India coronavirus dispatch: A few notes on restarting the economy

Here is a round-up of important coronavirus-related articles from across Indian publications. From the impact on urban poor, to miles between relief and reality, and how India should not lapse into ‘permit raj’ after the lockdown — read these and more in today’s India digest.

Expert Speak

The challenge of testing: One of the key questions that has to be answered is how many people can be tested in order to know how the disease is spreading, has spread, or is likely to spread. This is a question challenging those at the frontline of medicine as well as economists. Read this interview on the subject with Ajay Shah, professor at the National Institute for Public Finance and Policy.

Citizens Under Lockdown

Miles separate government’s claims on relief from reality: A majority of young men in their villages, particularly marginal farmers and landless labourers, tend to work in cities, returning mostly during the harvest months. Their farms are tended by other members of the family, particularly women and the elderly. About 75 per cent of all migrants in India’s cities are marginal landowners. Seasonal migration is critical to their livelihoods, and to the landless, as they combine their wages in the city with earnings from crops to make ends meet. Read more here.

Displaced and out of work, artistes of Kathputli Colony struggle for two meals: The spread of Covid-19 has locked these artistes out of their work, which essentially involves social gatherings or street crowds. With their already fragile incomes gone, they are facing hunger due to limited government support, and a few of them have appealed for donations through a crowdfunding portal. With 2,800 families cramped together, each living in a one-room lodging made of lightweight aerocon panels and using community taps and toilets, the residents in the Anand Parbat camp also worry about being easy targets for the spread of Covid-19. Read more here.

At the stroke of midnight, migrant workers became aliens in a double sense: Recently, the Calcutta Research Group (CRG) brought out a collection of essays around the lives and politics of migrant workers. In this interview, Ranabir Samaddar, the director of the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, speaks about the factors behind the migrants’ desperation to reach home, the dynamics of the visibility and invisibility of migrant labour and the boundary making exercises in economy and governance that produce migrants.

Opinion

Post lockdown, India’s economy should not lapse into ‘permit raj’: India has a long history of the “permit raj”, where all businesses were beholden to the bureaucracy for what they did. This had a tendency to strangle all but a few big firms and had held up the nation’s economic growth for long. Read here on why we have to guard against the risk of sliding back to these old habits — lapsing into these habits can bring an end to India’s growth story.

There may be no going back: May 4 is the date marked on many calendars, the day when we in India hope some semblance of normalcy would return to our lives. We may well have to wait a lot longer — lockdown or no lockdown — if the ‘normalcy’ that people across the border in China are returning to, after two long months of isolation, is anything to go by. Read more here.

Managing Covid-19

How has the Covid-19 crisis affected the urban poor? While several commentators have highlighted the plight of migrants due to the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, less is known about how low-income families living in urban shanty towns are faring. In this note, Afridi, et al, discuss findings from a phone survey of a sample of 413 households in the industrial areas of Delhi, on the impact on their livelihoods, and physical and emotional well-being. They also provide some insights into the gendered experience of this crisis.

India has listed abortion as an essential service, but problems of access persist under lockdown: India says it has protected abortion as an essential service in the coronavirus lockdown, but experts say women are struggling to get medical help and may resort to risky alternatives. With no transport services, limited healthcare and movement restricted, campaigners predict the Covid-19 crisis could push women to take abortion drugs without supervision or seek help from people who lack training. Read more here.

Gujarat triples its cases in one week, deaths also rise by almost three times: More than thirty deaths were reported from across the country on Wednesday, taking the number of people who have so far died from Covid-19 disease to well past the 650-figure mark. More than 20 of these deaths were reported from Maharashtra, with Mumbai and Pune, two of the worst affected cities in the country, accounting for the bulk of these deaths. Read more here.

Understanding Covid-19

Tweaking patient’s immune cells to target the virus could be potential therapy: With more than 2.6 million cases and over 184,000 deaths, scientists across the world are looking for new weapons everywhere — from our immune cells to viruses that infect plants — to kill the coronavirus. Read more here.

ICMR study indicated lockdown would reduce CoV cases by 20-25 per cent max: An internal study by the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR), prepared well before Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the nationwide lockdown, showed that the new coronavirus would achieve community transmission within India and that the government could institute the lockdown only as a way to buy time to conduct more tests, something the government hasn’t yet done. Read more here.