In normal times, he rides a bus from his tiny village to the nearest city, where there are enough people to make a living begging. Now 60, Talukdar lost his left leg and hand more than 30 years ago in a fight over family land. “One or two days (of lockdown) would be OK, but 21 days is a very long time.” “If they stopped the lockdown for just a few days then I could go into town and earn some money,” said Paresh Talukdar, a beggar who supports a family of five in India’s far northeast state of Assam with food supplies down to almost nothing. For these people - for Jakhawadiya in Mumbai, for a maid walking to her home village in the north, for a watchman bicycling his way across the country - three weeks can be an eternity. The lockdown means India has “probably pushed out the epidemic peak by three to eight weeks,” said Ramanan Laxminarayan, an epidemiologist and economist who directs the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy in Washington.īut that logic means little for Indians at the bottom of the economic ladder. If India’s hospital system were overrun by COVID-19 cases, it could collapse in days, leaving untold numbers to die.Īs a result, many experts say Modi had to act as he did to buy time to prepare. Very few people have been tested, so the true scale of the outbreak is unknown. Public hospitals, especially outside major cities, often have limited supplies, questionable cleanliness and third-rate doctors. Except for private health care for those who can afford it, the medical system barely functions across wide swathes of the country. Mumbai, for instance, has a population density of 77,000 people per square mile - nearly three times higher than New York City, which crowding helped turn into one of the world’s deadliest epicenters.
The risk is that it could hopscotch from the Himalayas to South India, ravaging cities and villages. While India had only 536 confirmed coronavirus cases and 10 deaths when Modi gave his speech, it’s also one of the most crowded places on Earth, a nation where social distancing is impossible for millions.
She looked at Modi speaking on their little television, spattered with stickers left over the years by one child or another.
But not Jakhawadiya, who makes a living selling cheap plastic buckets and baskets with her husband on the streets of Mumbai.įor her, the order means 21 days in a six-by-nine-foot room with five people, no work, a couple days of food and the equivalent of about $13 in cash. Those near the top can hunker down in gated apartment complexes, watching Bollywood movies on Netflix and ordering food deliveries online. While India’s economy has boomed over the past two decades, pulling vast numbers out of extreme poverty, inequality also has grown. India’s handling of the lockdown and the ever-spreading virus is a test for the developing world, offering clues to how countries from Bangladesh to Nigeria can fight COVID-19 without forcing their poorest citizens into even worse hunger and further destitution. Modi’s order allows Indians out of their homes only to buy food, medicine or other essentials. As governments around the world try to slow the spread of the coronavirus, India has launched one of the most draconian social experiments in human history, locking down its entire population - including about 176 million people who struggle to survive on US$1.90 a day or less.
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