THIS CRISIS WAS FORETOLD

 

The current COVID-19 crisis and the financial unpreparedness of governments worldwide in dealing with it are a cautionary parable. In Goa, the situation is no different. If there is a difference, the situation here is undoubtedly worse than in other places.

Be it the global financial crisis of 2008 or the Corona crisis now, it is certain that the poorly-paid workers are the first and the most affected of the lot. Though performing the most essential tasks for society, such as cleaning, these workers are treated as dispensable. Nowhere was this more apparent, and willfully ignored, as in India. The daily-wage workers’ barefoot attempts to return to their villages due to the lockdown should have haunted the country’s collective conscience.

But it didn’t! And the reasons are not hard to guess. The centuries-old and fossilized attitudes born out of an essential high and low within the caste hierarchy has seen most people condemned to remain poor and socially inferior. Of course, there have been moments when the underclass has rebelled, but the casteist system has survived, one way or the other.

 

In Goa, we hardly hear about how the pandemic has affected daily wage workers. In the grand narratives of megaprojects, like marinas, IITs, and coal hubs, these are precisely the people who are willfully ignored. Moreover, the government and big businesses want the land that belongs to agrarian, fishing, and daily-wage earning communities. The pandemic has surely deepened the financial problems for this section of our society.

And it seems that the pandemic and the financial crisis is ripping through the lives of even those who are not exactly poor or socially inferior. Recently, we read that in a small state like Goa, about 200 small businesses have asked for their trade licenses to be canceled. It is not surprising, though understandable, why small businesses made such a move. They are simply unable to stay afloat.

Also not surprising (as well as not ironic) is that while small businesses shut due to a mismanaged crisis, big businesses are expanding as if we are not in the middle of a health and financial crisis. News is trickling in of a major corporation, believed to be close to the ruling party, is planning to expand into e-retail, telecommunications, agriculture, and education. Another corporation wants to increase the volume of coal transported through Goa for generating power.

The state appears to favor big corporations unjustly. Nowhere is this partisan attitude more glaringly obvious than with the mining companies. Ever since the Justice M. B. Shah Commission made the startling revelations that Goa’s illegal ore extraction was worth Rs. 35,000 crores, the government has been unwilling to hold accountable any of the companies involved. After about eight years from the first revelations, it is now reported that the state can at least recover about Rs 466 crores. It is a fraction of what was alleged in the Shah Commission report, but it appears that the state will once again drag its feet.

Today when small businesses are shutting down, and people are losing their jobs, the treasury could have enjoyed some fiscal stability from these 466 crores at the very least. The resulting benefits from this stability could have been passed onto the people of Goa. For instance, the recovered cash could have been easily used for medical equipment and life-saving drugs against COVID-19. But alas, all these measures are ‘could have beens.’

Before or after COVID-19, the state never ensured that the exchequer was in good health. There were repeated warnings that the Goan economy was hurtling towards a crisis. For instance, the tourism industry’s performance and management were sure signs of what was to come. The mismanagement of the shack allocations every year, the taxi operators’ issue, and a general environmental crisis that is tourism-related took Goa to the tipping point.

Since the 1980s, successive governments have ignored warnings and recommendations that the carrying capacity—the number of people a tourist destination can serve yearly without environmental and cultural damage—should not be exceeded. But the governments want to increase the number of people visiting Goa each year continuously. Even at the peak of COVID-19 infections, both in Goa and the rest of the country, the Goa government announced that it was opening the borders for Indian tourists—even if they traveled from the Corona hotspots—while Goa itself had zero cases.

The role of the government in averting any crisis, with or without a pandemic, is central. If governmental policies make no provisions to withstand shocks and crises, then the government fails in its duties towards its people. Merely promoting multi-crore projects is a sure indication that more disasters will happen in the future. We are living in one now!

If one considers the last two decades of financial crisis and mismanagement, one gets the eerie feeling that our current crisis was foretold. True that there are some things that the government cannot fix; a vaccine takes about 18 months to be safely administered to the people, for instance. But be it a vaccine or safeguarding jobs and the economy, the government needs to be held accountable for an utter lack of fiscal stability. While people are suffering a pandemic and a financial crisis, the government cannot start building new monuments, like a parliament building or a Governor’s residence. The government demonstrates its accountability by prioritizing its spending. For instance, now, it needs to spend on healthcare.

