Corona May Kill. Starvation Surely Will
Kumar Chatterjee in Kolkata
A 12-year-old girl fell and died just about an hour away from her village after a three-day walk. The blazing sun and insufficient water and food had left too drained to survive for the remaining journey back home. She travelled 150km in India’s Chhattisgarh with the hope to get her food at home when suddenly work at the chilli field, where she was employed came to an indefinite halt and payments stopped.
The sudden break in life and work came when the government slapped a nationwide lockdown with only a four-hour notice on March 24 to arrest the Corona virus infection. The little girl was one of the 10 million children from poor Indian families who worked in farms and fields in villages and sell knickknacks on city roads. Their earnings stopped suddenly. So happened to their parents as well.
For millions of workers who survive on daily wages, the lockdown sounded a death knell. “I may contract the infection if I step out of home to earn whatever I can but we all will certainly starve if I stay at home and do nothing,” said Raju, who paddles his three-wheeler to transport people in a Kolkata neighbourhood. “What should I pick?”
With several weeks gone by, the lockdown has kept the fate of nearly 40 million migrant labourers and daily wage earners like Raju in limbo. Around 92.5% of labourers have lost work of over four weeks, said a survey by a civil society group. Some 60,000 workers walked hundreds of miles to their village homes to secure their food and shelter when the lockdown was imposed.
Although the government declared a $23 billion relief package for the poor but most of the daily-wage workers would be excluded from this because 94% do not have the registration card that is mandatory for this, the survey said.
Free rations soothed the pain for some but it kept most of the urban poor out of its ambit because of inadequate public distribution system. In villages, the poor couldn’t access much of their slice of the pie due to mushrooming of middlemen and supply snags.
“I have five people to feed. We will run out of food in a few days. We can’t get the free ration because we’re Bangladeshi immigrants and do not have valid papers,” rued Rahim Molla, who ferries people across the river Ganga in a small town in West Bengal.
The lockdown has almost completely disrupted the farm produce supply chain. Farmers are now fretting over how to sell their crops because demand has dipped to new levels, driving farmgate prices downhill under a huge subsidy burden. Wholesale markets are shut and transport system is on hold.
The farmers, who have been reeling from low income because of the prolonged commodity price slump, are set to suffer a worse blow to their incomes. That might even force them to default on their existing loans and borrow more for the next season. The debt eddy may eventually push them into what the country has been battling for years without much of a solution – farmer suicide.
As India marches to be a $5-trillion economic superpower by 2025, about 60% of its 1.3-billion-strong population – 812 million – living off less than $3.1 a day feels left out.
Mushtaq Reza, who sells betel leaves from his makeshift roadside setup in Kolkata, is broke. “People are scared of contagion if I make paan for them,” he said. “I send money back home in Bihar to fund my children’s education. We haven’t been able to sell our harvest this year because of the lockdown. I feel so helpless.”
The administration chose life over livelihood to contain the epidemic, it seems. But the containment measures have pushed the underprivileged into a dark tunnel with death on both ends. The lockdown, which is likely to be extended beyond May 3 with 31,332 infected patients and fresh cases averaging 1,500 every day, has unlocked one of the gravest threats to India’s social fabric – a widening economic inequality – that would leave the nation bleeding for long, if not healed on time.
