Dipankar Ghose: In the mining villages of Raniganj, broken roads, homes - and system / Vidya Krishnan: India's moral failure
The residents of the mining villages of Raniganj are all too familiar with this soot emanating from the Sonpur Bazaari mine. For decades, it has covered their broken roads, flown into their cracked homes, and seeped into their lungs and bodies. Run by the Eastern Coalfields and approved in 1995, this mine has been the subject of multiple protests - acquisition of land, alleged non-delivery of promises of development, rehabilitation. Little has come of these protests.
In Bazaari village, Saikat Bose says the residents’ worst
fears have come true. “Look at the rest of Bengal or the country. Roads are
being built, there is development. That development comes on the back of our
villages, and we get nothing. Our roads are damaged, our homes are always
dirty, and there is absolutely nothing here. The food we eat and water we drink
has coal in it. We feared this, and protested but nothing happened. Now it is
our fate.”
On April 26, the constituencies around the mine - Jamuria, and Pandabeswar - will go to the polls as part of the seventh and penultimate phase of the West Bengal assembly elections. But years of struggle have ensured that the residents have lost consonance with the electoral process. “The Eastern Coalfields are run by the Centre and our battle has always been with them. For seven years, the BJP has been at the centre but nothing has changed in the way they treat us. The Left allowed for this to happen, and the TMC has done nothing substantial too. Who is there to trust?,” Bose said. This lack of trust is a common refrain….
India Is What Happens When Rich People Do Nothing
Individual tales of people finding oxygen or a hospital bed
via Twitter cannot hide the reality: There will soon be no beds left. Medicines
are running out. There aren’t enough ambulances to carry the sick to get care,
nor are there enough vans to carry the dead to graveyards. There aren’t even
enough graveyards, nor enough wood to burn the necessary pyres.
Laying the blame for India’s coronavirus disaster—hundreds
of thousands of new cases and thousands of deaths each day, both of which are
certainly a huge underestimate—at Modi’s feet would be easy. Certainly, much
can be attributed to his government: After the virus landed on India’s shores,
he imposed a brutal shutdown—one that largely hurt the poorest and most
vulnerable—without
consulting the nation’s top scientists, yet did not use the time to build
up the country’s health-care infrastructure; his administration offered little
in the way of support for those who lost their job or income as a result of
restrictions; and rather than taking advantage of low case counts in prior
months, his government offered an air of triumphalism, allowing enormous
Hindu religious festivals and crowded
sporting competitions to go ahead. Modi’s ruling Hindu-nationalist
party has been accused
of hoarding lifesaving
drugs, and has held mass
election rallies cum super-spreader events that would make Donald
Trump blush. (This is to say nothing of how the authorities have used the
pandemic to invoke a draconian colonial-era law
to restrict freedoms, while Modi’s government has at various points blamed
minority groups for outbreaks, arrested
questioning journalists, and, most recently, demanded that
social-media platforms including Facebook and Twitter delete posts critical of
the authorities, ostensibly as part of the fight against the virus.)
India’s experience of the pandemic will be defined by this
enormous second wave. But the chamber of horrors the country now finds itself
in was not caused by any one man, or any single government. It is the greatest
moral failure of our generation.
Read:
Why the world should worry about India
India may be classified as a developing or middle-income
country, and by international standards, it does not spend enough on the health
of its people. Yet this masks many of India’s strengths in the health-care
sector: Our doctors are among the best trained on the planet, and as is well
known by now, our country is a pharmacy for the world, thanks to an industry
built around making cost-effective medicines and vaccines.
What is evident, however, is that we suffer from moral malnutrition—none of us more so than the rich, the upper class, the upper caste of India. And nowhere is this more evident than in the health-care sector. India’s economic liberalization in the ’90s brought with it a rapid expansion of the private health-care industry, a shift that ultimately created a system of medical apartheid: World-class private hospitals catered to wealthy Indians and medical tourists from abroad; state-run facilities were for the poor. Those with money were able to purchase the best available care (or, in the case of the absolute richest, flee to safety in private jets), while elsewhere the country’s health-care infrastructure was held together with duct tape. The Indians who bought their way to a healthier life did not, or chose not to, see the widening gulf. Today, they are clutching their pearls as their loved ones fail to get ambulances, doctors, medicine, and oxygen.
I have covered health and science for nearly 20 years,
including as the health editor for The Hindu, a major Indian
newspaper. That time has taught me that there is no shortcut to public health,
no opting out from it. Now the rich sit alongside the poor, facing a reckoning
that had only ever plagued the vulnerable in India.
Averting our gaze from the tragedies surrounding us,
remaining divorced from reality, in our little bubbles, are political and moral
choices. We have been willfully unaware of the ricketyness of our health-care
system. The collective well-being of our nation depends on us showing
solidarity with and compassion toward one another. No one is safe until
everyone is.
Our actions compound, one small act at a time—not pressing
for greater attention to the vulnerable, because we are safe; not demanding
better hospitals for all Indians, because we can afford excellent health care;
assuming we can seal ourselves off from our country’s failings toward our
compatriots.
A prior Indian tragedy shows the shortcomings of that approach. Shortly after midnight on December 3, 1984, in the central Indian city of Bhopal, a tank in a pesticide factory leaked, releasing methyl isocyanate into the night sky. What would unfold in the following hours, days, weeks, months, and years was the world’s worst industrial disaster.
Officially, the Indian government says that 5,295 people
died overall—others put the death toll far higher—and hundreds of thousands
suffered chemical poisoning. The run-up to and the immediate aftermath of the
incident were chaotic: The company that owned the plant had not kept its
security and safety precautions up to date, and locals and medical
professionals in the area were not aware of how to protect themselves.
Over time, toxic pollution from the plant contaminated the
soil and groundwater around the site, resulting in
higher-than-average rates of cancer, birth defects, and respiratory disorders.
The area is still a toxic mess. The company, the local and state government,
and India’s federal authorities have all consistently blamed one another. The
deaths began decades ago, yet the suffering continues now.
I moved to Bhopal after the leak and grew up there, a city
filled with people carrying the intergenerational cost of what is now known
simply as “the gas tragedy.” Outside Bhopal, many Indians do not recall the
city beyond a vague sense of some long-forgotten disaster. The gas tragedy is a
faraway one to them, consigned to history. But living in Bhopal, and seeing the
impact the leak had, I learned early in life that monumental failures, like
monumental successes, are collaborative efforts, involving both the actions
people take and the signs they ignore.
Many things went wrong then, and many people were
responsible: Safety systems that could have slowed down or partially contained
the leak were all out of operation at the time of the accident; gauges
measuring temperature and pressure in various parts of the plant, including the
crucial gas-storage tanks, were so notoriously unreliable that workers ignored
early signs of trouble; the cooling unit—necessary to keep chemicals at low
temperatures—had been shut off; the flare tower, designed to burn off methyl
isocyanate escaping from the gas scrubber, required new piping.
What has happened since is perhaps more instructive. Indians
have by and large forgotten the tragedy. The people of Bhopal have been left to
deal with its fallout. Richer Indians have never had to visit the city, so they
have ignored it. Yet their apathy signals a choice, a decision to look the
other way as their fellow Indians suffer.....
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/04/india-covid19-moral-failure/618702/
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