

>> Now, you have said that the government in India has now recognized this is a once-in-100-year calamity.

Does that mean that they have suspended all of these mass, in-person election rallies?

Does that mean that we are getting the kind of leadership in terms of telling the people, "Here's the way you need to behave now"?

>> Well, it was only about a week ago, roughly, that the prime minister himself suspended his campaign.

I just wish he had done it way earlier because everybody takes the cue from him.

And what was also happening at these rallies were that leaders were not wearing masks.

You know, they could have used these moments to make them a moment about mask wearing.

They could have made these rallies with one-seat gaps, even if they were out in the open, and said you would not be allowed in.

There were ways to do it if you had to do it.

I personally think that these rallies should never have been held.

So, all that, I think is now past us.

But I just have the sense that we are still in denial.

Either we think that's the way to contain panic.

Our health minister, for instance, made a statement saying that India is better equipped to fight COVID in 2021 than 2020.

That's simply rubbish.

We had India's solicitor general telling the Supreme Court that there is no oxygen deficit as of now.

That's simply not true.

I have just reported from a gurdwara -- that's a place of worship for Sikhs -- where the situation is now so bad that this place of worship now has oxygen cylinders at its doors, and it's called an oxygen langar.

Langar is the Hindi word for a feast that the gurdwara normally provides.

It's normally food.

Now, instead of food, there are cylinders being offered for the elderly who cannot get access to hospital.

They drive up in their car.

They take a puff of oxygen for about half an hour.

They calm themselves down and then they go back home.

This is the situation.

It's dystopian.

I never thought I would see it in my country.

And so when I hear the senior-most law officer tell the Supreme Court that there is no oxygen deficit, it makes me very, very angry.

So I just feel enraged when you're asked to believe that everything is okay.

I understand the need to not create panic, but that containing panic will not be done by lying to people about how bad the situation is.

We need help.

We need the world's help.

And we should have no shame and no nationalist pride in asking everybody at this point to come to the rescue of the Indian people.

>> I mean, going through this for your country and for you right now, where are you turning to for some hope?

>> I think in people.

I think the fact that people have come through for each other, that strangers have come through for each other, that whether it's this place of worship that's opened its doors, you know, or it's, you know -- you go on to Twitter and yes, there's a lot of ugliness sometimes on social media.

But sometimes you just say, "I need help."

And some complete stranger will connect you to someone who will connect you to someone who'll get you a hospital bed.

I've personally been trying to do it for as many people as I can.

When my father died, I know I got messages from across the world and, you know, what is it about this crisis?

It's basically that you feel displaced, you feel scared, you feel alone.

And I think the hope -- the only hope that we look for right now is in the humanity of connections, sometimes with people we don't know and sometimes with people we know.

And frankly, at this point, that is the hope.

Otherwise there's an overwhelming sense that we've been left to fend for ourselves, >> Barkha Dutt, my heart goes out to you.

Thanks, really, for joining us today.

>> Thanks for having me, Ian.

Thank you.

>> That heart-wrenching dispatch from Barkha Dutt provides a glimpse into the COVID outbreak crippling her country.

But what has the experience been like for the millions of Indians living outside of India as they watch their friends and their family endure unspeakable suffering?

>> My name is Rohit Mediratta.

I've been living in the Bay Area for about the last 20 years.

>> My name is Kanika Mediratta.

Our family is back in Delhi.

My parents, my in-laws, as well as our extended family live there.

Two weeks ago, we were hearing about its impact on people we had heard of.

Last week it became people we knew.

This week it's our own family.

My mother has COVID, thankfully is stable at this point, but we are anxious as her oxygen levels fluctuate.

My father started showing symptoms.

So we started this campaign about two weeks ago as we sat together at night saying there has to be something that we can do.

We came across oxygen concentrators as one of the major needs in Delhi as oxygen supplies were low, and agencies, hospitals, nursing facilities were running out of oxygen and putting out S.O.S.

messages to everybody on Twitter, Facebook.

We were getting texts from people asking if we knew of a supply.

>> Typically in hospitals, there would be oxygen supplies that would be given to patients with an oxygen concentrator.

The advantage that people have is it takes in regular air.

It then increases the concentration of oxygen in that air so that the lungs have to work less hard to bring the patient back to normal levels of saturation of oxygen in their blood.

>> Next morning, I woke up.

I called about 20 suppliers and distributors in the U.S. We were lucky enough to find one supplier with distribution network in India willing to work with us and able to secure or tell us that he had the ability to secure 200 oxygen concentrators, to be able to provide them to India the first week of May.

We then partnered with SaveLIFE Foundation, which is a organization out of Delhi, working directly with the Delhi government, that gave us the ability to not just know that we had a supplier, but we also had a distribution network that we could trust so that we could get these oxygen concentrators to the neediest people on time and in a trustworthy manner, which was important to us.

The response to our campaign has been humbling.

We have received donations, contributions, words of encouragement from all around the world, from not just Indians in the U.S., but also politicians, organizations, media that have been very encouraging and supporting us and also spreading the word about what is happening in Delhi as well as the rest of India.

At this point, we are over our target.

With those funds, we've been able to secure about 224 oxygen concentrators.

140 of them reached Delhi today and are all in the process of being handed over to the Burari Hospital that the Delhi government has started, so knock on wood, in the next 30 minutes, they'll be on the ground.

>> India needs all the help that it can at this point in time.

This is a very difficult time for everybody in India and for anybody who has friends or family in India.

>> That's our show this week.

Come back next week.

And if you like what you see or you found it really meaningful, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by...