By Amay Singh
On the evening of March 24, 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared a “Janata Curfew”, People’s Curfew, what is now considered by the New York Times as the strictest nationwide lockdown, that effectively limited the movement of the entire 1.38 billion population of India as a preventive measure against the COVID-19 pandemic. The general public was given a mere four hours' notice before the same was implemented. Staying true to his deeply intertwined religious and divisive Hindu politics, Modi urged the citizens of India to not cross an imaginary sacrosanct line or the “Lakshman Rekha”, a line that was drawn to protect the Hindu goddess Sita, which is mentioned in the Hindu epic, “Ramayana”. He also drew parallels between the “Mahabharata”, another ancient Indian epic about an 18-day war, and the COVID-19 pandemic as the initial 21-day lockdown was all Modi needed to win the war against the novel coronavirus.
It's been almost a year and month to the day the initial lockdown was announced, yet India's war against the virus seems all but lost as the second wave continues to crush Indian society. As of May 7, NDTV a record 4,14,188 new coronavirus infections being reported in a day, India's total tally of COVID-19 cases climbed to 2,14,91,598, while the active cases crossed the 36-lakh mark, according to the Union Health Ministry data updated on Friday. For the second consecutive day, India has reported the world’s highest single-day increase in infections, all while the populous struggles to get basic medical support in the form of a hospital bed or oxygen tanks. This month alone has seen over four million cases being reported with the government reporting 24,452 deaths. However, this figure could potentially be exponentially higher as numerous media houses in the country have reported a disparity between the deaths being reported by the government and the number of people being cremated, as crematoriums are working overtime to a point where there are queues of dead bodies just lying on the ground, patiently waiting for their turn.
While it is hard to refute the necessity for another lockdown given the current situation, India is still reeling from the aftershocks of the first lockdown. Since India has always had the habit of mimicking our former colonizers and other rich countries, it adopted a measure that simply was not sustainable for a low-income country. Without any form of a stipulated income from the government, closing the economy had the consequences any sane person would have hypothesized unemployment and poverty.
This haphazard lockdown without proper planning and notice has pushed over 10 million people into poverty. The worst to be affected by the strict lockdown rules was the migrant workforce. A vast majority of them were daily wage laborers who were forced to go back to their villages. The only problem was they had no means to travel as well as no means of an income because of the lockdown. Many walked their way back home, which were sometimes hundreds of kilometers away. With millions being displaced from major cities across the country, many of them risked carrying the virus back to their villages but with no other means to sustain their lives, they started their excruciating journey.
It is estimated the GDP contracted by as much as 15%. According to Crisil, an Indian analytics company, by the end of 2021-22, GDP will only be approximately 2% higher than March 2020 level. More importantly, the absolute GDP would be roughly 10% below its pre-pandemic trend level.
While a majority of Indians struggled, there were a few who happened to prosper in this period. The past year saw a massive spike in income and wealth inequalities, like what was observed in the United States of America. The fortunes of the biggest companies and the richest Indians have soared. The latest edition of Forbes' annual list of billionaires has ranked Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of India’s most valuable company, Reliance Industries Ltd., the richest man in Asia after dethroning Jack Ma, the co-founder and former executive chairman of Alibaba Group, who has found himself on the wrong side of the Chinese government. In fact, the three richest Indians alone added over $100 billion between them over the past year.
It is obvious the pandemic did not have the same impact on all sectors. While it obliterated the hospitality, travel, retail sectors respectively; the IT, financial services, e-commerce, Edutech-and-Fintech sectors have thrived. In order to ascertain how businesses should be run during a pandemic, I interviewed Dr. Neha Sharma, who is the director and a professor at Shanti Business School in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. She believes different businesses should be treated according to their category or sector to which the business belongs to. As a business, they have to rely on their strategies to help them consolidate and survive a pandemic. They need to be quick to adapt and to stay relevant in order to take advantage of the current situation.
As the situation continues to deteriorate in India and with state governments adamant to not use a lockdown, the coronavirus is having a field day. Weekend curfews are being implemented in major cities across the country and the state of Maharashtra has already gone back into lockdown. Sharma believes that the pandemic has exposed the poor preparedness of governments across continents in handling this global crisis effectively and efficiently. Rather than having a playbook for handling such a crisis, it was ad hocism that was visible everywhere. She believes this state of indecision was acceptable in the initial phase, but governments could have taken a leaf out of the corporate response book and learned quickly to deliver the required respite to its citizens.
"Governments, in many cases across the globe, were not prepared for a second wave. The time between two waves was not used to ramp up the healthcare infrastructure, to restock the essential medicines, to develop civil protocols, etc. Of the BRIC countries, an acronym coined to associate five major emerging economies which include Brazil, Russia, and China, India spends the least on healthcare per capita, and has the fewest hospitals, hospital beds, intensive care units, doctors, nurses, per thousand persons. As a citizen of the largest democracy in the world, you would expect the government to be on top of the situation but like many other great countries, India too exhibited slow learning."
A key factor that aggravated this slow learning was the lack of communication between different countries, no mechanism for sharing knowledge, experiences, and best practices to deal with this novel virus. Sharma opines that had this been done, many would not have reinvented their own wheels, thereby saving precious time and other resources.
Since another lockdown could be on the horizon to ease the load on India's limited healthcare infrastructure. The government should be proactive and not fail as they are the only one that has a macro view of the current situation.
However, for the long term, Sharma believes this is the time to let Industry 4.0 principles make inroads into every business, irrespective of its size. The pandemic has highlighted that not everything can be done remotely, particularly in sectors that require a hand to either produce a product or service. Wherever a high-quality interface between stakeholders can be created using modern technologies those jobs can be earmarked for Work from Home. This would reduce the density of manpower at workplaces, thus providing safe space for jobs that necessarily require the physical presence of human beings.
But for a country like India, that is a pipedream. With daily-wage laborers, who make a large portion of India's workforce, a lockdown could be the difference between life or death. A stipend should be included if there is another lockdown just like the stimulus checks the American government handed out. This is not a long-term solution but it would surely help these laborers survive a pandemic.
Over 700 million people have already faced the calamitous consequences of a badly planned nationwide lockdown once, doing it over a second time, could consequently further wealth and income inequalities which could trigger massive protests and revolutions. I guess that would be one way for India to truly mimic the countries it tries to emulate, only this time it would resemble France from 1789.
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