The impact of the Covid pandemic is also clearly visible on the Indian economy. While unemployment has increased on the one hand, on the other hand, the workers involved in different jobs in the cities have been forced to join the agricultural sector.
(Image credit: Flickr)
Indian citizens are still living with the effects of the Covid pandemic. Here we consider only two aspects: government mismanagement, some effects on the economy and jobs.
Three years ago, on April 15, 2021, the Indian Government Cabinet met for the first time in three months on Covid. (The previous session was on January 11). Two days later on April 17, the Prime Minister held his biggest rally in Asansol with hundreds of thousands of people.
Daily cases of covid that day were 260,000 and deaths were 1,500. Until then, the Prime Minister was apparently unaware of the Covid surge, although the government had been specifically warned of an impending second wave.
After returning from Bengal that night and perhaps seeing pictures of the devastation in Delhi’s hospitals on television, he canceled further Kumbh activities the next day, April 18. Daily cases were now 275,000, but it took another four days for the prime minister canceled his rallies in Malda, Murshidabad, Birbhum and Kolkata.
He said the rallies would be ‘virtual’ (in reality, only the speaker would be visible on the screen; the crowd would also gather). So far, cases were 332,000 with 2,200 deaths per day. On the day the Prime Minister canceled his rallies, the Electoral Commission banned all party rallies.
In this second wave, none other than the Prime Minister’s Office drew up the Covid strategy. In March and April 2021, the Union Cabinet did not discuss any issue related to the pandemic due to the progress of the second wave. However, it was held five times.
Before this, the most surprising decision up to that point was the imposition of a national lockdown on 25 March 2020 with four hours’ notice, the world’s toughest lockdown. India topped the global league table for lockdown severity (according to Oxford University’s global metric).
China also imposed a lockdown, but only in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province (where the pandemic started), so no flights/trains could operate from Wuhan to the rest of China, but China continued to operate. South Africa imposed a national lockdown, but on 4 days (not hours) notice, even though South Africa has one-twentieth the population of India.
The results of this lockdown in India were disastrous; Millions of people walked to their villages in North and East India and many died along the way. In addition to human destruction, economic and job losses were inevitable; In FY 20-21, India’s economy contracted almost twice the global economy (3.1 percent), while China’s economy grew.
This was followed by a cabinet meeting on 11 May 2021 as well, where things like the ropeway project in Uttarakhand were approved. On 18 May 2021, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari asked more companies to issue licenses to manufacture vaccines. This is exactly what Manmohan Singh had suggested to the government a month earlier (the then Health Minister Harsh Vardhan had given him a cheeky reply).
Then during the second wave from February to April 25, 2021, the Prime Minister publicly registered 92 attendances. The Prime Minister has been missing since April 25 after canceling the Kumbh and his rallies in Bengal. When the people needed the government the most, he did not appear in public for 20 days.
Twice in 2020 – in April and November, the government was warned that oxygen was running out. Minutes of a meeting said clearly: ‘India may face a shortage of oxygen supply in the coming days’.
If there was a strategy to deal with the pandemic, it came directly from the PMO. As the India Express headline said, ‘Cabinet had no role in controlling epidemic, PMO takes decision’. This took a toll on the country’s healthcare system, which was already fragile and out of reach for the poor even before the pandemic.
Two months before the second wave, on 21 February 2021, the BJP passed a resolution. was written; It can be proudly said that under the able, sensitive, determined and visionary leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has not only defeated Covid, but also the confidence of all its citizens to build ‘Atam Nirbhar Bharat’ was created. The party appreciates his leadership for presenting India to the world as a proud and victorious nation in the fight against Covid.’
After that came the second wave (Delta). In the eight weeks between March 1, 2021 and April 30, 2021, daily cases in India increased 40-fold from 11,000 to over 400,000. No healthcare system in the world can handle this kind of influx of patients. The only way to protect citizens is to stockpile items that are not needed immediately but are made and bought in anticipation of the intensity of the wave. India did not.
In April 2020, the government decided that it would buy 50,000 ‘Make in India’ ventilators, but after deciding that the first wave of the pandemic was over, only 35,000 of them were eventually bought. Corporations like Maruti said they have produced ventilators, but the government has not decided to buy them.
However, the only good news was that vaccines were available in April 2021. The World Health Organization says that 4.5 million additional deaths occurred despite vaccination.
Meanwhile, the country’s economy, which had already been in recession for nine quarters between 2017 and early 2020, slumped. Unemployment, which was already at its highest level for 45 years, worsened. During the first wave of 2020, 3.5 crore new workers joined agriculture. More in the second wave and the third wave (2022), eventually forcing 6 crore (60 million) laborers to engage in agriculture in just 3 years. Never before in history has there been so much internal migration. Therefore, a reduction in wages has been recorded.
(Santosh Mehrotra is an independent economist; Akar Patel is associated with Amnesty International.)
