Neglect of India’s Urban Poor During COVID-19

Writer: Riya Misra

COVID-19 has shown no mercy.

Citizens lining up to register for testing and medical attention.

Many believe that it has earned the moniker “the great equalizer,” for its seeming lack of discrimination across race, gender, creed, or socioeconomic status. It’s poignant, it seems, to be stricken with a global pandemic that ignores bigotry and prejudice. However, this isn’t the case: COVID flourishes in inequality.  In Indian slums, it has exposed a multitude of socioeconomic disparities. Safe and steady sanitation, housing, healthcare systems, and job opportunities are luxuries that are often unaffordable in poor and undeveloped areas like Dharavi, a large Mumbai slum that’s renowned for its poverty porn feature in Slumdog Millionaire. Slums are densely populated compared to the rest of the world; families live in unhygienic, crowded one-room houses, making social distancing impossible.

These people are already susceptible to a multitude of health conditions, mostly caused by their toxic living situations: air pollution, scarcity of clean water, and malnutrition. If one person were to get infected with COVID-19, the disease would rip through the entire community like wildfire, exacerbated by the lack of medical resources. 

Additionally, people live hand-to-mouth, often with families to support. For laborers, going to work is a debate between risking COVID-19 and keeping food on the table for their families. They have no safety net for wages that could preserve some semblance of their livelihood (“This Pandemic Is Bringing Another With It”). Moreover, slums and developing areas are often overlooked in major healthcare networks. Medical care is radically behind the rest of the world when it comes to equal access to resources. Intensive care units, ventilators, and COVID-19 tests— the most important resource to track the virus— are in high demand, much higher than the physical supply. When it comes to manufacturing and distribution, these underdeveloped communities are merely an afterthought, ignored in favor of the rich and middle class. 

Healthcare professionals taking the temperature of citizens in urban poor spaces.

Indeed, India’s socioeconomic stratification is drastic. While the wealthy revel in their luxury condominiums and penthouses, the urban poor survive with a gross lack of basic resources; the former is completely indifferent to the latter. After all, most do not care where their servants are from. 

Since COVID though, the housing and sanitation crises have come back to “bite the top echelons of society,” as Amrit Dhillon of The Guardian claims. Many members of the elite have to live without their staff of drivers, maids, cooks, cleaners, to avoid the risk of infection; this is not an insignificant lifestyle change for them, as many rely entirely on their staff for even the most basic of habits and errands. Although essential to the wealthy lifestyle, the servants’ own health and livelihoods have rarely been given consideration until now. And even so, the wealthy have begun to care about slum conditions insofar as they’re affected, not out of compassion or genuine concern.

For so long, India has neglected the lives of the poor. COVID-19 has begun to unearth these ugly truths, but the question remains as to whether any action will be taken.

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Sources:

Dhillon, Amrit. “'We Have Abandoned the Poor': Slums Suffer as Covid-19 Exposes India's Social Divide.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 3 Aug. 2020, www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/aug/03/we-have-abandoned-the-poor-slums-suffer-as-covid-19-exposes-indias-social-divide. 

Kristof, Nicholas. “This Pandemic Is Bringing Another With It.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 22 Apr. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/opinion/coronavirus-pandemics.html