The Ward has been home to migrants from different parts of India as well as to those who have been resettled from the erstwhile slums situated in the inner recesses of Mumbai. The people from Shivaji Nagar slums in the M-East Ward, where a bulk of Apnalaya’s work is focused, share a similar predicament. For the urban poor, this has meant more unemployment, food insecurity, indebtedness and further marginalisation. With no work and little means to support themselves, millions have had no choice but to defy the lockdown and return to their villages. If not for the aid provided by thousands of civil society organisations (CSOs) and citizen groups across the country - supported by an unprecedented philanthropic response from all sections of society - the consequences would have been even more catastrophic. More or less, this is the reality of most of the poor in India. During the lockdown, 81 per cent of the people have struggled to have access to rations, and 70 per cent had to borrow to buy rations and water. Over 25 per cent of the households do not have ration cards. In a recent study conducted by Apnalaya, it was found that in Shivaji Nagar, M East Ward, the average family monthly income was just Rs 13,555-about Rs 2464 per person for the whole month for a family of five. The data for 2020 is obtained from Oxfam India. Source: The data from 1961 to 2012 are obtained from the Wealth Inequality Database. The extent of the loss of lives and livelihoods experienced last year is becoming clear “officially” only now, with detailed data from the Periodic Labour Force Surveys (PLFS) - the latest round of which is for the April-June quarter of 2020. 65-70 million small and micro enterprises had come to a halt. This included 91 million daily wage earners and 17 million salary earners who had been laid off across 271,000 factories. As early as May 2020, an estimated 114 million had lost their jobs. The lockdown has made us more aware that the urban poor, especially daily wage earners face starvation if they do not earn daily. Since March 24, 2020, we have been shaken by the images and stories of fellow Indians rendered jobless, hungry, separated from their families, cut off from access to services, and subjected to the most deplorable human conditions due to the COVID-19 pandemic and national lockdown. In a market society, basic aspects of social life would be treated as pure market commodities (fictitious commodities) and humans redefined as purely economically rational (i.e., profit-maximising) actors. The rise of capitalism, however, involved political efforts to de-link the economy from this social environment. Polanyi argued that before the 19th century, the economic system had been conceived of as a part of the broader society governed by social customs and norms as much as by market principles of profit and exchange. Let us underline, right at the outset, that it is only in the post – The Great Transformation period (à la Karl Polanyi) that one can even begin to fathom the possibility of India’s top billionaires increasing their wealth by 35 per cent while India’s poor population more than doubled from 6 Crore to 13.4 Crore after the first wave of the pandemic. A public health parable (adapted from the original, which is commonly attributed to Irving Zola) Your friend answers, “I’m going upstream to tackle the guy who’s throwing all these kids in the water.”
Suddenly, you see your friend wading out of the water, seeming to leave you alone. Then another struggling child drifts into sight… and another… and another. You and your friend jump back in the river to rescue her as well. Before you can recover, you hear another child cry for help.
Without thinking, you both dive in, grab the child, and swim to shore. Suddenly you hear a shout from the direction of the water-a child is drowning. You and a friend are having a picnic by the side of a river.
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