21,393 Coronavirus Cases In India; 681 Deaths, 41 In 24 Hours

The disease has now spread to 430 districts, up from 211 on April 2, while six major cities account for about 45 per cent of the total cases across the country. Mumbai has the highest with over 3,000 cases, followed by Delhi at 2,081, Ahmedabad at 1,298, Indore at 915, Pune at 660 and Jaipur 537.

More than 60 percent of the cases are from just the top five states - Maharashtra, Gujarat, Delhi, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu.

Such an uneven spread allows health officials to focus their efforts on the top affected areas, or red zones, such as Delhi and Mumbai, while allowing other states to re-start activities, the government has said.

The contours of a second economic stimulus will take some time to devise, some cabinet ministers have told NDTV asking not to be identified. The reason, they suggest, is that in the middle of a pandemic, the government is uncertain how things will pan out over the next few months.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, and their offices have been in constant touch, discussing various aspects of the economic stimulus that is required and its modalities.

Attacks on healthcare workers will carry stringent punishment - jail term of up to seven years and a hefty fine - the government said on Wednesday as instances of such attacks spiralled across the country.

Medical personnel have been playing a frontline role in the battle against the coronavirus, the government has underscored repeatedly. But it has not stemmed the tide of attacks against doctors, nurses or paramedical workers.

The lockdown in India that started over a month ago has impacted nearly 40 million internal migrants, the World Bank has said. "The lockdown in India has impacted the livelihoods of a large proportion of the country's nearly 40 million internal migrants. Around 50,000-60,000 moved from urban centres to rural areas of origin in the span of a few days," the World Bank said in a report on Wednesday.

Air pollution over northern India has plummeted to a 20-year-low for this time of the year, according to satellite data published by US space agency National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

"We knew we would see changes in atmospheric composition in many places during the lockdown," said Pawan Gupta, a Universities Space Research Association (USRA) scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Centre. "But I have never seen aerosol values so low in the Indo-Gangetic Plain at this time of year," added Mr Gupta, according to news agency ANI.