Lessons from a pandemic: Honest reckoning can prepare India for next crisis

An honest reckoning can prepare India for the next crisis

March 24 marks five years since the Union government announced the 21-day nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus (Covid-19). Memories of the two years that followed may have faded from the public discourse. But the management of this first global public-health crisis since World War II holds lessons that could be usefully codified into a set of standard procedures for pandemics that leading epidemiologists predict are likely to rise in frequency in our increasingly globalised world. Doing so demands an honest reckoning of missteps and successes. No country was adequately prepared for the pandemic, including those with sophisticated public-health systems. However, once the vaccines arrived, India managed to inoculate at speed and scale, which helped contain the spread and, more importantly, deaths.

 

India logged its first recorded case on January 30, 2020. The number of confirmed cases rose quickly thereafter. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 a global pandemic on March 11. With the benefit of hindsight, it can be argued that India should have reacted earlier. More than anything, the lockdown revealed the tragic and unanticipated consequences for a marginalised and mostly invisible section of Indians: Migrant workers, who were evicted from their workplaces. The cessation of public transport forced them and their families to take to the roads to make their way home. Several died on the journey, indirect victims of the virus. As others took Shramik Special trains, belatedly supplied by the government, and buses, they carried the virus to their villages, where the near-absence of basic medical facilities caused high levels of fatalities. The trauma of those memories has kept many workers from leaving their villages today, adding to a labour shortage for construction and infrastructure projects.

 

The second, and more deadly, phase of Covid-19 starkly revealed the tragic consequences of India’s consistent underinvestment in health infrastructure. With the virus spreading swiftly after the government prematurely declared that India had “defeated” Covid-19 and permitted the mini-Kumbh Mela in Haridwar to go ahead, the number of new cases and deaths spiked for want of hospital beds and respirators. This was not India’s finest hour: The rising number of deaths overwhelmed cremation infrastructure. The high point of this phase, however, was the emergence of high-quality pop-up medical facilities by military and paramilitary services in several cities, offering a salutary lesson in the art of managing medical emergencies. On the economic front, the government’s swift move to address the livelihood crisis, caused by an economic contraction, by choosing to temporarily relax fiscal prudence with its free-food distribution, emergency credit to small businesses and farmers, and enhancing borrowing limits for states partially stabilised the worst impact of the pandemic. The government opted for higher capital expenditure in the recovery phase, which helped the Indian economy recover swiftly. The government has also taken several measures to address the problems of migrant workers such as the One Nation One Ration Card scheme. Nonetheless, the nature of the Indian labour market and the weaknesses in medical infrastructure remain India’s vulnerabilities and must be proactively addressed.