It isn’t doing it now, just like it didn’t do it then. So, a future and worse crisis is already foretold today, if the Government does not reverse these actions.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 7 October, 2020)

TECHNOLOGY AND COVID-19

 

All the worst predictions about COVID-19 have, thus far, been proven true. Whether it was the rise of infection in a particular month, or the fact that the Government would clear “projects” in the absence of any opposition, or the increase in poverty and unemployment, the COVID-19 crises have deepened existing inequalities in accessing basic resources for sustenance, and technological ones such as internet and smart phones. With India’s GDP diminishing to about 23 percent in the first quarter, these technological inequalities will deepen further.

 

Goa’s Chief Minister, Pramod Sawant, had, a couple of months ago, made a candid admission that all people do not have access to technology like smart phones and internet. “Arogya Setu [app] is not compulsory. However, those who have smart phones need to compulsorily download the app,” he said. While the statement appears to contradict itself, the condition that only those who have smart phones exposes the gap in access to technology. All people in India do not have access to technology which means that the Government’s strategy of using apps and smart phones for communication is misguided.

 

The unequal or poor-quality access to technology is now hampering the education of children. The sudden switch to online and smart phone-based teaching has left many parents and teachers in the lurch. We have seen several examples of students climbing the roofs of their houses or a hill to get better internet coverage. We have also seen parents selling their meagre property to purchase a smart phone.

 

In Kerala, for instance, sometime back a photo of students perched on the roof of her house went viral. Many applauded the dedication of the students. But the viral photo actually suggests how deeply flawed is our education system, even in a state like Kerala which scores high marks in human development indices. Though the Kerala government has been proactive in making resources available, especially through television classes, the access to a television is also difficult for families who depend on daily wage jobs. But the gap between the haves and the haves not of technological access is wider than before.

 

Since 2002, successive governments in Goa, under the chief ministerships of Manohar Parrikar and Digambar Kamat, have implemented the Cyber Age scheme. Under this scheme, students after completing SSC were to be given computers and later laptops at a subsidized rate. The scheme did not meet the targets of promoting e-learning and computer literacy. A couple of years ago, the government once again floated another iteration of the Cyber Age scheme, for the year 2017-18. The 2017-18 iteration too did not succeed as it hardly reached households that needed computers or laptops the most during the lockdown.

 

One thing is clear that had the Cyber Age scheme been implemented properly, along with strengthening the e-learning facilities in schools, the shocks of COVID-19 in education would have been minimally felt. Another problem in promoting computer literacy, apart from the logistics and distribution of quality equipment, is access to internet. Before the lockdown was implemented, rural areas had spotty internet at best.

 

Despite the lack of basic technology in primary education, the Government has been repeatedly promoting higher technocratic education, such as engineering, through the IITs. Thus, the technocratic and merit-based vision of India’s future, nurtured by the so-called middle classes for so long, is a mirage. The crores of rupees spent promoting technocratic education and to create professionals for the IT industry, for example, has not seeped down to the lowest strata of Indian society. There are considerable number of areas in India where even spotty internet access is a distant dream.

 

In Goa, too, we have seen similar hardships faced by our students, especially in the rural areas. As such one needs to ask if technological innovation and technocratic education—the IT and engineering careers—have really benefitted Goa. The pandemic, while exposing the yawning gaps in access, has also made it evident that technocracy and STEM education has not created innovation that is required in a fundamentally unequal society.

 

As such the new IIT project in Guleli—which was shifted there after intense opposition from Canacona and Sanguem—seems like a case of misplaced priorities. The IIT project once again is promoted as a way of encouraging Goans to compete for a spot in a top-quality engineering training as well as boosting regional infrastructure and investment. Both these claims, touted even during the pandemic, seem hollow and a far cry from the reality of poor access to something as basic as the internet and smart phones.

 

Considering e-learning and technology, we must not forget that what literally powers these devices is electricity. The electricity supply is not regular; there are frequent power cuts. In the rural areas, sometimes there are power cuts for hours on end, if not more. In such a scenario how does one even begin to promote cutting-edge technology, least of all in teaching and learning?

 

In the last few weeks, the Goa government has announced that local bodies will be circumvented to set up telephone towers and lay cables to improve internet connectivity. Such a move seems directed to bypass any opposition or due process. Rather than taking the people into confidence during a difficult time, the Government chose to ignore them. This appears to be another way of clearing “projects” despite public opposition in the guise of fixing a COVID-19 related problem.

 

In the absence of basic services, pertaining to water and electricity supply to name a few, it is unwise to talk about e-learning or smart learning. Or even to promote advanced technical education because this will only deepen existing hierarchies and privilege. The COVID-19 crisis is proof that we need to strengthen basic infrastructure more than anything else.

