COVID-19 opportunity for course correction from Self Destruction – I

Malini Shankar, 

Digital Discourse Foundation 

The COVID-19 Pandemic has triggered an unprecedented lockdown worldwide and threatens to annihilate modern industrial society and the global economic order. Humankind today stands exposed like never before.

Decades of unsustainable development has led to human society not only digging trenches for its mass suicide but codified its self-destruction. The COVID 19 pandemic is an opportunity for course correction. 

Economic growth has come at the cost of equitable growth as trade surpluses have not been re-channeled into social investment. This cancerous phenomenon has manifested as migration in Europe, Africa, North America and South Asia in the past decade with lessons hardly being learnt.

Industrial production yielding a trade surplus but did not reinvest was unsustainable. Be it aviation, automobile, agriculture, education, e-commerce, hospitality, horticulture, healthcare, or Higher Education, insurance, industry, travel and tourism or shipping,  satellite communication, and everything in between, the profits were unsustainable, and non- inclusive wherever not reinvested.

Even those in high salary brackets lost their livelihoods leaving them to seek food donations. 

Instead of catering to the basic needs of the Have-Nots, a super abundant feel-good economic growth awaited a pinch back to reality. 

Just take, for instance, stratospheric levels of luxury in maternity care: it has deprived basic nutrition to malnutrioned neo natal mothers and new-borns in the Below Poverty Line segments of society. Why then the need for luxury birthing suites for the super-rich?

Vertical economic growth, mistaken by the political class for development, has triggered urbanisation without horizontal and inclusive economic growth, thus causing unsustainable urbanisation. Glittering skyscrapers do not hide the slum and squalor. 

This unplanned and unsustainable urbanisation has led to congestion, squalor, unhygienic conditions – rendering cities from New York to Newcastle, Mumbai to Mombasa, Mandalay to Manila ideal breeding grounds for pandemics.

Liberalising super abundance then remains fatally wrong as the hapless migration crisis triggered by COVID- 19 in India has exposed all that is wrong in the system. India’s COVID 19 triggered Migration exposed the deficit in development quotient in tragic ways.

During Lockdown, Tripura Govt Didn't Provide Mid-Day Meal Food Grains to Any Child

Daily wagers lost food and livelihood security within a 15 minutes nationally televised address during prime time by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

In defense of the Indian Government one could say It is easy to criticise in hindsight. But India has Disaster Management Act, where experts have laid down guidelines. India was one of the countries to legislate the  National Disaster Management Act, in the aftermath of the monstrous Asian Tsunami (2004) in 2005. 

What choice did the Modi Government have anyway? His supporters ask. 

For the Third Time in Four Years, Modi's Knee-Jerk Decision-Making Has Cost India Dear

COVID- 19 just opened the Pandora’s Box to a host of issues simmering underneath. There was a precedent in Europe that was ignored at the cost of the Have-nots in South Asia. 

Migrant workers from the poorer Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha and Rajasthan were living in appalling conditions in  inhuman tenements to earn small amounts of money (in the range of € 100 - 300 a month) plus maybe one meal  in the more prosperous  states of Karnataka, Tamilnadu Maharashtra and Gujarat. 

Without proper preparedness asking migrant workers to stay wherever they were, ostensibly to prevent spread of the viral infection, without ensuring basic facilities for them, reflected abject unpreparedness and the futility of statecraft in silos. Stopping them from returning home also reflected a callous mindset.

A pandemic in congested cities perishes thousands and leads to a recession. Foresight and planning were glaringly missing in pandemic mitigation.

 India’s rail system, one of the best in the world, had the capacity to respond to the migrant crisis. But the Central and state governments failed to rise to the occasion and think out of the box.  

COVID- 19, - it is safe to say – has exposed the lacunae in rural and urban infrastructure, food security, economic policies, and industrial planning in India.

Among these starving migrants were pregnant women and children who – out   of sheer exhaustion after walking 40 kilometres in summer heatwave slept on railway tracks  Freight train runs over ‘migrants sleeping on tracks’, 16 killed only to be mowed down by a speeding freight  train in Aurangabad district of Maharashtra.

