When Will We Learn?

Arun GC 

The health system was on the verge of collapse. People were not dying due to a lack of expensive medicines like in other major diseases, rather they were forced to die owing to the lack of oxygen. They died because hospitals were either overly occupied or refusing to admit them. 

Curative Action

In such a situation, everyone was focused on the health system and it is quite natural too. In other words, we were more focused on curative action rather than preventive action except for the imposition of lockdown.

The major political parties organised huge rallies and gatherings. They brought people from around the country without adopting any health protocols. Similarly, people continued to organize and participate in several cultural and social rituals. Further, hunger and poverty force commoners to out-migrate in India amidst pandemics and the majority of them are returning home with covid. We neglected recommended health protocols. And, finally, we arrived here.

It is worth asking how many hospital beds, ambulances, medics, and paramedics were added after the first, second, and third waves. It is also important to assess how much buffer of food and medicine was maintained. Likewise, it is time to assess what kind of crisis response plans were prepared and implemented after knowing our ground reality in these three successive waves of covid crisis. These all indicate that we do not learn. 

In 2019/20, according to an economic survey, 16.67 per cent of people were living in absolute poverty. Furthermore, if we consider multidimensional poverty, among 1,225,000 households, 391,831 households in 26 districts were identified as poor. With a higher degree of confidence, we can speculate that the number increased after the onset of the covid crisis. 

For those populations, covid and poverty are attacking simultaneously. People are losing employment and businesses are still trembling. Likewise, the agriculture sector which is the ultimate lifeline of the overall economy and food security is also severely affected. Commercial farmers were facing difficulties selling their products during the pandemic. Consumption was dropped due to movement restrictions and affordability.

The farming system has not been changed based on learning and experiences. Neither policy shift nor any program amendment was observed to respond to such a big-scale crisis. Furthermore, some business communities got some kind of relief packages from the government. However, the majority of the farmers did not get any such incentives from the government. 

The Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development has developed a digital portal to place demand and supplies from farmers and traders free of cost. The portal may help bridge producers and traders. However, the intervention was not internalised in the mainstream.

Running all business as usual is not possible in this critical situation. Consequently, people lose their employment and vulnerable people might have to live on compromised food. This limited access to food directly affects the immune system of people. In such a situation, how does the state fulfil the constitutional promise of the right to food? 

All this evidence indicates that there is plenty of room for improvement in governance. We have to assess the number of staff in the bureaucracy along with the hierarchical ratio, and a serious evaluation of existing institutions and their relevance is urgent. Further, the motivation of the staff needs to be assessed along with the causes of demotivation. We have to revisit legal frameworks- whether they are facilitating or just restricting. Therefore, in-depth analysis and restructuring of bureaucracy are urgent if we want service delivery as of contemporary society's demand.

To localise governance, a federal system has been adopted. However, the service delivery of tiers of governments was not reported to be satisfactory. Despite being nascent, some local levels have to undertake necessary steps to tackle the current pandemic and for overall development. Therefore, to make the federal system more functional more work needs to be done to delineate roles and responsibilities and to develop institutions at a subnational level.

Policy Implementation

If we need to learn lessons from the second wave of the pandemic, we need to come up with some key policy departures and their due implementation. Firstly, we have to redefine our agriculture and food system. The traditional concept of a long value chain and commercialisation is not working at an encouraging pace all over the nation. 

Likewise, the government needs to declare agriculture as a zero poverty sector. For doing so, the government needs to prescribe that to sustain decent life, as promised in the sustainable development goals, farmers need to have at least a certain land area along with a recommended farming system. 

Farming under this threshold should be supported with off-farm income. Likewise, instead of having  a long value chain, we should promote local and shorter value chains to make the food system more resilient.

Secondly, urban and peri-urban farming require to be promoted for food security and poverty reduction. Thirdly, the government should maintain certain food buffer stocks, for which the government should procure foods on the minimum support price fixed by itself. Fourthly, a national campaign for fruit tree plantations in the barren land needs to be promoted for environmental services and food security. 

Self-sufficiency in major staples and fresh vegetables needs to be on priority. Finally, the agriculture sector needs to have a crisis response plan which needs to be simulated to check the validity with the involvement of all tiers of the government.     

(The author is pursuing MPhil-PhD Programme at the Central Department of Economics, Tribhuvan University. 

(Twitter: @gcarun88)