Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong pointed to an important criterion for battling the Covid19 crisis. Besides other precautionary measures, Lee points to social capital which he says includes citizen’s trust in the government and the media as being crucial to fight the pandemic. Social capital revolves around three dimensions: interconnected networks of relationships between individuals and groups (social ties or social participation), levels of trust that characterize these ties, and resources or benefits that are both gained and transferred by virtue of social ties and social participation. A high degree of trust among members of the network fosters a sense of mutual obligation and enables them to be more effective in pursuing shared objectives.
Lee also said that the level of morale of the society when hit by the crisis is an important factor. A society that is perpetually suspicious of government will get into a more aggressive mode at a time of crisis because it believes that government does not care. Hence when the morale of society is low a crisis exacerbates the problems. Considering that governments gain a lot from social capital, it is in their interest that they build public trust. Where government is actively assisted by civil society much of their intent is communicated to the larger public by individuals which are part of the network that people trust. That’s the positive outcome of social capital. The Covid19 pandemic has brought out the worst in countries like Spain which were perceived by the public to have been unprepared to meet the health emergency until it became too late and there were not enough respirators for everyone infected by the Corona Virus.
In India too there is currently a high degree of dissatisfaction vis-a-vis the lockdown because it could not foresee how that would impact on lakhs of migrant labourers moving from their place of work to their respective states. Such examples of government failure to anticipate a human crisis tends to deplete social capital. It will take much fire-fighting from the Modi government to come out of this mess unscathed and to rebuild social capital. Thankfully India is a federal republic where states function autonomously and the experiences of people rely largely on the kind of governments at the state level. A good example is Kerala where civil society rises to the fore to meet every crisis by transcending all differences. Presently Meghalaya too has seen civil society groups of all hues coming together and voluntarily extending help to the helpless and homeless during this crisis. This reduces the burden on government whose resources are already over-stretched. Social capital indeed is crucial to meet every crisis.
