Day #26: prefix-Corona properly...

15th April 2020: Since the beginning of this Pandemic we in India have given it various types of prefix according to our own understanding. Initially it was called the "China" virus, then we had the unfortunately incident of the Islamic event organized in Delhi that resulted in developing a large cluster across the country and several people jumped to conclude the virus as "Muslim" virus, some of the tasteless and divisive hindi television channels even called it, "Jihadi" virus spinning conspiracy theory that suited their character and political leanings.

But really if we need to prefix the virus what will we prefix it as? Unlike the media people who have lot of un-named sources and leaks that can contribute to spinning stories, I go with the data that the governments are presenting to us and all my inference of prefix are based on the available data. 

 "Global" virus - This is the obvious, it is estimated that about 50 million Indians traveled abroad in 2019. As the MoHFW official that gives the daily media briefing repeats every day, "this is an imported virus". We didn't have it so. About 3% of Indians travel abroad and these 3%  "imported" the virus into India along with them.  Even if we add the 10 million foreign travelers who come to India to this, it is still 60 million out of 1300+ million Indians. Now let's consider the fate of the migrant labourers in India - according to the govt. they constitute about 100 million (as per the Govt. of India submission to the Supreme Court), in India. This 7% of the population is being asked to stay put in an alien space where they have no work or security, where they are not close to their dear ones to take care, where they don't get treated with dignity and where they are not sure about being fed, because some of the 3% of India that traveled abroad and returned was not careful about themselves. ok, if you want to nit-pick data fight with me, we can reduce the 0.63% of foreigners that have been declared Corona +ve and that still leaves the 99.3% which is from this 3% that traveled abroad. 

"Wealthy" virus -  Eight of the top ten wealthy states (as per online data available), are in the top 10 Corona infected cases in the country. Delhi doesn't qualify in this list as Delhi has a large number of migrant labourers as we have seen who seem to upset the otherwise good earning of the City that despite having 1.4% of the population is rated 13th wealthiest state in the country. 

If we consider the bottom most states with highest number of poor people (averaging 40% and more), we have a population of about 300 million people, constituting more than 22% of the population that have been asked to "lock down" for the sake of the wealthiest states of India that have imported the virus. And if we assume that the poorest states contribute most to the migrant labourers in this country, then we see that the loss of livelihood of the poor has been directly impacted by the wealthy people of this country. 

"Urban" Virus - The top 10 virus score (as on 15th April 2020) which have between them 87% of the cases detected in India, have an average urban population of over 42% (more than 11% over the national average).  The concentration and the spread of the virus across the country has been highest in the urban concentration with Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai leading being also some of our most celebrated urban centres. Uttar Pradesh though not highly urbanized, has the second largest no. of urban living population in the country.  If you further consider that almost half the cases of Maharashtra are from just Mumbai and similar figures for Jaipur in Rajasthan, both with very high urban population, you realize that the entire phenomena is very urban in the country. The case in Madhya Pradesh too is concentrated on the urban pockets, however, Madhya Pradesh seems to be having a political crisis of sorts (or a crisis that was created at the beginning of the Corona pandemic) and we cannot infer much from the data there. So, we have "locked down" the 800 million plus rural population of India because the urban centres have gone ahead and infected themselves with this virus. 

So, you may ask me, what am I trying to get at? These figures may change in the coming days, reports indicate that Madhya Pradesh is not in great shape as a Government in its capacity to handle the situation. If the migrant labourers that have been seen protesting in Mumbai and Gujarat are not handled well, the situation could go out of hand. If they are facilitated to return home - some of the poorest parts of the country, things could go out of control. All kinds of scenarios are possible. 

But, the reason to profile this data above is to indicate how the urban middle class in this country that prides itself of being somewhat 'intelligent' has been tom-toming the 'chinese' and 'muslim' virus terms without much thinking. Across the country, such racial and communal prefix to the virus has ended up costing lives and peace in communities. Divisive politics and media have contributed to this rather heavily. But, we vote for one and patronize the other. If one were to look at the data, it is the Global, Wealthy and Urban population that has created this virus. And everyone is paying the price for the same. 

Two questions step from this - 

1. Can the urban rich and middle class which constitutes the big chunk of the global, urban and wealthy population (and also a big votary of bigoted media and divisive politics today), be held accountable for inflicting this virus on the rest of the country? Using the model of UP CM  Yogi Adithyanath (popularized during the anti-CAA protest), can they be asked to pay for all the additional expenditure incurred in addressing the pandemic? Would we be comfortable as a society if the names, addresses, phone numbers and photos of all those who 'evaded' detection was made into posters to adorn important junctions in their respective cities? 

2. Can we actually acknowledge that such pandemics are a result of Globalization centric growth, Urban centric development and Wealthy centric economy? Do we dare call it by its real prefix?