Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday addressed the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum's 3rd Annual Leadership Summit and said that COVID-19 pandemic is testing resilience, public health system and economic system and the current situation demands fresh mindset where the approach to development is human-centric.
"When 2020 began, did anyone imagine how it would pan out? A global pandemic has impacted everyone. It's testing our resilience, public health system & economic system. The current situation demands fresh mindset where the approach to development is human-centric," he said.
PM Modi added that India has one of the lowest death rates per million in the world due to COVID-19. "India, a country with 1.3 billion people and limited resources, has one of the lowest death rates per million in the world. The recovery rate is also steadily rising," he said.
Meanwhile, the video of his speech uploaded on YouTube received a huge amount of 'dislikes' as compared to 'likes'. When last checked, the video had 93,000 dislikes and only 10,000 likes.
YouTube Screengrab
This isn't the first time that PM Modi's videos have received more 'dislikes' than 'likes'. Recently, his 'Mann Ki Baat', the monthly radio address to the nation got more than a million dislikes. It was seen as a result of the government not rescheduling the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) and the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) examinations amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, BJP IT cell chief Amit Malviya claimed that YouTube data suggests that "only 2% of those dislikes are from India". "Over the last 24hrs, there has been a concerted effort to dislike Mann Ki Baat video on YouTube... So low is the Congress on confidence that it has been celebrating it as some sort of conquest! (sic)" he tweeted.
Malviya claimed that a vast majority of the dislikes came from accounts outside of India. "Bots and Twitter accounts from overseas have been consistent feature of the Congress’s anti JEE-NEET campaign. There is huge spike in activity by Rahul Gandhi’s favourite Turkish bots! What is this Turkish obsession, Rahul?" he wrote.
(With ANI inputs)
