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In 2020, Covid-19 ravaged mostly the cities and towns. This year, in the second run, it is spreading beyond the urban settlements and affecting rural India. This is a great cause of concern.

Last year, agriculture, forestry and fishing were the only bright spots in a crippled economy recording positive growth rates in all the quarters for which numbers are available. If the infection spreads in the villages, farm output can suffer which might spell disaster next year driving up prices of foodgrains, pulses and oilseeds.

To safeguard against this scenario, all governments must focus their attention, and considerable part of the resources towards the villages, which is traditionally deprived of both infrastructure and personnel. On Thursday, during his interaction with 54 district magistrates, the Prime Minister made a passionate plea for them to rise up to the challenge. He also said that once the vaccine supply timeline becomes clear, vaccine management will become easier and assured that supplies will improve in the districts.

However, a national action is the need of the hour more than an impassioned plea. Testing is one area that needs to be quickly ramped up in the villages. In the absence of tests, carriers would move freely setting off extremely fast spread of the virus. All state governments need to rush test kits to the villages quickly and ask primary health centres and hospitals to go on a testing overdrive.

Another area warranting immediate attention is creation of safe homes and isolation centres. All school and college buildings can be utilised for this purpose. Home isolation kits with paracetamol, vitamin tablets, cough syrups need to be quickly distributed free of cost to the families.

But the biggest challenge is to cover the rural population with medicines, oxygen and hospital beds. While schools can be converted to temporary care centres, primary health centres, sub divisional and district hospitals need to be beefed up immediately to treat Covid patients.

Governments need to dispatch more doctors in the rural areas and marshal all personnel such as recently retired doctors and nurses, apart from deploying untrained medics, who treat patients in the villages in large numbers, after imparting a crash course, if required.