Write the story of your life emphasizing on the COVID – 19 lockdown period.
Answers
The public health challenge
There is little doubt that a lockdown that is somewhat longer than the 14-day upper-limit incubation period of the coronavirus is essential, not because it will annihilate the virus but will slow its spread and buy desperate time. But now that the lockdown has begun, what should the State do and what are the instrumentalities of the Indian State to manage its multiple — and conflicting —goals?
To save lives, the government has taken the first major step at social distancing, and while this continues, it must heed the advice of the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), “Test, test, test. All countries should be able to test all suspected cases, they cannot fight this pandemic blindfolded.”
This requires ramping up the manufacture and distribution of a) personal protection equipment (from disposable face masks, to eye protection, gloves and gowns); b) lab testing and diagnostics, c) manufacture of medicines needed to treat secondary infections and complications and ventilators and d) rapidly creating dedicated hospitalisation facilities for those with serious infections.
The economic challenge
But what about livelihoods? Here, the key lies in not creating anything new, but protecting and ramping up select existing programs and supporting private actors in specific areas. The key is extreme selectivity, knowing that there is little time and limited capacity.
The finance minister’s proposals are broadly in the right direction, with a mix of cash (PM-Kisan, Jan Dhan) and kind (increased allocations of rice or wheat and free distribution of gas cylinders to beneficiaries under the Ujjwala scheme). Importantly these measures use existing plumbing — the Jan Dhan Account-Aadhaar-Mobile (JAM) infrastructure and the Public Distribution System (PDS) — which despite some weaknesses, can ensure rapid delivery at scale.
The nearly 60 million ton grain mountain of Food Corporation of India can be rapidly drawn down via free rations through PDS. With the rabi wheat crop about to be harvested, it might be better to draw down rice reserves to a greater extent, else wheat markets could be hit hard.
Concurrently, there are three critical supply chains that need to be maintained: energy (electricity, fuel and cooking fuel); delivery services for essential goods; and agriculture harvesting and supply chains.
Electricity generation and distribution are not manpower-intensive activities. Distribution is, but hopefully there will be limited disruptions over the next few weeks. The very success of Ujjwala means that dependency on cooking gas has markedly increased, and free delivery to BPL families for a few months will be provide considerable relief.
The critical lacuna is agriculture where the government has to be more flexible, whether allowing farmers to sell outside Agricultural Produce Market Committees (and waiving mandi taxes), allowing herders to graze their flocks and bring their goats to markets, and critically allow all seed supply operations which are hugely important for the planting of the kharif crop.
To manage the conflicting objectives of lives and livelihoods around agriculture, the government needs to work with arthiyas (middlemen) and farmers’ groups. Instead of farmers coming to the mandi, which then becomes a hotspot for disease transmission, it will be necessary to have the gram panchayats work with arthiyas to bring to the 22,000 Gramin Agricultural Markets and from there (if necessary) to the APMCs. As Mekhala Krishnamurthy argued in an excellent piece in ThePrint, with the rabi harvest in full swing, farmers need to be able to sell their produce and schemes such as Madhya Pradesh’s SMS-based pre-registration systems to try to regulate arrivals and manage logistics, while ensuring some social distancing.
Responses cannot be one-size-fits-all and will need to be tailored to local needs. Agriculture is a state subject and states and district administrators should have flexibility and be encouraged to be innovative and not punished for thinking out of the box.
Deploying all institutions
But how should all this be done? What are the instruments the State has at its disposal? The enactment of Disaster Management Act 2005 established the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) in 2005, headed by
Answer:
The short-term tradeoff between lives and livelihoods is manifest and nobody really knows where the precise balance lies. Too limited a lockout period risks the lives of potentially hundreds of thousands of people; too restrictive a lockout could result in the eruption of serious social unrest.The threat from a rapid diffusion of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) initially threatened to become India’s most severe health crisis since the Spanish Flu, which killed almost 15 million people a century ago. Increasingly, however, it is spiraling into an economic crisis and could easily spin out of control into a humanitarian crisis.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech conveyed a clear sense of the gravity of the situation. Given the structural constraints — India’s population density, weak health and sanitation infrastructure, and limited resources more generally — the need to slow the spread of infection is paramount. Whether the decision to lockdown the country for 21 days should have come earlier, should have been made with more preparation, should have been longer or shorter in duration, will be intensely debated, but its need is unequivocal.
At the same time, given India’s population density, the cramped and squalid conditions in which tens of millions people live, not only will social distancing have limited effectiveness (household members of every infected person will be at high risk), but the loss of livelihoods and access to basic necessities will impose significant human costs.
The short-term tradeoff between lives and livelihoods is manifest and nobody really knows where the precise balance lies. Too limited a lockout period risks the lives of potentially hundreds of thousands of people; too restrictive a lockout could result in the eruption of serious social unrest.There is little doubt that a lockdown that is somewhat longer than the 14-day upper-limit incubation period of the coronavirus is essential, not because it will annihilate the virus but will slow its spread and buy desperate time. But now that the lockdown has begun, what should the State do and what are the instrumentalities of the Indian State to manage its multiple — and conflicting —goals?
To save lives, the government has taken the first major step at social distancing, and while this continues, it must heed the advice of the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), “Test, test, test. All countries should be able to test all suspected cases, they cannot fight this pandemic blindfolded.”
This requires ramping up the manufacture and distribution of a) personal protection equipment (from disposable face masks, to eye protection, gloves and gowns); b) lab testing and diagnostics, c) manufacture of medicines needed to treat secondary infections and complications and ventilators and d) rapidly creating dedicated hospitalisation facilities for those with serious infections.