new delhi refuting allegations that india is not conducting enough covid19 tests the health ministry said on wednesday the testing ratio is not low and in a country with such a huge population not all people belong to vulnerable groupsresponding to a question about congress leader rahul gandhi alleging that the scale of testing in india has been low so far at 199 per 10 lakh people the chief of epidemiology and communicable diseases at the indian council of medical research icmr dr raman r gangakhedkar said for each positive case the country tests 24 peoplein countries like japan one out of 117 tests turns out to be positive which is among the highest in the world italy tests 67 persons for one positive test while the usa tests 53 persons and the united kingdom 34 he said during a daily press briefing on the countrys covid19 situationtaking their population base into consideration it is difficult to comment about our testing rate in india we are conducting 24 tests out of which one comes out to be positive also we have huge population and not all people belong to vulnerable groups hence cant say our testing ratio is low dr gangakhedkar saidadding to the remark lav agarwal the joint secretary in the health ministry said data can be interpreted in many ways and the governments effort is aimed at ensuring not a single positive case is missed outthere is a defined criteria compared to other countries we are testing 24 people out of each positive case we have been able to contain the spread of the virus to some extent through advanced action measures it is not the absolute number of testing which will be our defining criteria what is important is to see what output is yielded in our containment measures linked with testingwe are also testing patients with severe acute respiratory infections sari and influenza like illness ili even in places which have not reported any coronavirus positive case agarwal saidaddressing a press conference via video link earlier in the day rahul gandhi called for aggressive testing to defeat coronavirus and asserted that it should be used strategicallygandhi said the scale of testing in india has been low so far at 199 per 10 lakh people around 350 tests per district which he said is not enough to tell which way the virus is movingif you have to fight the virus you have to increase testing dramatically and your testing has to go from chasing the virus to moving ahead of it that means you have to move into random testing he noteddr gangakhedkar however said 290401 samples have been tested so far of which 30043 were tested on wednesday itselfout of the tests carried out on wednesday 26331 were done in laboratories under indian council of medical research icmr network and 3712 in private labs he addedcommenting on the testing capacity of icmr network dr gangakhedkar said working in one shift more than 42400 samples