📰 SC upholds right to discuss COVID-19
It asks the media to publish official version to avoid panic; government told to issue a daily bulletin
•The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the right to free discussion about COVID-19, even as it directed the media to refer to and publish the official version of the developments in order to avoid inaccuracies and large-scale panic.
•It ordered the government to start a daily bulletin on COVID-19 developments through all media avenues in the next 24 hours.
•A Bench, led by Chief Justice of India Sharad A. Bobde, was responding to a request from the Central government that media outlets, in the “larger interest of justice”, should only publish or telecast anything on COVID-19 after ascertaining the factual position from the government.
•A Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) report in the court, signed by Union Home Secretary Ajay Kumar Bhalla, explained that “any deliberate or inaccurate” reporting by the media, particularly web portals, had a “serious and inevitable potential of causing panic in larger section of the society”.
•The Ministry said any panic reaction in the midst of an unprecedented situation based on such reporting would harm the entire nation. Creating panic is also a criminal offence under the Disaster Management Act, 2005, the Ministry said.
•But the court took a view balancing free press and the need to avoid panic in society during an unprecedented crisis. “We expect the media [print, electronic or social] to maintain a strong sense of responsibility and ensure that unverified news capable of causing panic is not disseminated. A daily bulletin by the Government of India through all media avenues, including social media and forums to clear the doubts of people, would be made active within a period of 24 hours as submitted by the Solicitor- General of India. We do not intend to interfere with the free discussion about the pandemic, but direct the media refer to and publish the official version about the developments,” the court ordered. Noting that the 21-day nationwide lockdown was “inevitable” in the face of an “unprecedented global crisis” like the COVID-19 pandemic, the government blamed “fake and misleading” messages on social media for creating widespread panic, which led to mass “barefoot” journey of migrant workers from cities to their native villages in rural India.
Fake news
•“Deliberate or inadvertent fake news and material capable of causing a serious panic in the minds of the public is found to be the single most unmanageable hindrance in the management of this challenge... Will set up a separate unit headed by a Joint Secretary-level officer in the Health Ministry and consisting of eminent specialist doctors from recognised institutions like AIIMS to answer the queries of citizens,” the Ministry’s 39-page status report said.
•The Ministry said the Narendra Modi government, in fact, took “pro-active, pre-emptive and timely” action 13 days before even the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a “public health emergency of international concern”. Very few countries responded as well as India.
•But the mass migration of the poor would defeat the preventive measures taken by the Central government, the Ministry said. It said “there was no necessity for migrant workers to rush to their villages” when the Centre, fully conscious that no citizen should be deprived of basic amenities, had announced a Rs. 1.70 lakh crore package under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana to take care of their daily needs.
‘Borrowing sufficient to fight COVID-19’
•The Centre will borrow Rs. 4.88 lakh crore in the first half of the coming financial year 2020-21, or 62.56% of the gross borrowings of Rs. 7.8 lakh crore for FY21, Department of Economic Affairs Secretary Atanu Chakraborty said on Tuesday.
•“The government is committed to meet its requirements for fighting COVID-19, whether on account of health issues, or on account of protecting the economy, and also providing necessary stimulus at any point of time. The entire borrowing was designed in that fashion,” Mr. Chakraborty told journalists here.
Cash management
•He added the plan would enable the government to have sufficient amounts for cash management to meet such requirements.
•The Centre proposes to revise its ways and means advances (WMA) limit to Rs. 1.2 lakh crore.
•This will be reviewed on a need basis, according to Mr. Chakraborty.
•The revised limit is significantly higher than the Rs. 75,000 crore limit imposed in the first half of 2019-20.
•The government will roll out weekly G-Sec tranches of Rs. 19-21,000 crore, higher than the Rs. 17,000-crore tranches in 2019-20.
•It plans weekly borrowings of Rs. 25,000 crore in the first quarter, with a net borrowing of Rs. 1,37,090 crore in the quarter, he said.
•The Budget announcement for G-sec issuances through Debt Exchange Traded Fund route will be operationalised in the second half of 2020-21, and will be rolled out by initiating appointment of required intermediaries, he added.
📰 Beyond social distancing to fight COVID-19
In the global South, a military style lockdown, though inevitable given the circumstances, may reinforce prejudices
•I agree with Eric Klinenberg’s recent submission to The New York Times that social distancing, advocated by health authorities worldwide, as a means of combating the spread of the coronavirus, can only be a part of firefighting. The rapid worldwide spread of COVID-19 has a lot to do with the fallout of globalisation, including the travel industry, tourism and the neoliberal attack on universal health care. Moreover, unfettered promotion of social distancing can reinforce existing social prejudices driven by different forms of social exclusion.
