The big-heartedness of India's poorest in corona times

TALK to a poor young man living in the rural heartland miles outside the suburban sprawl of Budge Budge in Kolkata, and he will tell you that his locality is relatively free of coronavirus.

"It is a disease of the rich. It is spreading like wildfire in the posh areas of Alipore, but not here," said Abhijit Chatterjee, referring to the hard impact of the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in the wealthiest area of the city.

Even during the first wave, many people such as Mr Chatterjee, a laid-off jute mill worker, were saying the same thing, that the rich elite Indians had brought the virus from abroad. There was some truth to these perceptions. But not any longer because the pandemic has begun attacking rural India as well.

As the health crisis deepens, heart-rending accounts are emerging of the poorest people providing relief by donating the little money they have.

Take the story of a 75-year-old woman, Sarojini Das, who begs for a living but still donated 5,000 Indian rupees (S$90) of her savings to the Chief Minister's Relief Fund in the fight against the pandemic. Ms Das, a resident of Ekatala village in Rajkanika block in Odisha state, gave her money at a local government office during the first wave last year. Moved by the plight of the villagers, she also donated 2,000 rupees to a local press club that was offering cooked food to poor and destitute people in the locality. Ms Das, who is childless, makes her living begging and used to sleep in a room of a local village office, but she had to find shelter elsewhere when the place was turned into a quarantine centre.

Over in Aizawl, the capital of the northeastern Mizoram state, a little girl named Zorintluangi, a class 3 student at Faith Academy, broke her piggy bank and gave away all her savings of 1,107 rupees for her tiffin at school to a local task force to do battle against the virus during the first 21-day lockdown last year.

In the same city, Mailoki, a widow who survives doing casual labour and selling groceries, donated 950 rupees to a village team in Lunglei district. It was a substantial sum for her because she supports her son who is an undergraduate student. And then there is young Rommel Lalmuansanga, a seven-year-old boy from the same northeastern area, who won praise from Chief Minister Zoramthanga when he donated all his savings of 333 rupees to the fight against the virus.

Or consider the example of 82-year-old Subhash Chandra Banerjee who lives in the Dum Dum area of Kolkata, who recently called a couple of policemen on duty close to his home, who rushed to him thinking that the elderly man needed urgent help, but were astonished when Mr Banerjee invited them in and gave them a cheque for 10,000 rupees written to the State Covid-19 Relief Fund. Mr Banerjee, a retired college professor, explained that as he did not know how to give online, he called the cops, who learnt that although Mr Banerjee spends a large part of his pension on essential medicines, he still wished to donate. The professor apologised to the police officers for imposing on them.

Those who have witnessed these episodes - and there are many others like them - were left in awe of their selfless actions that came straight from the heart.

The country's estimated 260 million rural poor face the imminent issue of feeding themselves. In March last year, the government made bank transfers of 500 rupees for the poor as part of a US$22 billion Covid relief package.

As the second wave of Covid-19 has begun hitting the rural heartland of West Bengal, the plight of the poor has come under focus because the number of new positive cases have increased five to eight times compared to last year's peak infection rate.

The biggest contributors to the new spike in West Bengal, according to health experts, were the electoral extravaganzas by political parties, mainly the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Trinamool Congress, in April.

CRISIS IN RURAL AREAS

According to West Bengal state health department data, while Birbhum district recorded 94 cases in 24 hours on Oct 1, 2020, the comparative figure on April 26 was 704 cases.

Similarly, Hooghly district counted 145 cases in a single day on Oct 1 last year; this soared to 818 cases in a day on April 26.

So, although Mr Chatterjee of Budge Budge correctly believes that his district was relatively unaffected last year, the outbreak has crept into his precinct as well. Carried by electioneering and large rallies, the virus is moving rapidly into the rural areas which had largely remained unaffected in the first wave last year, shattering a popular myth that Covid was an urban event.

But West Bengal is slightly better off than many other states. New case counts are spiralling upwards in the villages of Madhya Pradesh as well as Maharashtra. The villages of Maharashtra are possibly the worst hit and are contributing more cases to the state's total tally than its urban areas. Rajasthan is also reporting accelerated increases in cases from its rural areas, and the rapid spread in rural Uttar Pradesh and Kerala has been blamed on large-scale breaches of Covid protocols during village-level elections in April.

With the overall cases in the second wave shooting up by over 300 per cent, there has been a deluge in infection in the rural areas whose rudimentary hospitals were never built for a catastrophe that has crippled even sophisticated health infrastructure in the major cities. What is even more alarming is the probability that many cases may not have been recorded in the villages, which would have led to an undercount.

Yet, the government is optimistic that the rural economy will weather the pandemic, and officials point out that record production of grains and buffer stocks will provide food security and support the overall economy. Further, predictions of a normal monsoon means that rural demand and production would be unaffected.

But the crisis is striking deep into the poorest areas. The number of new cases and deaths in India's hinterland and "backward areas" have quadrupled compared to the first peak in September last year. The districts receiving funds under the government's Backward Region Grant Fund showed more than 3.9 million people were infected as of early May. More than half of these backward areas are located in just five states: Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Odisha. Worryingly, these five states send large numbers of workers who help run businesses in other states, and should they fall ill, those enterprises would be hit.

The image of India's poor that is emerging is that of a people who are robust, resilient, and with large hearts, even if not deep pockets.

• The writer is the editor-in-chief of Rising Asia Journal.