Rural distress

A countrywide survey of rural households during the lockdown confirms widespread distress and reaffirms the importance of public provisioning of food and other essentials, and of the urgent need for cash payments to stricken households.

TO UNDERSTAND THE IMPACT ON RURAL India of the unprecedented lockdown of normal life and work announced on March 24 as a measure to halt the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Foundation for Agrarian Studies (FAS) canvassed a set of questions among 43 residents of 16 villages in 10 States across India. An FAS team conducted the COVID-19 survey between April 15 and 18.

The respondents represented a cross-section of village society—from large landlords to agricultural and manual workers, from ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist) workers to individuals engaged in large and small businesses and other non-agricultural activities.

The questions sought broadly to understand how a three-week lockdown period, which sought to pare down economic activity to a minimum, impacted the life, work and economic status of rural families.

Rural India not only has been grossly underserviced for decades in terms of civic and social amenities, but also sustains cruel and inbuilt socio-economic disparities of class, caste and gender that in even “normal’ times create unconscionable levels of deprivation for the majority of rural dwellers.

On this low existing base of human well-being, the lockdown has come as a body blow. While a total shutdown was necessary to mitigate the impact of a highly infectious disease for which there is yet no vaccine or cure, its impact, as this survey shows, has disproportionately hit those sections whose coping mechanisms have already been rendered fragile.

Any crisis or disaster, let alone the gale-force of a pandemic, throws the working rural poor into further cycles of deprivation and debt.