Abstract
During the Covid-19 pandemic, several different estimates of R0, the basic reproduction number have been doing the rounds in India. These values have also become the epi-centre of various discussions in policy circles and yet there seems to be a lot of misinterpretations and misconceptions about the salience of the R0. In this paper we outline the commonly held misconceptions about the term and emphasize that R0 is not merely a biological constant. R0 is in fact a function of number of environmental and socio-behavioural factors. We also address the difficulties in estimation of R0 in context of developing countries like India, where issues pertaining to the quality of the data result in a big margin of error in the estimation of R0. The paper argues that the estimates of R0 ultimately are only as good as our understanding of its unique characteristics and the underlying parameters.