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Updated: Apr 26, 2020 15:04 IST

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has said that India has not been able to scale up its testing for coronavirus disease Covid-19 due to bottlenecks and urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to clear the same.

“Experts agree that mass random testing is the key to beating Corona. In India, a bottle neck 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. PM needs to act fast & clear the bottleneck,” Gandhi said on Twitter on Sunday.

Experts agree that mass random testing is the key to beating Corona. In India, a bottle neck 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.



PM needs to act fast & clear the bottleneck. — Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) April 26, 2020

Gandhi has been attacking the Centre over the Covid-19 crisis, raising question as to why prices of petrol and diesel haven’t been reduced even after fall in global oil prices, freezing of inflation-linked dearness allowance and dearness relief of central government employees and pensioners, and approval to a proposal to convert surplus rice available with the Food Corporation of India into ethanol to manufacture alcohol-based hand sanitisers.

He is a part of an 11-member consultative group formed by Congress president Sonia Gandhi under former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s leadership to deliberate on matters related to the Covid-19 pandemic and to formulate the party’s views on them.

Medical experts and government officials steering India’s battle against Covid-19, however, said that country’s prophylactic measures have led to a reduction in the disease’s doubling rate, while allowing the ramping up of testing and the bolstering of health care preparedness.

Environment secretary CK Mishra, All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) director Dr Randeep Guleria, and Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) director general Dr Balram Bhargava said that infections were growing at a slower rate, larger numbers of people were being tested, and more medical facilities were being readied.

The number of Covid-19 cases in India crossed the 26,000-mark on Sunday, but the rate of growth of the infection has slowed down, whoch the experts say is a sign that the country may have been able to largely avoid the initial deadly spectre of the pathogen that has ravaged countries across the world.