The Health Ministry has now confirmed that with more than 34,000 new infections in the last 24 hours, India has breached the one million mark. The number of deaths reported has now crossed 25,000.

When India first went into lockdown, back in March, cases were hovering around 500. And when it started to gradually exit out of its lockdown on 8 June, confirmed cases had increased rapidly across states.

With more than 1.3 billion people, the country was always a point of concern. With its densely populated cities, most experts anticipated India to become a big hotspot when cases were still in the thousands.

From the first case, which was confirmed in January, to now, it took nearly 170 days to cross a million infections. Over the months, it raced past China, Europe's worst-hit countries, and most recently, Russia, to confirm the third-highest caseload in the world.

In the past two months, we've heard heart-breaking stories of people unable to get care and hospitals overwhelmed. Simultaneously, testing across states has increased which could help explain the rise in numbers too.

But it's worth noting that India's active cases are still relatively low at around 340,000. The number of people recovering from the virus is optimistic - for every 100 confirmed cases, 63 have recovered. And the mortality rate, at 2.55%, remains encouraging.