Bring Them Home

As the lockdown extension by another 15 days is being considered, it appears incredible that what should have been done 30 days ago is still not the most visible part of the government’s response.

Heart-rending images of stranded people from all over the country, desperately trying to make sense of the sudden loss of home, hearth and livelihood, are everywhere. And they can’t get to where they might experience some semblance of normality, their villages, the streets they grew up in, the communities where their loved ones live.

Coronavirus has brought a dreaded disease into our midst. But it has also done something else. It has made impossible the traditional means of succour human beings are used to in such circumstances. A hug, a conversation, a hand upon the shoulder, a few demonstrations offering guidance, an affectionate sharing of food, these are the things human beings have valued as they wrestle with adversity. The new coronavirus has made us afraid of all that.

For people stuck in cities, in suspicious and inhospitable surroundings, these deprivations are far worse than they might be in their own villages. Those villages have also perhaps turned suspicious and inhospitable, but they are still their own. That is where people should be in this time of distress.

Everyone should be home at this time.

For a country with the resources we have, this should not be difficult. Large fleets of state transport buses lie unemployed in thousands of bus yards across the country. The bus drivers would be at risk, but providing suitable protective equipment to that tiny number of people should not be difficult. And re-jigging the time-tables, with suitable cooperation between state transport undertakings, so that buses can transfer travellers at appropriate transfer points, seems to be well within the capabilities of most of them. This is not much more complex technically than arranging for massive pilgrimages from across the country. And with fuel prices in free-fall, not extremely expensive either.

The mistrust and wariness of villages towards their arriving sons and daughters should not be under-estimated. We have seen images of posters outside villages asking arriving people to stay out. We have heard reports of returnees not being allowed transit through villages. However, this is precisely the prejudice that effective leadership dispels. This is what politics ought to be about. Calls from the political class, and especially the PM, to whom the nation has so widely and frequently responded so far, need to encourage communities to take back our own, with suitable precautions and care.

In a village, those protocols of care are far easier to enforce than in the anonymity of the city where they are seen as authoritarian and lacking in affection. In a village, everyone is a brother, a sister, a cousin, a nephew, a son or a daughter. Surrounded by them, it is far easier to accept limits on one’s behaviour for common good than it is in the city. Also, villages know how to look after their own. The resources required to establish the temporary quarantines and to care for the infected, if any, will not overwhelm these communities.

Of course, the government will need to support the village communities in doing this. Large amounts of government funding, to the extent of its capabilities, are already being pre-empted for mounting an effective response to the disease. The question is whether it will be used up in centralised responses, centred largely on larger population centres, and driven by a limited number of possibly fallible experts, or more distributed ones with a greater reliance on the wisdom of smaller communities.

It is the normal reaction of a government to seek to centralise rehabilitation response to disaster. In times of natural calamities like floods and earthquakes, when entire communities are wiped out and rendered incapable of caring for themselves, it makes sense for a central authority to take charge. That works for a short-term effort, concentrated geographically in a small area, with well-known sets of responses, honed over several similar experiences.

The coronavirus challenge is nothing like that. It has affected large parts of the world simultaneously, it is likely to persist over a long period, and effective response protocols are essentially unknown at the moment because we know so little about the virus. At such a time, it makes sense to trust a widely distributed wisdom to respond effectively, while ensuring plentiful communication of the developing understanding about the disease.

The social and emotional connections that the people returning will experience in their villages are nowhere to be found in the desperate spaces that they now inhabit. The skills that they have learnt in the cities may or may not be immediately relevant in the villages, but they will certainly bring fresh sets of heads and hands to the challenge and the opportunity of living in the village.

Because this is not a short-term challenge, it is also an opportunity to help foster a new approach to village economies. It has long been impossible for villages to resist the siren call of the cities’ economies. Now that those economies have collapsed and the perils of urban overcrowding have registered rudely on the national consciousness, perhaps it is possible to take a fresh look at how rural economies might re-imagine themselves.

By now, we know that this lock-down is not the last. We know that whether we extend this one or relax it in phases, or bring it back later, the infection will rise and ebb and bring rising and ebbing need for fresh lock-downs from time to time. This is a challenge that will last at least 12-18 months and possibly longer. Our responses must not be those that are not feasible over at least a similar period. Getting people to their villages, integrating them safely with the people already there and supporting their efforts at building a viable economic infrastructure that works over the next 12-18 months is critical. If we keep them penned-in in the cities in the hope that they can re-join the industrial/service urban economy quickly when this is over, we display a misunderstanding of when “this will be over”.

None of this will make sense to those who believe that the disease will go away in a couple of months and we can safely return to the old order. However, what the disease has shown us is how fragile and vulnerable the entire structure of that old order is. We ignored warnings of an outbreak precisely like the one we have now for over a decade, chiefly because we did not understand, because we were unmindful of, that vulnerability. Now that we know, it is an opportunity to save ourselves from a similar future.

This is a homecoming worth our blood, sweat and tears.