essay on covid lockdown
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What does “lockdown” mean in a context where people, not just the poorest, depend on mobility and sociability to make a living? Using culturalist clichés, many media have highlighted the “cultural” difficulty of accepting the principle of social distancing. Long before being a “cultural” issue, and if this argument is valid, in economies where informal employment is the rule rather than the exception, and where social protection remains the privilege of a minority, social connection and movement are simply necessary for survival and protection.
India is characterized by the extent of informal employment. According to ILO statistics, 92% of jobs are informal in the sense that they exclude any form of protection, contract and guarantee of continuity (ILO 2016). India is also characterized by the crucial role of internal migration and circulation (Breman 2007; Picherit 2018). Largely underestimated by official statistics, these displacements give rise to various estimates of up to 100 million workers (Deshingkar and Akter 2009). While these workers’ movements have always existed, they have undoubtedly increased to meet the needs of a capitalist economy always in search of cheap and disciplined labour. Internal migration includes long-distance, inter-state migration, with massive flows from the poorest states in north-eastern India to the most employment-intensive states located in the west and south. Internal migration also includes short term forms of commuting from villages to nearby towns. With the massive decline in agriculture in recent decades, and even as India resists the rural exodus, many villagers survive by moving daily to nearby urban centres. Some of these migrants settle in cities, swelling the miserable mass of slums, but most remain attached to their home villages. The Indian labour force, and men in particular, is thus caught in a continuous flow, moving with the seasons and years according to opportunities, networks, and above all the needs of the capitalist system, while regularly returning home. The latter remains the pivot of family and village roots and identity.
Movement is not just about finding jobs. These generate incomes that are both low and unpredictable. At the same time, households face incompressible and ever-increasing expenses: eating; maintaining housing, often precarious and therefore requiring constant renovation and improvement; sending children to school; charges for electricity, sometimes water and gas; social and religious rituals; durable consumer goods that are now required, including for work (mobile phones, two-wheeled motor vehicles). To these regular and incompressible expenses are added unforeseen expenses: health shocks, sudden loss of a job, legal fees, theft, seizure of land following a conflict or an unpaid debt and so forth.
To cope with this mismatch between income flows and expenditures, individuals, both men and women, mobilize complex portfolios of financial practices in which debt is central. Savings are not completely absent, but among the poorest and for a large part of the rural population, they rarely take the form of monetary savings. Jewels, grains, livestock, as well as “social investments” (reciprocal gifts or loans) are much more common. Any surplus liquidity is often reinjected into the social network.
Debt is thus a central component of daily survival. Yet debt implies movement and sociability, either on the part of a family member who has to move to meet a lender, or on the part of a financial provider, since some provide doorstep services. Financial diary methods, aimed at tracing all of a household’s financial flows over a given period, confirm the intensity of movements related to financial transactions. This is even more true for women, since they are often the ones in charge of managing family budgets. A survey of this type conducted in 2017-2018 in the states of Pondicherry and Tamil Nadu shows that the number of transactions (borrowing, repaying, lending, getting repaid, giving, receiving) can reach peaks of 30 transactions per week for women, 20 for men (Reboul et al., 2019).
Given the crucial importance of movement and sociability, we can therefore imagine that the lockdown will have absolutely devastating consequences, and it already has. The invisibility of migrant workers, a vital link in India’s economy, has become glaringly apparent. They have simply been ignored by the lockdown measures. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s announcement of “stay home” provoked a massive influx of workers desperate to return home, even though transport infrastructure had already been drastically reduced. Testimonies collected over the first weeks of the lockdown in Tamil Nadu attest to widespread panic. The populations are used to shocks—the Tsunami in 2004, the demonetization in 2016—but the announcement of the lockdown seems much more frightening to them.
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