The Korea example
•In illustrating how social distancing actually works in the periphery, I will draw from a few examples from corona-affected countries. The COVID-19 epidemic in South Korea started with the controversial Shincheonji Church of Jesus with a personality cult centred around 88-year-old Lee Man-hee, identified as a messianic saviour. This cult facilitated the transmission of the disease from Wuhan to South Korea because of frequent travel among its followers. Consequently, more than half of all COVID-19 patients at the onset of the epidemic belonged to this religious movement, which accounted for less than 1% of the Korean population.
•Social isolation among new immigrants in Korean cities was incidentally a major incentive for people to join this cult. In this context social distancing was not popular among them due to the simple reason that the movement served as an extended family for many of its members. In this instance, social distancing once successfully introduced may have actually served to contain the epidemic, but it also further stigmatised a religious group already in the margins of Korean society, interfering with disease containment.
•Iran became a leading COVID-19 hot spot in West Asia due to a unique set of circumstances. It was compelled to develop ties with China due to economic sanctions imposed by U.S.-led western countries. An Iranian trader who made a business trip to Wuhan was reportedly the very first COVID-19 patient in Iran. The initial hub of disease transmission in Iran was Qom, a popular pilgrimage centre for Shiite Muslims. The next centre was the Iranian Parliament, having strong ties with Qom, the spiritual hub of Iranian society. As many as 23 parliamentarians, comprising 8% of all MPs, were infected with the disease by March 3. Social distancing was contrary to popular forms of social greeting in Iran particularly among the ruling elite. In any case the coronavirus was introduced in Iran through globalisation-triggered international alignment and incubated through political and religious processes.
Spread in Sri Lanka
•The onset of the COVID-19 epidemic in India and Sri Lanka has a lot to do with tourism and labour migration, processes intimately connected with globalisation. Both in India and Sri Lanka, the first cases were reported among foreign tourists from Italy and China, respectively. The tour guides who travelled with the respective tourists and their contacts became the first set of local people exposed to the disease triggering local transmissions. Both Sri Lanka and Kerala in India have large portions of their labour force employed overseas. Returnees from these overseas destinations have contributed to the upsurge in the COVID-19 epidemic in South Asian countries. For instance, among 18 conformed COVID-19 patients in Sri Lanka by March 15 as many as 11 (61%) were Sri Lankan returnees from Italy, a popular destination for Sri Lankan migrant workers from the 1990s.
•Thus, imported cases and those directly exposed to them comprise over 90% of all COVID-19 cases detected in Sri Lanka as of March 22. Roughly about 20.5% of confirmed cases are connected with tourism. Nearly 60% of all cases are among Sri Lankan workers returning from abroad and their contacts indicating that exposure to the disease through overseas employment has triggered the epidemic in Sri Lanka. Considering that nearly 50% of the entire caseload in Sri Lanka is among workers returning from Italy, it is important to note that many Sri Lankan workers in Italy work as live-in care givers for elderly people. The spurt of cases of Indian origin lately has led to identification of Chennai as a high risk region in Sri Lanka.
•Thus, the COVID-19 pandemic can be seen as a fallout of globalisation, particularly in the global South. The quarantine and social distancing processes may not be totally effective in so far as these workers and their families are often in between two states, experiencing difficulties at both ends. The workers returning from Italy and South Korea were the first to be sent to quarantine centres in Batticaloa and Kandakadu from March 10. Initially, they resented the mandatory two-week quarantine in a remote location. Both migrant workers and tourist guides already experience discrimination of various kinds because of their occupations and the risks involved. A military style lockdown though inevitable given the circumstances is likely to reinforce the existing prejudices. This clearly shows that we need to think beyond social distancing and address problems of the fallout from globalisation in dealing with the pandemic in the global South. It appears as if the much publicised problems of a run-away world have been finally crystallised in this deadly global epidemic.
📰 A pandemic in an unequal India
The official strategies place the responsibility on citizens, a majority without privilege, to fight the virus
•If the COVID-19 pandemic lashes India with severity, it will not be just the middle class who will be affected. India’s impoverished millions are likely to overwhelmingly bear the brunt of the suffering which will ensue. The privileged Indian has been comfortable for too long with some of the most unconscionable inequalities in the planet. But with the pandemic, each of these fractures can decimate the survival probabilities and fragile livelihoods of the poor.
•The measures adopted by the government to stymie the progress of the virus were first to introduce a ‘work from home’ measure, to urge people to wash their hands frequently, physical distancing, and then an unprecedented 21-day lockdown.
