Covid: Pawan Khera says India government must take responsibility

The Indian government has left individual states in the country to deal with the Covid-19 "tsunami" of infections on their own, Pawan Khera of the opposition National Congress Party said.

He told BBC World News that during the first wave the government had carried out a centralised response and had "an obsession" with "premature credit taking". But now individual states had been left to deal with the pandemic on their own.

"That's not the way a responsible government functions, especially a government that is obsessed with highly individual-centric decision making."

The government needed to take responsibility rather than blame the states, he said.