Is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government at the Centre deliberately keeping random testing for Coronavirus as alow as 39,000 despite having the capacity of one lakh tests per day, Congress party asked on Sunday as India recorded another 45 deaths and 1,554 cases over the last 24 hours.
Congress MP Manish Tewari questioned if the government was attempting "to play down the magnitude of the problem or is it unsure of dealing with implications of random testing."
Speaking of the challenges that await India once the lockdown is lifted, Tewari said how could states formulate a strategy until there is a national plan to deal with the crisis.
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"We hope PM puts out comprehensive, holistic strategy in dealing with lockout exit during the meeting with Chief Ministers," he said.
Tewari's comments come a day before the Prime Minister's scheduled meeting with state chief minister to discuss the way forward.
Meanwhile, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi urged PM Modi to clear "bottlenecks" and ramp up coronavirus testing in the country.
Quoting experts, Gandhi said, "random testing is the key to beating the virus". India has to scale up COVID-19 testing from the current 40,000 to one lakh tests per day, he said.
"Experts agree that mass random testing is the key to beating Corona. In India, abottleneckk is stopping us from scaling testing from the current 40,000 per day to 1 lakh tests a day, for which test kits are already in stock.
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"PM needs to act fast and clear the bottleneck," Gandhi said on Twitter.
