Walter Fernandes
It is commonly believed that COVID-19 has broken India’s socio-economic system and that the poor are paying its price. In reality the pandemic has not weakened this system but has exposed the pre-existing weaknesses. As Paul Carr says COVID-19 “feeds off social and environmental injustice, exacerbating the wounds, scars and illnesses that existed prior to this pandemic.” It has shown that our health, educational and economic systems and employment generation schemes are made for the urban middle and rural upper classes. The poor do not count in them. It is important to face this fact if we are to find a post-COVID solution that can be beneficial to every citizen.
Take for example the health infrastructure. There are reasons to believe that the number of corona virus positive cases is artificially low in India because testing was initially limited to the urban areas and to passengers coming from abroad. The numbers grew as people in the urban slums began to be tested. Later it was extended to some villages but not to most of them. But the health system as such is made for the better off sections. India has only 0.7 hospital beds per 1,000 people which is among the lowest in the world. It is the average in the least developed countries. It is over 5 per 1,000 in Europe, 4.6 in the USA and is 1.2 even in Sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, 64 percent of the beds are in private hospitals many of which have world class facilities, their charges are high, meant for the better off sections and also for high priced health tourism. The poor have to be content with government hospitals and the poorly equipped public health centres (PHC). These facilities are effective in States like Kerala where they are well managed. But in much of the Hindi belt, in eastern and North Eastern India most PHCs exist only on paper with the medical personnel visiting them occasionally. How does one expect them to test people for COVID-19 or deal even with ordinary illnesses?
Hence the first post—COVID challenge is to build a sustainable health infrastructure that is accessible to the whole population. Privatising government hospitals and PHCs is not the solution. Privatisation will turn them into profit oriented entities accessible to the rural upper classes and will continue to exclude the poor. The answer should probably be found in private-public partnership (PPP). In many rural areas, of the Northeast in particular, a large number of civil society and church organisations (CSO) run dispensaries and are doing what the PHCs should be doing. A rural health infrastructure can be built around them with the CSOs and the government working together. The State can provide the funds and the CSO and PHC personnel can join hands in running them by using each other’s expertise. They can work together in a spirit of PPP in order to build an efficient rural health infrastructure that is accessible to all and is sustainable in the long run.
The migrants pose the second challenge. The manner in which they were treated during the lockdown shows the callousness of our society in general and of the governments in particular towards the poor. A city state like Singapore announced the lockdown three days in advance to give people time to return to their base. India gave a four hour notice when people needed four to seven days to return to their homes. Millions of migrant daily wage earners were stranded with no work and with no money. During four to seven days every bus and train should have been mobilised to take the migrants and other stranded persons back to their homes but all transport was stopped at short notice. The migrants who were abandoned tried to walk back home or use any means they could find because remaining back meant starvation. But in an affidavit in the Supreme Court the Central Government has denied that anybody is walking on the highways. A senior minister has said that there is no starvation and none has died. Similarly, while asking everyone to remain indoors the government ignored the fact that 50 percent of urban dwellers live in one room tenements in the slums or on pavements. Similar numbers in the rural areas do not have a house where they can have privacy. What does social distancing mean to them?
All of it bears witness to the total lack of sensitivity in our society towards the poor and towards people who live on daily wages hundreds or thousands of kilometres away from their homes because their native place does not provide them productive employment. The migrants thus challenge both the State and our whole society to find a new economic response. It cannot be based on the minimum wage of Rs 120 for a 12-hour day that the Centre and many States have announced. It is less than half the poverty line. It will legalise bonded labour and push the migrants who have returned home from one exploitative situation into a new bondage.
A solution can be found in reviving the local economy in a new form. The massive destruction of natural resources has serious repercussions, more frequent and ferocious annual floods being one of them. Most governments have been responding to the floods by building bunds, providing relief, cleaning the Ganga and dredging the Brahmaputra. These actions will keep the contractors in business for years to come but do not solve the problem of the floods which are caused by deforestation in the catchment areas of the rivers. Because of it silt flows into the rivers, raises their level and causes more floods every year. More land takeover in the name of development and defence deprives more people of their livelihood and forces them to migrate from their states in search of employment. Today they return home because those avenues have closed, probably forever.
A solution can only be found by dealing with the causes. The natural resource base that has been destroyed has to be restored. That requires a united effort of the rural population and poses a challenge to the CSOs because the state will not take the initiative. To the state land, flora and fauna are only sources of revenue. Civil society has to form the migrant returnees and the local people into self-help and other organised groups to replant the forests, replenish water sources and revive land that has been rendered infertile by floods and droughts. They then need to organise the people into rural agro-based industrial units that plan a three crop regime based on local technology. Only production of crops is inadequate if their markets are controlled by the forces that encourage contract farming which recent central schemes support. Local people have to be trained to process these crops and market them, thus reviving a bottom to top local economy which can generate employment and can absorb the youth returning to their native place. MGNREGA can be used for this purpose but organising the local people and migrant returnees into viable self-help groups has to be its foundation.
Dr Walter Fernandes is Director, North Eastern Social Research Centre, Guwahati. [email protected]