Context: The devastating impact of the unprecedented closure of the entire economy, which was already in recession, will endure for a long time. However, the immense suffering of the poor has been rendered invisible by the collective indifference of the state and the rich and middle classes.

Background:

• There are communities in the countryside — in forests, deserts, hills, river islands and Dalit ghettos — who even in normal times survived on the edge of hunger. They used to depend on remittances from migrants for their survival; today they have to feed the migrants who returned.
• Casual daily wage workers, weavers, artisans, home-based workers, rickshaw-pullers and street vendors have always lived precarious lives too. But they have slipped much deeper into want.
• And there are millions of new entrants into the ranks of the hungry, including laid-off employees of small enterprises and eateries, domestic workers, sex workers, workers in the gig economy, and even teachers in low-income private schools and those taking private tuitions.

UN University Paper:

• A number of global reports warn that hundreds of millions of people are being thrust into extreme poverty and hunger because of the economic impacts of the lockdown and the raging pandemic.
• A United Nations University paper (Precarity and the pandemic, June 2020) estimates that 400 million new workers are at risk of slipping into extreme poverty, of less than $1.90 a day.
• The location of global poverty is likely to shift towards middle-income countries and South Asia and East Asia.
• The impact could intensify because of pre-existing conditions of fragmented or insufficient social protection systems and could last for “years to come”.
• In early July more than 250 million people are at risk of acute hunger. This impact, he believes, “will be long-lasting”.

Poor Public Policy:

• At senior levels of the Indian government, there is little acknowledgement of the depth of the crisis of hunger and the annihilation of livelihoods.
• To revive the economy and, in particular, MSMEs — the sector employing the most people outside agriculture — the Finance Minister relies mostly on credit rather than on fiscal transfers, unmindful that when both demand and production have crashed, credit will have few takers and can accomplish little.
• Governments also sought to revive the broken economy by excluding workers from regimes of labour rights protections, ostensibly for attracting capital investment.
• Instead of atoning for the immense distress of unprotected workers and mitigating future suffering by building sturdy legal walls for their protections, many State governments used the pandemic to further weaken the scant protections which the law currently provides informal workers.

With millions slipping invisibly into chronic hunger and intense poverty, India is hurtling silently into its gravest humanitarian crisis in over half a century.

Reference:

https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/an-invisible-humanitarian-crisis-in-india/article32288036.ece

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