Srinagaran, The city where I live in Kashmir under the administration of India, the streets are blocked. But through Twitter I hear cries of despair from all over India: the son is asking for an oxygen cylinder to save the mother; a daughter with a parent pumping her breast out of the hospital; the dead wife was riding a bicycle to find a place to cremate an elderly man; Turning all of India into a pyre from massive incineration.
As the number of new Covid-19 cases jumps by the hundreds of thousands, Indian Twitter, with its 18.9 million users, is now a compendium of despair. However, it has become something else: a kind of emergency telephone for citizens, where neighbors call their neighbors for help. Using tags like #CovidSOS and #SOSIndia, a message gets traction. Other users respond with resources or tag other people, hoping someone …anyone“She can help.” Volunteers on the ground working with NGOs or relief teams sometimes respond directly or provide advice on where to find local resources. Telegrams and WhatsApp have also been set up to find oxygen tanks, empty beds and other essentials. The activities on these platforms are encouraging evidence that people have come together and the government has complained about the failure, containment and correction of this second wave of Covid-19.
Journalist Somya Lakhani, who had 12,000 followers on Twitter, had Covid-19. He had severe headaches and sore throats and the air was irritated. Raising a single finger also hurts. Unable to sleep, he logged on to Twitter at 4 a.m. and answered calls from people in even worse condition, trying to augment and spread those SOS messages. One asked help She worked at a Covid-19 center in New Delhi for a 37-year-old nurse. “She needs help, ZIU bed … (please) help ????. #CovidSOS #COVIDEmergency”. Lakhani scrolled through his feed and frantically called or called DM’ed the numbers of resources found there. An hour later he tweeted again: “No more.”
“After doing anything offline, I went to Twitter as a last resort,” Lakhani said, adding that his DM is overwhelmed with requests from Covid-19 patients and that the phone doesn’t stop ringing. But as demand and chaos across the country increase, so do the scorers. “We’re losing eight of the ten people we grow up with because of SOS,” he said. “Where is the government? I don’t have anyone asking for help. How long can Twitter run the country for them? “
In January, at the World Economic Forum, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who heads the Hindu nationalist government, boast India’s success in having a new coronavirus. “The country where 18% of the world’s population lives has saved the world — all of humanity — by effectively controlling the crown from the great tragedy,” he said. But then the railings came down. The government allowed a large number of people to attend Hindu festivals and tens of thousands of members of the ruling party attended political rallies.
All hell broke loose: the main hospitals in the metropolitan cities were left without oxygen; patients died waiting for medical help; and the incinerators were left without wood. People were left on their own. Deaths are more than official calculations 3,000 every day, but experts say real number it is much larger.
In a way, just by revealing gaps in official support, India’s Twitter is filled with implicit criticism of the Modi government. But the platform itself has met with a government restriction for explicit criticism. Twitter removed at least 53 tweets questioning how the government handled the pandemic. New regulations in India require the removal of content authorities that deem social media platforms illegal; Twitter said so The Washington Post that he blocked tweets under local law.
