It’s been 20 days since India has been in a lockdown and things are just hanging by a thread. Some places are doing all they can, some places are making lot of plans but can’t see the plan getting executed.
To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.
Steve Jobs
I think the government has taken the right step to ask central employees to resume work on a staggered basis. One third employees working at a time. But asking some babus to work out of Delhi is a far cry from helping resume some normalcy in this country. There is still the big elephant in the room; question of daily wage earners and migrant laborers…
MNREGA To Rescue
I think government will try to use MNREGA for coming out of a lockdown and handle the unrest in that section of the society. We have seen in Surat and parts of New Delhi that execution of food disbursement is not very smooth and I think other parts of the country have similar issues. It would be the best time to build highways for next month as traffic in all of India is at a stand still and you won’t find a better chance to make this infrastructure. Imagine that from tomorrow we start to lay down new roads and repair all the potholes on all the national and state highways. For many that sounds like a crazy plan but it’s actually the most sane thing to do. On highways there is no traffic, ample space to do physical distancing and all these laborers who are desperate will get a job and money to feed themselves and families. It will also stimulate the construction economy which has been hard hit by demonetization and now the lockdown. All governments anyway want to give labourers INR 1000 – 5000 allowance, it makes complete sense to give them some dignity through their work. In case we see spread we can use all these vacant schools that we are already using to feed them to quarantine a cluster.
Let No Opportunity be Squandered
It’s the harvest season in India and in rural areas we will see lot of activity due to this. Now this is an activity which can not be stopped as food security is the top priority for any society. I see this as an opportunity to actually collect lot of data and run experiments. In villages where there is open space and lot of heat we should run massive educational campaigns on physical distancing, hand washing and other hygiene practices. Then see what works and what does not. This data will allow us to resume work in rest of the country and make better predictions on trajectory of virus spread in parts of India. We can also see any affect of heat on virus spread and temperatures are between 30-38 Celsius in day time.
But like great Steve Jobs said ideas are worth nothing if not executed. It will take courage and lot of hard work from our bureaucracy and leadership. Hoping for the best, planning for the worst!