India’s landmark telemedicine initiative needs a revamp if it is to fulfil its potential

In the spring of 2020, I left Cambridge, England, to return home to Kolkata and found myself in the midst of a strange predicament.

During my last few weeks working at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, we had begun to hear of stray cases of a new viral infection in China, and much to my annoyance, my father had begun sending a barrage of precautionary text messages from India.

Needless to say, the profound implications of those early reports were yet to dawn upon me and “pandemic” was only a word whose definition one had to learn – in series, after “endemic” and “epidemic” – before appearing for community medicine examinations while working towards an MBBS degree.

However, within days of my return home, the World Health Organization had characterised Covid-19 as a pandemic, and the world as we knew it changed forever. On March 23, 2020, India went into lockdown, drawing the shutters on all the grand plans for which I had quit my job and returned from the United Kingdom.

As I sat at home, enjoying the downtime and coming to terms with the new order of life, the novelty of the first few days soon wore off and natural instincts honed by years of medical training...

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