Pandemic exposes unsustainable Growth

By Malini Shankar

Digital Discourse Foundation

Like every other pandemic in modern history, aviation has been the catalyst for the spread of diseases globally. COVID 19 or the Novel Corona Virus 2019 supposedly had its origins in the wet markets or - live but illegal wildlife markets in the Chinese city of Wuhan in China.

 

The Novel Corona virus is a mutant with traces in similar strains of SARS, MERS, H1N1, H1N5, H1N9, Hantavirus, and before that Dengue, Chikungunya, Bird Flu, Swine Flu. But none other than the Coronavirus has gripped Humanity, terrorising to wipe out the human race itself.

 

Nation after nation ordered unprecedented Lockdowns in an attempt to prevent spread of the virus amid speculation that it was a biological weapon of mass destruction. None can confidently dismiss it as ‘Chinese Whispers’ confidently yet.  

Even before the COVID 19 triggered Lockdown was announced, recession was knocking at the doors with GDP figures tumbling quarter after quarter.

Even if the virus can be contained, the global economy is likely to resuscitate only after seven to eight years from now. For, the virus triggered lockdown has had a domino effect.

To stop the virus from spreading halting aviation was an immediate necessity. But aviation was stopped only after the World Health Organisation World Health Organisation of the United Nations declared a global pandemic.

Thanks to aviation (including flights to extradite stranded Indians) the infection started making its global footprint. But industrial output dependent on aviation suffered. The global economy already tethering on recession went into a fiscal tailspin.

 

With aviation halting in its tracks, Agriculture, Automobile industry, Business establishments, courts, education, manufacturing, industrial output, pharmaceuticals, Railways, Shipping, textiles, tourism, trade took a beating.

 

Schools and Universities shut down; examinations were postponed, depriving education / degree certificates to those on the verge of graduation; this led to increase in the rate of unemployment.

Canteens in schools and colleges, companies and factories all shut down, endangering the livelihood security of entrepreneurs and MSMEs.

Vegetable and fruit vendors, fish mongers, flower sellers, domestic workers, gardeners, security guards, drivers, cooks, carpenters – mostly in the self-employed category suffered job losses and their incomes were affected. It is this section of the population that has suffered the most from non-inclusive sustainable economic policies. Dr. Vinod Vyasulu President of the Centre for Budget and Policy Studies wryly comments about the migrant crisis “Exploiting labour has been a feature of the Indian economy for a long time. This is just the latest, brutal, manifestation”. 

“Dole and incentive do not make for a financial policy. What we need is a set of white papers on Nature, gender violence and alternative economies to provide a rationale for allocation instead of confronting a paradigm crisis, Nirmala Sitaraman bandages, pretending its Christmas time” says Shiv Vishwanathan, a social scientist based in New Delhi.

 Corruption is so systemic in India that no politician dares to practise the welfare state ideals enshrined in the Constitution. Indian fiscal planning has never really taken cognisance of natural resource management on a sustainable basis.

While Prime Minister Modi announced that landlords should not demand rent, and EMI repayment will be staggered across the fiscal board, even landlords suffered loss of income. Locking down the economy triggered by a pandemic, in the absence of welfare state economics, COVID 19 became a secondary disaster - all rammed at once nevertheless.

Halting drug manufacture increased potential health risks to many a demographic group, unwittingly increasing anxiety among vulnerable sections of populace causing increase in mental health issues.

   

Lack of Mental Health Care in India is as it is a cause for worry. Given that the geriatric section of society is very vulnerable to COVID and the fact that co morbid factors like hypertension and Diabetes is widespread in the geriatric sections of society, anxiety on account of Lockdown is escalating mental health issues.

The unprecedented Lockdown affected farm supply chain and lo and behold food security came into focus leading to hoarding of agricultural produce by everyone, from the farmer to the e-Tailer to the homemaker. This has the potential to increase prices of food and essential commodities unnaturally as an artificial scarcity is created.

 

 With offices, business establishments and manufacturing industries closing, not only did the economy and income of employees suffer, but unemployment led to livelihood insecurity and even food insecurity for millions of migrants living in penury for daily wages.

 

Work From Home worked for the white collared worker. For most of the others employment plummeted exposing the chinks in the armour of the Indian economy: the migrant labourers in the unorganised sector faced livelihood insecurity toppling the economy belly up. It became the unfortunate landscape for start-ups to become upstarts.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi pleaded to the countrymen (and women) to not disengage staff and to give them monthly salaries even if they are not supposed to work during the Lockdown; however this was not entirely feasible.

Cooks, domestic helpers, drivers, painters, tourist guides, self-employed Autorickshaw drivers, canteen workers, cleaners, construction or fish workers, plantation workers are all migrant labourers in the unorganised sectors working on cash hand-outs without blind employment benefits like house rent, travel allowances and increments in addition to bare minimal cash earnings.

 

Most workers in this sector also depended on their employees for daily food and food rations in exchange for hard labour upwards of 15 hours a day. Lockdown meant no daily wage earnings, no alternate sources of employment, no housing, and no food security.

 

Facing starvation, they risked everything to go back to their native homes. Most of the migrant workers hailed from poorer states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and were working in the more prosperous states of Maharashtra, Karnataka Kerala and Tamilnadu.

