Prime Minister Narendra Modi will today afternoon hold a fresh round of consultation with chief ministers of different states and Union Territories on the Coronavirus situation in the country as infections have spiked at an alarming rate in the past few weeks following considerable relaxations in lockdown measures.

PM Modi will hold a video-conference with chief ministers, Lt governors and administrators of 21 states and Union territories today which account for only 5 per cent of total cases in India, as per reports.

These include Punjab, Kerala, Goa, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand, the northeastern states and some Union Territories.

The Prime Minister will interact with chief ministers of 15 states and the L-G of Jammu and Kashmir on Wednesday. These include high case load states like Maharashtra, West Bengal, Delhi, Karnataka, Gujarat, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

In today’s meeting, the worst affected states are Assam, which has a total of 4,000 total cases, Punjab with over 3,000 cases, and Kerala with over 2,400 cases.

According to officials, the main objective of the meeting is to keep the death rate, or the case fatality rate low.

The twin meetings will be Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s sixth and seventh round of consultation with the chief ministers, the last being on May 11.

The two-day virtual meet comes as India reported 10,667 new Coronavirus cases and 380 deaths in the last 24 hours taking the total number of infections to 3,43,091 and fatalities to 9,900.

Under “Unlock 1” which rolled out on June 8, several relaxations have been made for public and businesses to ensure that economic activities hit by the lockdown gather momentum.

However, India’s recovery rate climbed to 52.5 per cent on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, several states including Delhi have said that the lockdown would not be reimposed to curb the spread of novel Coronavirus and the governments have called for “learning to live with the virus”.

On May 30, the Centre took an exit step from the 68-day nationwide lockdown, declaring that the restrictions will be limited only to containment zones up to June 30 and that the prohibited activities will be opened in a phased manner in areas outside these zones, allowing restaurants, malls, religious places and education sectors to open in a phased manner.

With lockdown 5.0, which is widely touted as Unlock 1.0, kicking in, the Coronavirus numbers in many states have rapidly started to spike, which has become a cause of concern for the Centre as well as the states. Already, Central teams have been deputed to provide technical support and handhold the state Health Departments and municipal health officials in reviewing steps being taken to tackle COVID-19 in six key metros — Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Delhi and Bengaluru.

The lockdown, enforced on March 25, was originally supposed to end on April 14. It was then extended to May 3, and then again to May 17 and finally to May 31. The lockdown 5.0 will come to an end on June 30.