 

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 2 September, 2020)

THE PUBLICITY CULTURE OF OUR POLITICS

Politicians cannot stay away from publicity. They depend and thrive on it. Through propaganda, politicians suggest that the polity is in good health, even if the reality might be completely to the contrary. While at other times, this publicity culture creates dense smokescreens of misinformation, in times of a pandemic, it could be fatal.

The publicity culture unfolds in the following way. Often there will be a leader who is ‘doing something.’ This act is inaugurating a new public work or donating for a charitable or worthy cause. If it is an inauguration, the leader will pause a few moments before cutting the ribbon for the photographers. If it is a donation, the giver and the receiver will also pause so that their generous deed is recorded for posterity. The brief moment when these leaders and philanthropists ‘pause’ for the camera is the moment of publicity.

The most recent example of the dependence of politicians on publicity is the statements of Goa’s Chief Minister, Pramod Sawant. While Goa enjoyed a relatively COVID-19-free April, at least going by official figures, the CM jumped the gun to declare Goa a ‘Green Zone.’ The reason was that no new cases were being reported in that month. However, it was common knowledge that many Goans, either in India or abroad, were to be repatriated in the first weeks of May. Naturally, there was a likelihood that more COVID-19 positive cases would come to light. And they did! By the end of May, the official number of cases rose from 7 to 70 (and counting). Now Mangor Hill in Vasco is a containment zone.

One wonders why the CM was so hasty to declare Goa a green zone. The reasons become apparent as one observes the positive coverage in the national press. The national press hailed Goa for being the first COVID-19-free state in the country. Perhaps the country needed some positive news, or it was good PR by the Goan government. But the Goan government and the national media discarded commonsense. They prematurely celebrated the absence of new cases for April. The result was a miscommunication of COVID-related information to the Goan public; people felt that they were safe from the disease.

The health and economic crisis created by the pandemic is a severe challenge to the leadership pretensions, one created by carefully crafted PR, of the politician. The Corona crisis tests a politician’s ability to take decisive actions to ensure that the state or country does not descend into chaos. In times of crisis, one expects politicians to enact laws that protect the citizens; make financial resources available to tackle disasters; and provide the citizens with accurate information about the crisis. The shocks and destruction that the pandemic is leaving in its wake, as, for instance, in the migrant worker crisis, is proof that most of the elected representatives have failed the people.

But the need for publicity is not just a necessity of the politicians. Everyone who engages in a public act of leadership or philanthropy indulges in the publicity culture. I watched with horror as many people reached out to the poor and vulnerable without any regard for the social distancing norms. The images of someone giving foodstuff or medicines to the older person, and thereby standing close to them for a photo-op, was a cause of concern. What if the corona virus was transmitted in the process of ‘handing over’ the foodstuff, medicines, or money?

And politicians, being leaders, are reinforcing such irresponsible and foolhardy behavior. So hungry are our politicians for publicity that social distancing norms are violated to gain publicity. Recently, the CM was pilloried for not following his own orders when he showed up to inaugurate the grade separator of a flyover in Dabolim. More than anything else, the inauguration of the grade separator was a move to earn publicity. The CM and his cabinet colleagues were standing close to each other, no doubt to be photographed as politicians ‘doing something’ for the people of Goa.

I am not questioning the charitable motives of all those who reached out to the poor and vulnerable without social distancing norms. It is important to reach out to the vulnerable and provide them with essential care and relief. Philanthropy is fine so long as it is not done merely for publicity—and in times of corona, done with social distancing.

Our leaders could have lived by example. In other words, they could have set aside the publicity-seeking culture, or altogether jettison it. Photo-ops are not necessary to show that the government is working for its people, or that the elected representatives are performing their constitutional duties. These photo-ops rather suggest that the government is not doing enough for the citizens. After the Mangor Hill cases came to light, the CM was nowhere seen, and the press conference was conducted by bureaucrats. The photo-ops also suggest that there will be no change in the political culture after the corona crisis.

We can easily see how a culture of publicity in our politics and public life could end up being disastrous. In times of severe crisis, our publicity-seeking political culture creates more problems than it solves. In other times, when there is no pandemic or natural disaster, the publicity-seeking culture leaves a trail of ruined or decaying public infrastructure projects. Who among us have not uneasily entered ramshackle buildings or driven over potholed roads? Funnily enough, these infrastructure projects were once inaugurated with fanfare and photo-ops. The commemoration plaques that gather dust and the photographs of the inauguration of any infrastructure project are a grim reminder that our leaders fail us daily.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 3 June, 2020)