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Covid-19 is hurting Indian poor the most
Read more on - Polity | Economy | Schemes | S&T | Environment
- The story: India's Covid waves have hurt the poor the most, and they are losing jobs, going hungry and falling victim to scams.
- Suno toh Ganga ye kya sunaye: Villagers suspected dead being buried on the banks of Ganges, by the village of Chausa on the border between Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, India’s poorest, most underdeveloped states. Authorities discovered tens of bodies. In the same week at least three other grisly human logjams were reported upstream. These sad scenes reveal two things.
- One is the scale of the tragedy now sweeping India’s vast interior. Far away from city labs, no one gets tested, so no cases are recorded, so no deaths are captured in the official national toll, which at approximately 2,58,000 was a small fraction of the real tally.
- The second thing the bodies in the Ganges reveal is how India’s second wave is worsening the already harsh lot of its poor. People borrow money to pay for medicines, or for oxygen, or for an ambulance driver who has charged them extra covid rates, and then can’t afford the funeral.
- In recent times, the cost of a cremation has risen sharply. It is telling that the authorities, despite denying that poverty has anything to do with the scandal, have started supplying free wood to the funeral ghats of Chausa. Bihar has also capped the price of ambulances.
- The First Wave: After the first covid-19 wave swept India in 2020, numerous reports tried to tally the cost to the poor. Pew, a research institute, estimates that whereas just 4.3% of Indians were earning less than $2 a day in January 2020, a year later this had risen to 9.7%, or 134m people. An in-depth study by Azim Premji University in Bangalore suggests that in the wake of last year’s nationwide lockdown, some 230m Indians slipped below a poverty threshold tied to the national minimum wage (around $45 a month). Researchers found that during the lockdown, 90% of the poor consumed less food. Six months later, their diets had not returned to normal. Over the course of the year the earnings of Indian workers, including the lucky 10% who hold salaried jobs, declined by a third.
- The Second Wave: Shocked by the pain it caused last year, the central government has left state and local governments to impose their own lockdowns during this wave. But though the economy has not come to a complete standstill, the sheer scale of the outbreak means lots of families have suffered just as much. For many, the biggest blow has been the loss of breadwinners. Indian Railways, which employs 1.2m people, says Covid has killed 1,952 of its staff. The state of Uttar Pradesh in April put 1.2 m civil servants to work running local elections and counting ballots. The vote was a super-spreader and an estimated 2,000 of these workers subsequently died, including 800 schoolteachers. Each of those deaths represented weeks of trauma and expense for the families seeking treatment and, for every person that died, perhaps another 20 were seriously ill.
- Poor health spending: With government spending on health stuck at a meagre 1.2% of GDP, in ordinary times Indians pay out of their own pockets for some 60% of health-care costs. And in an ordinary year one in every 20 families is pushed into poverty by medical expenses. The months of April and May have been anything but ordinary. Millions of desperate Indian families have been forced to sell gold, to pawn possessions or to borrow at usurious rates, all too often in order to pay for unnecessary treatments prescribed by harried doctors, or to provide basic items lacking in government hospitals, from oxygen tanks to syringes. The variety of traps they have fallen into seems endless: medical staff demanding bribes to secure hospital admission, suppliers of fake medicines, and even, in several states, conmen who have painted over fire extinguishers to sell as oxygen cylinders.
- Reacting to scams: In Delhi, police set up a special unit to fight such scams. The government otherwise was notable by its absence. Harsh Vardhan, the health minister, who has promoted herbal covid “cures”, advised Indians to eat extra-dark chocolate with “more than 70% cocoa” in order to beat covid-related stress. He overlooked the fact that 86% of Indian families cannot afford a basic balanced diet, let alone fancy chocolate.
- Summary: Indian society's poor and destitute are hit very hard. In the absence of any major income support from the State, they will simply fall into utter poverty in coming days. The time to act is now.
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