[Editor’s note]

A year and a half into the COVID-19 outbreak, India remains heavily afflicted by the deadly pandemic. In this article, Kaustuv Kanti Bandyopadhyay, director of Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), and Kaustuv Chakrabarti state that repercussions from the pandemic in all domains of the country, encompassing the economy, public health, migrant populations, and dissent over the political system were very much present in the society. With the pandemic affecting India’s population during a time in which it faced adverse conditions for development, concerns over unemployment have hiked over the past year. Additionally, the public healthcare system has been diagnosed as inefficient to deal with the sharp increase in COVID-19 patients. Not to mention, the authors argue that the COVID-19 pandemic has disclosed problems associated with the unorganized labor economy, stating that migrant workers have unequal access to support. Furthermore, the authors argue that the recent series of protests shine a light into the issues the Indian government faces. In this regard, the authors argue that significant developments in policy are indispensable.

※The following is an excerpt from the article. For the full text, please check the attached file at the top of this page.

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the foundations of governance in India as in many parts of the world. The lessons emerging from the pandemic reveal that a capable, accountable, inclusive, and participatory state is essential for effectively addressing the challenges posed by the pandemic that will have long-lasting ramifications. Since the end of January, when India identified its first COVID-19 case, 28,212,727 cases of infections and 332,644 deaths have been recorded. A total of 25,994,295 persons have recovered (as of June 01, 2021). India witnessed the second wave of contractions in the middle of February when the daily cases continued to surge until the first week of May 2021 when it reached over 400,000 cases. In the past two weeks, the daily count of infections has redueced but the death count still remains alarmingly high. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact the lives and livelihood of millions of people in India. The curfews and lockdowns add to unprecedented misery and suffering of the poor, vulnerable, and informal workers including migrant workers. The economy which was already on a weak footing even before the pandemic continues to suffer. The weak and unprepared health system in the country proved to be grossly inadequate to handle a pandemic of this magnitude. The pandemic provided a pretext to the ruling dispensation to restrict dissents and civic engagement.

Pandemic and Indian Economy

The COVID-19 pandemic hit India at a time when the Indian economy was going through one of its worst phases with growth in the gross domestic product (GDP). The GDP fell to an 11-year low of 4.2 percent from 2019 to 2020. The economy grew by 3.1 percent in the January-March quarter of 2019-2020, against 5.7 percent at the same time frame the year prior, marking the slowest growth in at least eight years (Sahoo, 2020).

Jobless growth in India was already a major concern among many economists who had repeatedly questioned why employment was not growing as fast as the country’s GDP. They warned that the rate of jobless growth could severely impact India’s economy which depends heavily on the middle-class population that is primarily employed in salaried jobs and entrepreneurship (Das, 2020). The demonetization imposed by the previous National Democratic Alliance (NDA)[1] government in November 2016 slowed down the economy resulting in unemployment all over the country, a trend that the government emphatically denied.

The concern over unemployment was reinforced by the findings of a National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) study. The survey was the first of its kind on employment by a government agency since demonetization. The government delayed the publication but the report was purportedly leaked in the media. The government eventually published NSSO’s annual report (July 2017-June 2018) of the Periodic Labor Force Survey (PLFS) which reported the All India unemployment rate was at 6.1 percent in the given year. This unemployment figure was a 45-year high (Patel, 2019). Facing vociferous critic from the opposition political parties and prominent economists, the government issued a statement that the comparison of the recent and past employment data was faulty as the study had used a new design methodology for the survey. In other words, the government maintains the virus slowed down the economy all around the world and there was nothing particularly unique or alarming about India’s recession (Scroll, 2020).■

[1]The National Democratic Alliance is a coalition of political parties led by the Bhartiya Janata Party which rules the central government in India.

■ Kaustuv Kanti Bandyopadhyay is the director of Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), a pioneer CSO, who has dedicated more than three decades for work on participation, democratic governance and civil society development. He has twenty-five years of professional experience working with universities, research institutions, and CSOs. He serves on the Steering Committee of the Asia Democracy Research Network (ADRN) and the Asia Democracy Network (ADN). He holds a PhD in anthropology for his work with the Parhaiya tribes of Chotanagpur in India.

■ Kaustuv Chakrabarti is an independent author, who served as a senior program officer at PRIA. Kaustuv worked on the issues of civic space, multi-stakeholder partnerships, South-South Cooperation, and building CSO capacities. He has been passionately engaged with PRIA‟s work on civic space both at the Asian and South Asian level. He co-authored Civic space under Siege: experiences from South Asia; the “State of Democracy: India” report, and the synthesis report on “Civic Space in Asia: Emerging Issues and PolicyLessons from Six Asian Countries 2018.” He has a Master‟s degree in globalization and development from the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex.

• Typeset by Junghye Suh, Research Associate
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