Crucially, COVID- 19 has exposed the yawning gaps in the existing medical infrastructure. The ratio of ICU beds to human population in India is completely disproportionate. Lack of investment in health care has showed up tellingly. According to the CDDEP report COVID-19 in India: State-Wise Estimates of Current Hospital Beds, ICU Beds, and Ventilators in India there is an approximate count of 1.9 million hospital beds for the Indian population of 1.3 billion people, 95000 ICU beds and 48000 ventilators. These figures are only for the government hospitals funded by public finance. Figures for private health care infrastructure, are simply not available.

A woman died due to brain damage in Mumbai - India’s financial capital, not having been attended to in time till she was tested for Coronavirus.

The pandemic was a big blow to aviation. Being the single biggest engine for the spread of the virus, halting aviation immediately after the first COVID 19 death in China would have mitigated the Pandemic effectively.

In halting aviation the Corona virus achieved what many UN summits on Climate Change Mitigation could not achieve: drop in Carbon emissions. It begs an answer to the question “Does it take a Pandemic to correct unsustainable economic development?”

Indian politician  Sachin Pilot declared that the environmental benefits of the COVID 19 triggered lockdown came at an economic cost. Shame! Drop in CO₂ emissions stabilises agricultural production, prompting food security correspondingly counting on sustainable development.

But, will COVID 19 triggered-halt to Aviation halt holidays abroad for the super-rich? It remains to be seen if COVID 19 corrects the course of unsustainable human development. Unsustainable economic development heretofore manifested in 7-star health care, hybrid tourism, nutraceuticals as food supplements and rapid urbanisation. Contrast this with rural migration, rabid rural unemployment, unsustainable agriculture, lack of food security in the hinterland and so on… 

Not only will history repeat itself to the detriment of human society but will decimate human gene pool if this sustains uncorrected. It is not rocket science that it is only when the economic engine slows down that CO₂ emissions will be flattened. COVID 19 is the rare opportunity to seize to make the world a better place:  Build Back Better

Don’t miss this webinar Frontlines of COVID-19 Impact and Recovery

The lockdown triggered by the Pandemic has brought to fore traditional practices - be they  washing one’s hands and feet before coming back home, washing one’s hair daily in the Tropics (where viruses normally thrive unimpeded), or street hawking of fruits and vegetables the old way – shutting the doors of many a new economy avatar like super / hyper markets.  

The plight of these faceless, beleaguered daily wagers exposes a corrupt system that lets the rich get richer at the cost of the poorest in society. That should prick our conscience in normal circumstances. But then we have a politician reflecting public sentiment that the economic cost of the lockdown is unsustainable. Lift the lockdown and it’s back to square one.

Plantation workers get breakfast 1 cup of tea and a rice based meal for lunch. Some get food rations for their family but their wages are not high by any yardstick. The lockdown triggered by COVID 19 and the announcement that all public transport ceased, left them destitute, hunry, malnourished, starving in some cases and in utter penury. 

Cooks in Bangalore in South India who are largely migrants from distant Odisha about 1000 kilometres away on India’s East Coast were seen cowering at the feet of their employers who were kind enough to pay their salaries of around € 100 even during the lockdown when they were not allowed to work.

Urgently required are smart solutions that meet the challenges exposed by the pandemic. Solid Waste Management and sanitation efficacy need change in mindsets; Economic development has to be inclusive. Ecological correctness is mandatory. Rural industrialisation, long advocated by environmentalists could not come sooner.

Urgently needed solutions:

1. Smart City governance is the need of the hour. 
2.  Employment Generation in the rural areas cannot be delayed any further regardless of corruption or COVID.
3. Infrastructure development in the Hinterland.
4. Inclusive Development mandates Water security, food security, and livelihood security for all.
5. Fiscal dole outs are not sustainable; rather they are inflationary and do not address significant segments of the population.
6. The fisheries sector seems to be ignored wholly in the fiscal relief announced by the Government of India.
7. Mitigate Malnutrition.
8. To flatten the consumption patterns in favour of the Have Nots subsistence living should be enforced for the super-rich.  That calls for fiscal reforms... the most basic lesson in economics.
9. Curtail vertical economic growth which lines the pockets of the super-rich in a corrupt economic order. It does not answer the needs of the downtrodden and does not tick the social indicators even in the richer nations.
10. Ramp up the rickety public healthcare system.