I n a rare address to the nation on Thursday night, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi appealed for the country’s older generations, the most vulnerable to severe infection, to call on their “wartime” experience of prolonged blackouts and national drills to beat coronavirus.

While the country’s tally of virus cases is just over 200, measures are being taken at the federal and state levels to place the country on a lockdown tighter than many worse-affected nations.