Talking of the north south demographic divide in India Professor Amita Bhide Professor and Dean, School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences and Convenor of the COVID 19 Response in (TISS) Mumbai tells Digital Discourse Foundation “This is a clear reflection of the spatially uneven development of the country post-independence and a continuity of the trajectory of colonial economy. The West and South with relatively more investments in education, industry and greater decentralisation has become the area of development and with more opportunities and hence triggered migration from North and East which have been reduced to a position of beggars”.

 

“Even though I own 4 hectares of ancestral agricultural land in my home town of Bhadrak district in Odisha, the agricultural yield (including fruits, vegetables and sometimes flowers,) does not justify the high expenditure involved. I earn more as a part time cook in Bangalore” says Ajith Kumar Behera, sinking his teeth into a fleshy ripe mango after a sumptuous breakfast at his part time employer’s house where he cooks for 2 hours every day for a part time salary of 7000 Rupees a month in one household.

              

“The nature of my job is transitionary. Sometimes I work in eight households spending 2 hours every day in each house and earn approximately Rs. 40000 a month sometimes I earn only Rs. 15 thousand a month by working part time in only two or three households. My son works in showroom in Bhadrak and takes home Rs. 10000; my wife engages a few people to till our land; another son works part time in my agricultural land, part time in Bhadrak town but the gross agricultural income is so meagre that it barely suffices for the family’s food security back home. I manage to repatriate five to eight thousand Rupees every month from my earnings in Bangalore. The lockdown meant I could neither go back home nor could I work in all the households where I work as a cook in Bangalore - it affected my earnings. I had to take a loan to pay the rent of the house I share with other migrant workers. Sharing a toilet with six other migrant workers for the sake of livelihood security is a humbling compromise” says a cynical Behera. 

Such are the bleak scenarios of food security and livelihood security in India.  Behera must atleast be grateful he did not have to endanger his own life walking across thousands of kilometres to his hometown. “My employers in Bangalore are thankfully kind people. They gave me my salary even though Lockdown rules disallowed me from working in their houses.”

Adds Professor Meenakshi Rajeev, Professor of Economics at the Centre for Economic Studies and Policy Institute for Social and Economic Change in Bangalore “Employment growth in India is not keeping pace with the economic growth- giving rise to disguised unemployment or under employment. Jobless growth is becoming a major concern for the country.”

Faced with starvation and unemployment, some penniless migrants started trekking cross country to their native places hundreds or thousands of kilometres away given that trains, flights and inter-state surface transport had all come to a halt. The summer heatwave and lack of tourist friendly infrastructure en route made the poignant situation pathetic.

With all means of public transport coming to a halt, farm supplies threatened food security for the white collared worker too.

With social distancing likely to stay, everything from shop counters to public transport busses have to be redesigned, with public transport needing redesign to accommodate only 1/8^th of its designed capacity.

“The COVID crisis is the crisis of the informal and the agricultural economy. The regime has no understanding that 80 percent of the livelihood are in these centres. The COVID is only an amplification of the deeper economic crisis that India is facing. Unless we rethink nature energy and plurality the crisis will continue perpetually” according to Shiv Vishwanathan.

  

“Development is a way of magnifying vulnerabilities and increasing the sufferings of the marginal and minorities. The crisis today is the crisis of the paradigm and not of bad application. Economics has no notion of vulnerability or suffering. What we need is a new mode of thinking which combines justice and understanding of suffering”.

Lessons to be learnt:

1. No matter how economically powerful China is, international sanctions will help mend corrupt and ill conceived practices like wet wildlife markets. China has been notorious for violation of all conservation laws and has openly defied international covenants like CITES to satiate the nation's appetite for endangered wildlife derivatives like tiger bones, claws, nails among others.  Tiger penis soup, the fantasy of the nouveau riche almost decimated endangered tiger gene pool in the range states of the Royal Bengal Tiger. Consumption of reptiles, Pangolins, shark fins, ivory,  against all traditional wisdom has brought the population of endangered wildlife to the point of extinction.  International bodies like CITES, has to execute conservation laws in China even if it hurts global economy. The tragic binary is if we fail in this, if we fail to hold CITES to account, the threat of a mutated virus can decimate Human race itself. 
2. Sustainable fiscal policies need to be evolved out of the box so that  piecemeal incentives does not fragment the social fabric of a potentially powerful economic giant that India can be. 
3. Political consensus is critical to inclusive governance.
4. Statecraft needs political wisdom.  Vertical economic growth is spurious to the fiscal health of any nation.
5. Long term goals have to be fulfilled by politically correct means to the financial end. Short term populist financial incentives are detrimental to the fiscal health of the nation. 
6. Rapid economic growth upwards of 7% GDP is utterly unsustainable. 
7. Export oriented foreign exchange dependent GDP is a fallacious cheat sheet not exactly economic growth. 
8. Aviation is the most effective carrier for pandemic causing mutated viruses.
9. Fiscal planning is central to sustainable Climate friendly economic growth. 
10. It is either sustainable climate friendly economic growth or decimation of Humanity itself.