Deepening a social divide
•Public health experts are divided about whether this lockdown was absolutely necessary and indeed implementable. It should have been clear that a total lockdown was possible only for the rich and the middle class with assured incomes during the period, homes with spaces for distancing, health insurance and running water supply. But how can we justify the choice of a strategy which throws the dispossessed, who lack all of the above, to both hunger and infection?
•When ordering the lockdown, did the government not remember the millions of informal workers and destitute people who would have no work if they stayed home, many of them circular migrants, estimated at 100 million? These include casual daily-wage workers; self-employed people such as rag-pickers, rickshaw pullers and street vendors; and people forced to survive by alms.
•Many among them are people whose earnings each day barely suffice to enable them to eat and feed their families. Does the government expect them to voluntarily starve and let their children die to prevent the spread of the infection? This crisis of hunger is even more dire for older people without caregivers, and persons with disability. The government also seems to be in amnesia about hundreds of thousands of children, women and men in every city whose only home is the pavement or the dirt patches under bridges.
•Recorded messages on our phones urge us to wash our hands regularly. We forget, however, that millions live in shanties without water supply, and they buy a pot of water, sometimes for a fifth of their day’s earnings (irregular incomes which are further decimated by the lockdown). Regular cleanliness is a remote luxury beyond their means.
•We are also advised ‘social distancing’ (physical distancing) and ‘self-isolation’. How is this feasible for large extended families who crowd into narrow single rooms in slums and working-class tenements? Or for the homeless people who have no option except to sleep in overcrowded unsanitary government shelters, veritable breeding centres for infections? Or for destitute people in beggars’ homes? Indeed, prisoners in overcrowded jails? And I cannot forget those confined to detention centres in Assam, which are jails within jails.
•And then consider the capacity of the health system to deal with the pandemic if (or when) it actually submerges India. India’s investments in public health are among the lowest in the world, and most cities lack any kind of public primary health services. A Jan Swasthya Abhiyan estimate is that a district hospital serving a population of two million may have to serve 20,000 patients, but they are bereft of the beds, personnel and resources to do this. Few have a single ventilator. India’s rich and middle-classes have opted out of public health completely, leaving the poor with unconscionably meagre services. The irony is that a pandemic has been brought into India by people who can afford plane tickets, but while they will buy private health services, the virus will devastate the poor who they infect and who have little access to health care.
•The Union government has announced a package, including additional 5 kg grain a month for the next three months under the PDS; ₹500 per month for the next three months for women holding Jan-Dhan Yojana accounts; three months’ pension in advance to nearly three crore widows, senior citizens and the differently-abled; and ₹2,000 more for MGNREGA workers. If you and I were told that we have to survive on just two days’ salary and 5 kg grain a month, with no health insurance, how would the future look?
•The visuals of thousands of migrants, suddenly left with no food and work, walking to their homes hundreds of miles away, dodging the police, until the States were ordered to seal their borders, showed clearly that the lockdown is ineffective.
What must be done
•Most of the official strategies place the responsibility on the citizen, rather than the state, to fight the pandemic. The state did too little in the months it got before the pandemic reached India for expanding greatly its health infrastructure for testing and treatment. This includes planning operations for food and work; security for the poor; for safe transportation of the poor to their homes; and for special protection for the aged, the disabled, children without care and the destitute.
•For two months, every household in the informal economy, rural and urban, should be given the equivalent of 25 days’ minimum wages a month until the lockdown continues, and for two months beyond this. Pensions must be doubled and home-delivered in cash. There should be free water tankers supplying water in slum shanties throughout the working days. Governments must double PDS entitlements, which includes protein-rich pulses, and distribute these free at doorsteps. In addition, for homeless children and adults, and single migrants, it is urgent to supply cooked food to all who seek it, and to deliver packed food to the aged and the disabled in their homes using the services of community youth volunteers.
•To ensure jails are safer, all prison undertrial prisoners, except those charged with the gravest crimes, should be released. Likewise, all those convicted for petty crimes. All residents of beggars’ homes, women’s rescue centres and detention centres should be freed forthwith.
•India must immediately commit 3% of its GDP for public spending on health services, with the focus on free and universal primary and secondary health care. But since the need is immediate, authorities should follow the example of Spain and New Zealand and nationalise private health care. An ordinance should be passed immediately that no patient should be turned away or charged in any private hospital for diagnosis or treatment of symptoms which could be of COVID-19.
•While one part of the population enjoys work and nutritional security, health insurance and housing of globally acceptable standards, others survive at the edge of unprotected and uncertain work, abysmal housing without clean water and sanitation, and no assured public health care. Can we resolve to correct this in post-COVID India? Can we at least now make the country more kind, just and equal?
