By Rit Nanda*
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” – Rahm Emanuel, Chief of Staff, Barack Obama, Former President of the USA
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” – Rahm Emanuel, Chief of Staff, Barack Obama, Former President of the USA
It seems odd to start an article with
perhaps one of the most cynical political quotes of recent times, but it is
imperative that we see the truth in the latter part of the quote that a crisis
is an opportunity to do things anew. And crises do not come bigger than the
COVID-19 pandemic currently ravaging the globe.
Also economics dictates that jobs that
involve service or manufacturing are generally better compensated than those
that simply involve production of raw material. It is vital to monetize to
recognize human endeavour. This natural flow of supply chain has for years
created a steady stream of migrants from our rural to our urban centres as we
have moved further and further away from an agrarian society.
But seasonal migrants who come to the towns
and cities from villages are not better off away from their homes. They simply
come because they earn more and therefore can send more money back home to take
care of their family. It is the same reason so many Indians go to the Middle
East to work as labourers; not because living conditions there are better but
because monetary savings to send back to their families are better.
Hence, we see desperation in migrant
workers to return home to their villages now that they do not have any earning
in the cities due the COVID-19 lockdown. Because of the lockdown, it is not
even sure how many small businesses will go under as no stimulus package was
introduced for Small and Medium Enterprises going into even the fourth week of
the extended lockdown. So, it is not even guaranteed how many rural migrants
will be able to return to their jobs once the lockdown is removed.
Therefore, it is this writer’s contention
that the migrants are allowed to move back to villages after the lockdown.
However, it must be then noted with some dismay that the government has taken
the opposite tack and is instead trying to be a nanny state by trying to find
jobs for workers in the state they are currently stuck in. This is as per the
Union Home Ministry recommendation that came on April 19, 2020.
While the guideline might be in the right
spirit, it is completely misguided in that no government can provide jobs for
so many newly unemployed people, majority of whom survive on the basis of day-to-day
work. Furthermore, it needlessly distorts the market for the last few weeks of
the lockdown because the moment the lockdown is over people would want to move
back to their villages thereby creating a labour shortage where they were
temporarily employed.
This is also unwise because, whether the government likes
to hear or not, an economic slowdown is coming and that means the private
sector has less capacity to employ these migrants. Inevitably, many will
therefore be out of jobs and being stuck in the city is not an option for them.
So, instead of wasting these two weeks
trying to micromanage free markets, the job of the government should be to
enable those who are going back to the villages to find work there. This means
moving some components of the supply chain away from the cities. We must learn
our lessons from past pandemics in India, mainly the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic
that had such a devastating effect.
If migrants crowd back into cities, where social distancing is impossible, it might lead to a second surge of COVID-19
Reports suggest famine like conditions in
villages forced many people to move to densely populated cities which further
exacerbated the spread of the pandemic. Considering how weak our current levels
of testing are, there is a huge chance that if migrants crowd back into cities,
where social distancing is impossible, it might lead to a second surge of
COVID-19.
This is the opportunity that this pandemic
gives. Already we are seeing an exploding urban population and it is
dispiriting for a major economy to see so many urban poor living in such
squalor. If we can take this opportunity to distribute service sector
industries away from cities to towns and the process industries towards village
hubs, we can eliminate the problem of urban dependence of our economy which
causes fallouts such as urban poverty and lower quality of lives for the
migrants. Let us look at some industries that can be moved towards the towns
and rural belt.
The International Institute for Population
Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai’s research as reproduced by Aajeevika Bureau found that
majority of the migrants are employed in construction, domestic work, textile,
brick kilns, transportation, mines and quarries and agriculture, given in
decreasing order.
Among them, the glut in construction in the
cities is because many people from the middle class migrate to cities where the
white collar service jobs are. If the government uses this pandemic to reorient
itself where service jobs can move to smaller towns where broadband facilities
are already there, BPO and IT support services can easily move to smaller
towns.
This has an added bonus that the
universities in the hinterlands will now have access to industry, so students
in there will study seriously instead of losing hope for a better life. As more
people are employed in smaller towns, domestic work opportunities will also
increase there and decrease in the cities. Similarly, textile industries can be
moved away from the cities. Cotton, which is the main textile crop, is grown in
Deccan, Malwa and Sutlej-Ganga plains, but the mills are generally located in
the cities.
If these are moved back towards the
villages and infrastructure made to carry export items straight to the ports,
then export headquarters can be kept in the cities, but workers need not move
to the cities to work. Similarly, if infrastructure connects the hinterlands,
especially in the peninsula, then stone processing factories can be located
next to mines and quarries and the processed materials can be moved directly to
the cities of use or ports of export instead of having to bring them to cities.
What are given above are just suggestions
which the government officers might study in detail to attempt to reorient our
supply chain. Migrants are often not captured in the BPL lists or electoral
lists, thereby making them vulnerable to, even in the best of times, a lack of
subsidised food and electoral representation. This pandemic has given us an
opportunity to pause and rethink. There is no reason why we should not take
this opportunity.
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*M.Sc energy, trade and finance, City
University, London; procurement, logistics and human resource supervisor and consultant
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