India coronavirus dispatch: A time for brave and imaginative action

From caring about the Indian migrant, to getting the containment strategy right, and when one could get infected from food - read these and more in today's India dispatch

Here is a round-up of important articles on Covid-19 from across Indian publications – from caring about the Indian migrant, to getting the containment strategy right, and when one could get infection from their food.

Expert Speak

Now is the time to show india cares about its migrants: Benoy Peter, an expert on internal migration, and executive director of Centre for Migration and Inclusive Development, a Kerala-based non-profit, says in this interview that this might be the time for India to show it cares about its migrant workers. He suggests the country should immediately take measures like ensuring food and decent living conditions, testing for Covid-19, and explaining properly to workers in their own language the intricacies of this virus.

Citizens Under Lockdown

Locked down and forgotten in Mumbai: The protest by thousands of stranded migrants at Mumbai’s Bandra railway station on Tuesday evening was yet another reminder of how the nationwide lockdown had been hardest on the poorest among us. It also exposed holes in the government’s repeated claims that it had been providing food and other essentials to those who needed it most. Read more here.

Don’t push yourself to excel in BYJU’S and Duolingo: People are trying new things during the Covid-19 lockdown but it is a problem if they pressure themselves to master those hobbies in these stressful times. Finding time to finally do something you always wanted to is indeed a productive, self-improving and satisfying way of spending time in isolation. Read here why it’s vital to realise that one doesn’t have to come out of this pandemic prim, proper, with a degree in hand and a new language on the lips.

Opinion

A long haul, spend wisely, but don’t skimp on the truly needy: The biggest worry right now is that a huge number of people will be pushed into dire poverty or even starvation by the combination of the loss of their livelihoods and interruptions in the standard delivery mechanisms. Nobel laureates Amartya Sen and Abhijit Banerjee, and former RBI Governor of India Raghuram Rajan explain why as part of the commitment to not miss the needy, there has to be funding available for state and local governments to find effective ways of reaching those suffering from extreme deprivation. If there was ever a challenge that required brave and imaginative action, this has to be it. Read it here.

Getting the containment strategy in India right: The lockdown has imposed tremendous economic hardship on the poor, without any important benefit as they cannot practise social distancing or proper personal hygiene. If the central government is serious about the containment strategy proposed by the Ministry of Health and saving lives irrespective of social class, it must provide economic and social resources on a massive scale. Read more here.

Managing Covid-19

How Kerala 'flattened the curve’: Kerala's robust public health system, and a culture of thriving grassroots democracy with power devolving effectively to the village councils have helped it flatten the curve. It also helped in community outreach, rigorous contact tracing and mass quarantine. Read here to understand how Kerela has been managing the pandemic.

Outdated census data deprives over 100 million of PDS: With the 2021 census process being delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, any proposed revision of the public distribution system (PDS) coverage using that data could now take several years. “Meanwhile, the consequences of excluding millions of people from the PDS are taking a grim turn as the coronavirus crisis devastates livelihoods across the country.” Read more here.

India’s Covid-19 lockdown has made a national policy on domestic workers more urgent than ever: Reports from Delhi, Chennai and Bengaluru suggest that domestic workers are still being called to work despite the lockdown. While there are some reports of employers giving their domestic workers paid leave, other reports say people are firing or temporarily relieving their workers to save money. In some cases, domestic workers are not able to physically collect their salaries, and don’t have bank accounts or access to electronic payments. Read here to understand why it is time we provided domestic workers with some semblance of security and support.

Demand, prices, supply & curious case of veggies: With fewer takers for farmers’ produce, halted transport, and a supply chain in shock, very little is moving from farms to reach forks as of now. Read here to understand why it is critical to mobilise resources for aggregating demand to ensure that the vegetables will find a profitable market.

Understanding Covid-19

Can you get the coronavirus infection from your food? It cannot be ruled out that the virus lies on the surface of food, especially when brought from a place that many have frequented. What makes food an unlikely source of transmission, however, is that many people already take precautions against food-borne illnesses, such as through hand washing and cleaning of utensils – measures that are now being followed more vigorously than ever. Besides, when food is cooked, it reaches a temperature that the virus is unlikely to be able to withstand. Read more here.

Meet Gisaid, the open science database helping us make sense of Covid-19: Following the open science model, the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (Gisaid) has been in the spotlight for all the right reasons. Gisaid is a collaboration that enables timely sharing of genetic sequencing data related to Covid-19 in a freely accessible database. Several countries have deposited more than 4,000 sequences of the novel coronavirus already; India itself has deposited two. Read more here.