The migrant disaster will be a blot on the country's collective conscience

Lockdowns, which have come with daily trackers and goals of flattening curves, can be akin to ineffectual New Year resolutions. As the lockdown eases in many parts of the country, this week a task force of public health experts and epidemiologists gave India a poor grade. Indeed, we are relaxing rules as the rise in infected numbers geometrically progresses, crossing 200,000 on Tuesday. It took 97 days to reach 50,000 cases on May 6 and just a week to jump from 150,000 to 200,000. The task force makes the entirely plausible point that if millions of migrants had been allowed to get home early on, the spread of the virus would not have been so dramatic. An article on so-called superspreaders in Science magazine last month showed a high number of infections in situations where large groups congregated — a choir practice in Washington state, for instance, or workers’ dormitories in Singapore. Thus, the huge crowds of migrants waiting to get to train stations and onto buses or pathetically crammed into trucks as if they were indentured labour in colonial times were like giant petri dishes that likely spread the virus to rural India. The “incoherent strategies, especially at the national level” were more a case of “catching up,” the report said.
 

In normal times, the Modi government has been as decisive as it is parsimonious with data, even if it involves household spending surveys. It has become even more stingy through the Covid crisis. A government health agency mysteriously abandoned releasing records of the incidence of influenza-like illnesses since February — just when the country needed it most. The public health experts’ task force this week specifically requested that the government share Covid-related data as a public resource. For a start, it would be useful to know what the rate of transmission is, that is, how many people are infected by one infected person. If the so-called R0 (R-naught) is below one, or at least slowing, we know we are moving in the right direction. Leaders around the world refer to this statistic frequently. Kerala’s heroic health minister K K Shailaja revealed in an interview with The Print last month that the R0 keeps her up at night. Yet, it is not part of the public discourse elsewhere in India. Meanwhile, Lockdown 5.0 (or Unlock 1.0, as it’s sometimes being referred to), which sounds as if it were a smooth software release rather than yet another in a series of erratic administrative decisions, is going ahead as the virus gathers momentum.
 

The bureaucracy’s notifications are now amplified in our lives by what Bloomberg columnist Andy Mukherjee tweeted was the tyranny of RWA uncles. These are the older men (and they are almost always men) who manage resident welfare associations. The men who manage my building complex in Bengaluru are prone to tragicomic, eccentric Nehru conspiracy theories, but have at least allowed newspaper delivery, unlike many others. A fortnight ago, our committee allowed visitors in ones and twos, but in classic North Block illogic-speak nonetheless “strongly” advised against this and suggested we meet guests outside our flats.

The huge crowds of migrants waiting to get to train stations and onto buses or pathetically crammed into trucks as if they were indentured labour in colonial times were like giant petri dishes that likely spread the virus to rural India. Photo: Reute

 

At an individual level though, India may have become a kinder, more considerate place. Hardly a few days go by without reports of yet another admirable effort to help day labourers and migrants — or of the dignity of migrants in refusing help even when it is obvious they need it. A young woman in Bengaluru has teamed up with a modest eatery to feed migrants off a Facebook funding effort that yielded lakhs in contributions. Admirably, as a nation, we have transitioned to wearing masks much more quickly than people in the UK or US. And, who could have imagined we might learn to queue?
 

Like so many, I have been moved to tears by videos of interviews with migrants on highways or of those tragically dying on their way home. The inequalities of India are so large, however, that I might as well be living on another planet. Early in the lockdown, a neighbour ringing the doorbell with then hard-to-find bitter gourd counted as a treat. By week six, I am ashamed to report that I was delighted that some bureaucrat had bizarrely categorised Silvo polish an essential item, allowing Amazon to deliver it.
 

The blot on India’s collective conscience from the dire conditions of migrant labour vividly revealed during this humanitarian crisis will be hard to cleanse. As the Oxford University epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta told Karan Thapar on The Wire, it is “beyond tragic” that the most economically vulnerable paid the highest price for what she regards as an overly severe lockdown, given India’s mostly young population. The government’s afterthought of a response to the migrants’ crisis recalls the satirical lines from W H Auden’s poem, “The Unknown Citizen”: “He was married and added five children to the population, / Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation. / And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education. / Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: / Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.” In one way or another, we have all been complicit, looking from our balconies past the shantytowns in our midst.