24 March this year marked five years since the imposition of the first country-wide lockdown, during the Covid-19 pandemic.
With just a few hours warning, crores of people all over the country found themselves locked in their homes, with all forms of transport and many essential supplies cut-off. Schools and colleges, factories, offices and workplaces were closed indefinitely.
Spokesmen of the Central Government claim that the Covid crisis was handled very well in our country. However, the terrible impact of the lockdown, the untold suffering of crores of workers, peasants, shopkeepers, doctors, patients, nurses and other health workers, tell an entirely different story. They expose the inhuman features of the existing system.
Impact on workers
Crores of temporary, informal and daily-wage workers were suddenly left with no work, no earnings, no food and no place to stay. Unable to afford rent or food in cities and with public transport shut down, they were forced to return to their home states by any means, including walking for hundreds of kilometres. Several hundreds of children, women and men died in these journeys.
The tragic condition of the so-called migrant workers and their families exposed the fact that such a large section of the working class in our country have no legal protection for any of their basic rights. They are not registered in any official records. They have no social security, no secure housing as they have no address proof in the towns where they work. While five years have passed since these terrible conditions were exposed for all to see, government action in this period has failed to effectively address the problems of these workers. By subsuming the Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act of 1979 in the Occupational Health and Safety Code enacted in 2000, the inadequate legal protection for migrant workers’ rights has been further diluted.
In many sectors, including IT companies, news media, education, banking and finance, workers were asked to work from home during the lockdown. This led to heightened exploitation of the workers. It severely affected workers’ physical and mental health and social relations. The IT and ITeS companies did not even provide the necessary infrastructure to work from home like high-speed internet, hardware and software and working space.
Workload increased tremendously, because working hours were no longer fixed, but considered ‘flexible’, often extending late into the night, early hours of the morning or even into weekends; often up to 16-18 hours a day. For most working women and men, this meant no distinction between their personal and professional lives. Personal or family requirements had to be constantly “adjusted with work times”. The concept of overtime payments for working beyond the stipulated working hours was completely abandoned.
The heightened exploitation of workers has continued even after the lockdowns ended. The extension of the working day to 10-12 hours or more has become the norm in most sectors. Today Indian monopoly capitalists are openly demanding that workers work for 70 hours or even 90 hours a week!
Loss of jobs and livelihood
Huge number of workers lost their jobs. Those workers who still had their jobs were not paid their wages for many months on end, while wage increases were frozen.
According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), unemployment soared to 23.5 percent during April and May 2020 from 7.2 percent in January 2020. Nearly 11.4 crore workers lost their jobs by the end of April, while 5 crore workers lost their livelihood within the first two weeks of the lockdown itself.
The large-scale loss of jobs pushed crores of workers of the formal sector into the informal sector, with wages far below the statutory minimum wage, no job security or social security. This trend has continued.
Impact on health care
The existing health care system completely collapsed during the lockdown. Thousands of sick people had to be rushed to hospitals, only to be turned away in many cases, because the hospitals had no more beds, ICU, oxygen supplies, basic medicines etc. Doctors, nurses and paramedics worked overtime, sometimes without access to proper safety gear, risking their own lives.
While this was the case in the government hospitals, private hospitals used the condition of scarcity of hospital beds and oxygen supply to fleece patients by charging exorbitant rates. Black marketing in oxygen cylinders and basic medicines flourished. Doctors who reported these rackets to the authorities were suspended or dismissed from their jobs. Media persons who tried to expose the callousness of the authorities were threatened and attacked in many parts of the country.
The Covid pandemic clearly brought out the urgent need to establish and strengthen a universal public health care system. This has gone completely unheeded by the authorities. Ensuring the profits of monopoly capitalists, pharma companies, private hospitals, and vaccine manufacturing companies and keeping up an international image of “efficient management” has remained the major preoccupation of the Government of India.
Impact on education
Due to the sudden closure of schools and colleges during the lockdown, an estimated 32 crore students, from elementary to higher education, were prevented from attending school or college. Teachers in all educational institutions were forced to shift to online teaching mode. This led to a big boost in digital online education technology.
On the one hand, crores of children and youth of the toiling masses suffered greatly due to lack of smart phones and laptops, poor digital infrastructure and connectivity, especially in rural areas. Lakhs of children had to lose a year of school or to drop out of school completely. On the other hand, the rise of online education and digital technology has been greatly promoted by the ruling class as the solution to the problems of education in India.
The demand of the working class and toiling masses for universal, good quality state-funded school and higher education, with proper infrastructure, adequate number of trained teachers and all other facilities, has been completely ignored by our rulers. Instead, taking advantage of the situation created by the lockdown, the National Education Policy 2020 promotes digital and online education in a big way, as part of the increasing privatisation of education. IT monopolies have collaborated with various companies to make online education a highly profitable and rapidly growing business.
Ban on mass protest actions
The Coronavirus pandemic and lockdown was used by the capitalists and their state to ban all forms of public protests and mass actions. The government used the ban on public protests to push through several anti-people legislations, such as the Labour Codes, the 12 hour working day, the rampant use of contract labour in numerous sectors and services, the anti-kisan laws, etc. Today, even actions such as a march to Parliament against sexual exploitation of women by those in power, are banned by the authorities in Delhi.
Conclusion
The Covid pandemic and lockdown showed that the Indian state is not an organ for ensuring protection or prosperity for all the people. It is an organ for maintaining the rule of the bourgeoisie and the system of capitalist exploitation alongside the preservation and perpetuation of the remnants of feudalism and the caste system. The bourgeoisie has used the pandemic and the lockdowns to create even more opportunities to multiply its profits through intensified exploitation of the land, labour and natural resources of our people.
PM Modi had publicly “advised” the big monopoly capitalist houses to “turn the crisis into an opportunity”! They did so, making many of the conditions imposed during the lockdown a permanent feature of the exploitation and oppression of the working masses.