The plight of daily wage earners in India due to the Covid-19 situation is pathetic. You are Jamie/Jasmine. Write a letter to the Editor of ‘The Herald’, New Delhi expressing your anguish over the problems faced by these people and suggest a few strategies that the government could adopt to bring respite to these affected people .(Word limit-150-200 words)
Answers
India is not new to epidemics. Growing up in the country, I still remember the 1974 smallpox that took the life of one of my girlfriends and completely disfigured another one. I also remember the gastro-enteric outbreak, locally called ‘antrik’, as Calcutta city’s water supply system was polluted by sewage, forever changing what the middle classes see as ‘pure’ and drinkable water.
In the past, too, pandemics ravaged the country; one look at India’s demographic graph of the 20th century shows that the dip in population between 1911 and 1921 is stark. As students, we were told that this drop was due to ‘Burdwan Fever’, named after the district in eastern state of West Bengal.
We read about the malaria epidemic that decimated rural parts of Bengal, then one of the largest and richest provinces, as the British built embankments to lock the truant rivers within fixed courses, and to earn revenues from the land on the floodplains thus freed up for agriculture.