The number of coronavirus infections in India crossed the 3 million mark with 69,239 new cases reported on Sunday even as the country opened up various sectors from a lockdown that ground businesses to a halt and hurt economic growth.
Many experts say, however, that the real scale of the infection in India is much higher.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government imposed one of the world's strictest lockdowns in late March with little planning, sending millions of migrant labourers in cities on an exodus to villages across the country.
The lockdown that has been mostly eased in recent weeks.
But the epidemic has left Asia's third-largest economy reeling, and tens of millions of people have lost their jobs and livelihoods.
Hotspots move from megacities
Individual states and cities have imposed localised lockdowns -- including Haryana and Punjab, where cases have spiked in recent weeks.
Previously the main hotspots have been the teeming megacities of New Delhi and Mumbai, home to some of the world's biggest slums.
"At the moment we are seeing a fairly sharp rise in cases overall for India," said K Srinath Reddy, of the non-governmental Public Health Foundation of India.
Authorities in New Delhi said last week that an antibody study in the megacity suggested more than a quarter of the capital's population had contracted the infection.
Opening up media production industry
India on Sunday issued guidelines to open up its media production industry with norms for social distancing, crowd management and sanitisation.
The new guidelines were aimed at creating “a safe working environment for cast and crew in the industry", Prakash Javadekar, India's union minister for information and broadcasting, said in a tweet.
Top producers, distributors and actors from Bollywood, the movie industry in India's financial capital of Mumbai, had said in May it would take at least two years for them to recover financially from the pandemic, putting at risk tens of thousands of jobs.
While India has been slowly opening up some industries with specific regulations, containment zones - areas identified as most affected by the virus - still remain under lockdown.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP and REUTERS)
