Four weeks into India’s now extended 40-day COVID-19 lockdown, the public health benefits of locking down 1.38 billion people remain unclear. Cases and deaths continue to rise as the total shutdown of the country devastates its large population of day labourers and migrant workers.
Shortly after extending what was already one of the strictest COVID-19 lockdowns by almost another three weeks, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi assured those watching his televised address this week that “the country is in a very well-managed position.”
The situation on the ground, however, suggests otherwise: While proportional to its population of 1.38 billion, India’s COVID-19 caseload is small, it’s been rising despite the lockdown and has surpassed 16,000, with 2,154 new cases reported Saturday, the highest increase in a single day.
There had already been reports of hunger and distress among the poor, who have been hit hardest by the lockdown, and news that the 21-day countrywide shutdown would be extended by another 19 days to May 3 sparked further chaos.
Hundreds of migrant workers — angry at being locked down with little access to daily essentials and no income — protested in the streets of Mumbai and Surat, a textile manufacturing hub in western India, demanding authorities transport them back to their villages.
This has weakened our fight against #COVID2019.
State & central governments must come together to ensure that migrant labourers are fed, sheltered, motivated & inventivised to stay put.
Interstate travel cannot be an option during a national lockdownpic.twitter.com/4uFIQDl6p4
Restrictions on movement have been strictly enforced by police and include the shutdown of passenger trains, buses and all domestic and international flights, as well as schools and social and religious institutions.
The government has allowed “select, necessary activities” to resume in areas that are not COVID-19 “hotspots” as of April 20 in addition to those already deemed essential. Permitted activities now include agriculture, fisheries, banking, a rural work-for-relief program and some construction, industry and manufacturing.
Government promises more relief
India has been under lockdown since March 24. At 8 p.m. that night, Modi announced on TV that in four hours, he would be halting all activity in the entire country to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
“If you do not take these 21 days seriously, then the country will go back by 21 years,” he warned.
But absent any advance notice or consultation with state governments and with only limited financial aid and food rations for the most vulnerable, the announcement sparked despair among India’s millions of workers, especially those known in India as daily wagers.
These are workers who live practically day to day, employed on construction sites, in small and medium manufacturing units and cottage industries, and in hotels and homes.
Much of the labour force in India’s cities is made up of interstate economic migrants from villages around the country (at least 45 million of them, according to the 2011 Census), and as transportation and their means of employment ground to a halt, a large number were left with no choice but to walk hundreds of kilometres back to their villages in a desperate bid for survival.
Researchers have compiled cases of almost 200 Indians who have died as a result of lockdown-related distress, and social media is replete with SOS calls and cellphone videos from labourers stuck inside their tenements or cramped work sites, which double as accommodation for some.
The government’s relief package, which includes food, gas and cash for poor households and health insurance for medical staff, has been criticized by some as too modest, at about 0.8 per cent of GDP, excluding millions of those who need it. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Friday additional assistance would be announced in the coming days.
Is it working?
The lockdown has pushed the already sagging Indian economy into further decline, with the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy, a Mumbai-based think-tank, estimating that unemployment shot up from less than seven per cent in mid-March to more than 23 per cent in the first week of April.
Barclays estimated the cost to the economy would be $234.4 billion US and zero per cent GDP growth for 2020.
Meanwhile, the public health benefits remain unclear. India has not “flattened the curve” in the past three and a half weeks, with cases rising from around 600 to more than 16,000 in that time.
The number of new cases continues to go up, as does the number of deaths, which rose from 13 on March 25 to more than 520 currently.
While over half the cases are in the cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Indore and Bhopal, testing has shown that COVID-19 is present in almost all of India’s 28 states and eight union territories.
“The three-week lockdown was supposed to buy the government time to ramp up testing, increase surveillance and contact tracing, acquire PPE (personal protective equipment) kits in requisite numbers for frontline workers, train health personnel, prepare hospitals to receive COVID-19 patients, and draw up a comprehensive plan for controlling the spread of the virus,” said Anant Bhan, a researcher in global health, bioethics and health policy.
“There have been pockets of containment, but there is no indication that authorities have used this three-week window to address the big picture.”
The Ministry of Health and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), which has been overseeing testing protocols and pandemic-related policy, did not respond to questions from CBC News.
Slow to respond
The first COVID-19 case was reported in India on Jan. 30 in a student who returned to her home in Kerala from Wuhan, China, but as late as March 13, a day after India’s first coronavirus death and two days after the WHO declared a pandemic, the government said the virus was not a health emergency.
Eleven days later, as deaths rose in parts of Europe and North America, Modi announced he was locking down the country.
