COVID -19: changing the way Indians live II Use COVID to heal society
COVID -19: changing the way Indians live
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| COVID -19: changing the way Indians live |
COVID -19: changing the way Indians live II Use COVID to heal society
with a hands-on-deck type of resolve.
COVID
brings into sharp relief who the primary beneficiaries of public
assistance should be. No,
it is not the organized sector – hotels,
airlines,
entertainment,
travel businesses facing a slow-down –
despite them being the first to raise a clamor for a bailout and
loan waivers.
It makes
little sense to preserve employment by benefiting corporates over a
prolonged slowdown.
It is as futile and costly as the RBI trying to
keep the INR over-valued to keep imports (particularly oil) cheap and
exports expensive thereby killing the Indian industry.
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| COVID -19: changing the way Indians live II Use COVID to heal society |
The right way to help corporates is for the RBI to slash the repo rate to
0.5 to 1 percent above inflation and for banks to slash floating
retail interest rates to the bone – not more than 3 to 4 percent
above inflation,
whilst making sure that already compromised
corporate borrowers are forensically analyzed before letting them too
benefit.
Cash
assistance must be targeted instead to anyone in an urban area who
does not have a salaried job or who had one but has been laid off by
the enforced slowdown in an already slow economy and has negligible
amounts in her bank account.
This large community of COVID’s economic refugees is tough to identify.
They comprise both the self-employed and those who lose employment as
the domestic service sector industry sheds jobs to reduce costs.
The
COVID slow-down will last at least for the next six months till
December 2020.
Many casual migrant workers will head home to their
villages to sit out the slow down as they did during demonetization.
In rural areas,
the existing schemes of MGNREGA must be expanded to
provide income-earning opportunities.
But
around 150 million workers are permanently settled in urban areas and
have no “return to the village” option.
Of these,
around 100
million have salaried jobs – corporate,
service establishments,
or
house help.
Most are either secure or have savings to bide them
through the next six months.
The rest depends on daily work and three-fourths of these are men.
It is this set of 50 million who will need
to be sustained till the economy recovers to 5 percent annual growth
– hopefully sometime in 2021.
Of
these,
the very young between 16 to 30 are the ones most likely to be
laid off.
They need to be absorbed in alternative paid casual
employment per their skills.
They can be used to boost the existing
public human resources for managing COVID like for community
monitoring or crowd management.
Out of work home,
deliverers could
turn emergency responders to coordinate getting patients to the hospital.
Women could work additional public services call centers or tailor
relief materials,
including from home.
Community surveyors could
identify vulnerable households,
thereby breaking through the grim
anonymity of urban life.
So where
will the money be found – around Rs 1.4 trillion over six months –
to provide 15 days of employment per month to 50 million urban workers?
If the
government contributes the first month's requirement of Rs 225 billion
(this being the additional amount it earns per month from a drop in the import price of oil from $60 to $30 per barrel assuming retail
prices remain constant) the burden in subsequent months can be shared
by public-spirited corporates or trusts,
the most well-off of whom
got a tax reduction bonanza starting in this year's budget.
But more
than the money is the need for an imaginative short-term social
impact outreach program that goes beyond wasteful print and TV
advertisements.
Participation in such socially useful work – possibly for the first time – might transform some of the 115 million urban Indians between the ages of 15 to 30 and give them new social purpose and a sense of achievement.
The close association of religious organizations should be encouraged in
this pan-Indian urban endeavor to explore the hitherto neglected
soft,
social purpose jobs as useful building blocks of national
development.
The ubiquitous Khalsa Aid comes most easily to mind for the succor it provides to the hungry.
The erstwhile community mobilization by RSS
shakhas is sadly less visible in good Samaritan initiatives since a
BJP government came firmly to power in Delhi and in many state
governments.
Mosques
and Churches are traditional centers for social activities and should
be co-opted to say no to COVID but yes to social support for those
affected,
physically or financially,
by the imported scourge.
COVID
can become an opportunity to explore what our unemployed youth can do
for their communities.
In the short term,
it must be publicly funded
and managed for a quick response.
But the hope is that these programs
will not just peter out and die six months later.
Instead,
innovative
social impact private financing will carry through and provide the
institutional base for using the soft skills learned during the
emergency period.
The future promises fewer factories and organized service sector jobs as efficiency-enhancing automation beat human capital in repetitive tasks.
The human skill sets which will be the ones most in-demand are
those of empathy and sensitivity to the irrationality of human
behavior and the domain-based expertise to define systems that
provide a rational institutional response to human frailty.
Think of
how well
“comfort dogs”
do to relax and de-stress travelers at
busy airports and you will get the picture.
Amidst
all the rushing around,
which is commonplace today,
as a proxy –
albeit a bad one – for efficiency,
lies a still and quiet core of
competence that draws from the relentless drive of achievers to make
a difference – no matter however small.
No automaton ca.
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