Preventing a pandemic of hunger along with COVID-19

Even if India was rather conservative in screening the entire inward air passenger traffic since January till the lockdown on March 24, COVID-19 does not appear to have taken on the proportion of a pandemic on the scale witnessed in the US, UK, Italy, Spain and France. At least not yet. This, without denying that we have under-tested in relation to other countries—an average of 150 per million (the US is 1,000+), the number differing from state to state, depending on availability of testing kits. Asymptomatic patients who went unnoticed are also emerging as full-blown cases.

However, had people been perishing even in small clusters—as would be the most likely scenario in a contact-based spiral—it would be difficult, if not near-impossible, to hide. The Surat plague or the Bengal famine could not be kept a secret. Large-scale manipulation of numbers cannot be kept under wraps for too long. Despite the fact that this dreaded virus and its ways are yet to be fully understood. The comeback cases being witnessed in China and South Korea do reinforce the sense that the war is indeed against an unknown.

What is known and tangible on a large scale, though, is the fact that our population is also vulnerable in multiple ways: Look only at India’s jobless, homeless, wageless migrant labour and the distressed farmers. Their numbers are finite, if massive, therefore a solution is needed. Large spaces, like the stadia that were readied to treat COVID-19 patients, can easily be used to house and feed our unorganised labour force—since the virus is not a mass killer yet.

Enforced poverty is no less of a killer. Neither our inadequate healthcare nor the state would be able to contain a pandemic of hunger unless we also think of distributing rations—using whatever instrumentalities possible—the way we now think of PPEs and testing kits.