By Glenn C. Kharkongor
The swirls of the Covid-19 storm suck the poor into the vortex. Their health, social welfare, and financial condition are already on a teeter-totter cliff edge. The loss of daily wage work, travel back home, cost of medical care, and the looming uncertainties of the future,will threaten their precarious existence into oblivion.
The present crisis is so unfair to the poor. Covid-19 did not arise out of poverty situations where crowding, poor nutrition, poor sanitation and other such deprivation factors are the breeding grounds of TB, cholera and other infectious diseases.
Covid-19 was brought to India by privileged foreign travelers, the virus even travelling by business class. Once the virus disembarked, it was spread by celebrity returnees who threw parties, or some NRIs who wiggled through the quarantine nets and merrily went shopping, ate at restaurants and pubs, and visited friends and family.
In other words, this is, for the average Indian, a rich man’s disease, but which now knows no class barriers in its inexorable spread. While the rich and middle classes have financial buffers, the poor are immediately punished. Millions in the informal sector are being thrown out of work every day.
Those who have gone to the cities to work now struggle to get home, many stranded en route. We have seen pictures of overcrowded trains, and milling crowds trying to get into a single bus. Private cars, as we know, are still permitted on the roads, another nod to the well-off. Those who stay back in the villages to manage their subsistence farms cannot take their produce to market, because public transport has halted and markets are closed.
The poor are the most vulnerable in the fallout of unforeseen disasters. The first deprivation will be of food and nutrition. Food is now not available or affordable. This will drive borderline healthy women and children quickly into malnutrition.
The second deprivation will be of healthcare. Those who get sick will not have public transport to go to a doctor, or enough money to pay for tests and medicines. Precious savings will be consumed overnight. They cannot even buy masks, tissues or sanitisers.
Scarce money kept aside for school fees, clothes, fuel, and family events will be used up quickly. They will now visit the money lender and the familiar cycle of poverty is accelerated.
Poverty statistics
Sad that we have to use a term like ‘statistics’ to collectively describe the acutely human predicament of the poor. As per the familiar Tendulkar Committee report, the population below the poverty line in India was 354 million (29.6% of the population) in 2009-2010, and was 269 million (21.9%) in 2011–2012. A gradual decline in poverty levels followed the economic growth that started in the 1980s and continued for the next two to three decades.
An analysis of the consumption expenditure numbers reported by the National Statistical Office (NSO) in a “hushed-up report”, published in Livemint, suggests that rural poverty rose nearly 4 percentage points between 2011-18, to 30% even as urban poverty fell 5 percentage points over the same period to 9%. Given the higher proportion of the rural population, the estimated overall poverty rate went up nearly a percentage point to 23% in 2017-18. The rise implies that 30 million people fell below India’s official poverty line and joined the ranks of the poor over the past six years.
Disproportionate anxiety
While we are all in agreement that the Covid-19 pandemic requires global and individual action, a sense of constructive composure is needed, even in the face of many imponderables. A Whatsapp ‘news’ item or video goes viral. People are comparing what other states and countries are doing. The initially positive test reported in Assam sent the Northeast into a tizzy.
Four lakh individuals die of contagious tuberculosis every year, but it is hardly mentioned. Of course, not many of them travel by air, or come to our offices, so they are not a threat to the middle-class bubble of life. No nationwide mitigation or suppression campaign has ever been conducted on this scale for TB or malaria or leprosy, all of which impose heavy communicable disease burdens on the country.
In 2015, there were about five lakh road accidents in India, which killed about 1.5 lakh people, an average of 410 a day. Happily during the last 10 days of lockdown, perhaps four thousand road traffic deaths were averted.
This then is the “Uncertain Glory” of India, to borrow a phrase from Amartya Sen. The poor bear the brunt of this uncertainty. Jean Dreze, Amartya Sen’s longtime collaborator, and a professor of economics at Ranchi University, wrote a telling opinion piece in The Hindu (Mar 23, 2020). He said, “If a service creates a major health hazard, public purpose may certainly call for closing schools and colleges. On theother hand, services that help poor people in their hour of need, without creating a major health hazard, should continue to function as far as possible”.
The main obstacles to total suppression (lockdown) is the fact that rural people have no way to get food or healthcare except on their own. Today, 80,000 women will deliver, the majority of them rurally located. How will they reach the hospital to have the baby? Families have to get milk and food for their children. This is not Europe where food can be delivered to everyone’s door or obtained over the counter.
Perhaps we may allow the rural weekly markets to continue. This will allow marginal farmers to take their produce to market and rural families to buy food. After all the mingling is only among the rural folk. Headmen could keep others out. Maybe public transport in the rural areas could continue, to markets, and PHCs/CHCs.
Today’s papers report that the Meghalaya government will give Rs 1000 per worker per week. This is a good thing.By the time this reaches the press the Prime Minister would have spoken once more to the nation. Hopefully he will announce some measures of succour for the poor.
The scale of the cost of Covid, not the disease, but the national responseis staggering for the poor. They cannot afford precautions, they cannot afford panic. Their lives are perpetually on a knife edge. They need humane consideration. (IANS)