 Hello and welcome to Dispatchers from India, a show by People's Dispatch where we bring you major stories from across the country, what Indians are talking about, and the impact it will have on politics and society. Our first story is from the state of Haryana, where thousands of Anganwadi workers staged a massive protest demanding increments to their salary. Anganwadis are childcare centres and play a vital role in ensuring nutrition, welfare for children, and are also often the first step in the education system. Despite the significance of this institution, the workers and helpers are paid a pittance. They receive only Rs. 12,000 which is around Rs. 165 and Rs. 6000 which is around Rs. 80 respectively in the state of Haryana. The workers and helpers had been promised an increment of Rs. 1,750 which is around $20 and $10 in 2018. However, they have not received this yet. This has led to a number of protests and in December they went on strike. On January 8, workers' unions and the government held discussions, while the government considered some of the other demands, the increment has not been granted. The determined workers have said that they will court arrest on January 12 in protest. We now discuss an issue that is constantly on the minds of many Indians, especially the young. We are talking about unemployment. Recent data shows that the number of households with both members working has declined over the past five years. At the same time, the number of households with no working members has increased. Unemployment data often fails to capture many of the nuances of the situation in India. The pandemic has, of course, played a huge role on this, but the numbers are part of a more long-term trend. We bring you some of these numbers. The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, or CMIE, has recently collected a few sources that show that the number of households with two members working has declined over the past five years. In March 2020, during the first lockdown, people who were forced to walk and go to their villages, a large part of them have not returned to the city. A family with no working members has increased from 6.3% to 8% in their country. In April 2020, i.e. in the first month of the strict lockdown, this increase was 33%. It is obvious that these families are very weak and need immediate government help. However, in order to deal with the arctic crisis in Mahamari, the help of these families will be of no help to them. But this is not enough. Apart from this, there are a lot of expenses, such as children's education, health, clothes, income, etc. For our next story, we go to the south of the country to Pondicherry University. Students who had taken part in a Feas Must Fall movement in 2020 are reportedly facing action. Students' movements across the country have faced immense pressure from administrators over the past few years, but have nonetheless continued struggles against the increasing cost of education and other policies that will increase the privatisation of the sector. Let me bring you this report on the students who are facing action. We were told to recall the strike. So, unfortunately, we had to recall the strike and right after five days of that, this pandemic started and the educational institutions throughout the country started closing down. In 2018, the Pondicherry University made exorbitant hikes to tuition fee across the courses and the student community opposed this move. Several rounds of memorandum submissions, agitations, hunger strikes and other forms of protest were held by the students demanding the administration to recall the fee hike. The administration was not ready to budge from their stand. So, during this time also, we decided that we will be filing a petition against the university for this fee hike, which has happened. So, we did that and the case is still pending in the Madras High Court. But why I am sharing this thing with you is that when the case is still pending in the Madras High Court, no verdict, no direction from the court as of yet that who was wrong, who was right or nothing of that sort has happened. Despite that, the university sends one, this Shoko's notice to 11 students who were part of the strike, this fee must fall protest and this Shoko's notice was given to the students after one and a half years of this protest. On the 17th December, the same 11 students who were given the Shoko's notice, they were sent a notice as well as a letter by post that they have been debarred from the university for the five years and a fine of 10,000 rupees has been imposed on them and they wouldn't be getting their degree certificates or any other tuition money, etc. unless they pay this fine. The struggle against privatisation and commercialisation of education is an ongoing one and democratically elected student unions and the student movement has been a barrier for those in power to smoothly impose their neoliberal policies. Paruchya Yadav says that is why institutions are imposing restrictions on students to ensure that they do not mobilise against the authorities and their policies. During the pandemic, we have seen that how it held in imposing these kind of restrictions or how it has held in a very rapid way for the BJP government to impose their project of commercialisation and also restricting the movement in the campuses. Big public universities, the union is the only barrier right now which is stopping their neoliberal policies which they are trying to bring in the campus. While in absence of the union in other smaller centre universities, there is an absence of union and it is easier for the administration to bring in such sort of policies and this is why we believe that if we have to resist that we need to build a larger solidarity which represents the student's community across the country. And finally, as a fresh way of COVID-19 sweeps the world, India is in no way immune with cases increasing by leaps and bounds over the past week. On Friday, India recorded over 140,000 cases with the big metro cities recording a huge chunk of them. Immunologist Dr Satyajit Rath explains the situation right now. Countries should not really talk about waves. What we should be looking at is local outbreaks and the trajectories of local outbreaks and the outward spreads from local outbreaks. As you pointed out, in India, the local outbreak, the local transmission and outbreaks have been in the metropolitan areas. Mumbai, Delhi, now Bangalore, Kolkata are growing very, very rapidly in terms of case numbers. The second issue is many of us will remember last year, this was quite frequently said by anti-science skeptics of the COVID response that, oh, it's pretty much like influenza, why are we getting so worked up about it? And there were two responses to that. In the first place, the frequency of severe illness was still clearly higher than for influenza. And in the second place, the fact that for two years has been brought home to us repeatedly, that if infection numbers explode in one week as the denominator, then even if a relatively small fraction of infected people become severely ill, the denominator number being large means that the numerator, meaning the people who land up in hospitals who overload the critical health care system, not simply for COVID, but for all other illnesses that are handled by the hospitals, becomes a massive public health problem. And this is what happened last year with the early strains of COVID. What is happening with Omicron is the so-called good part, which everybody is referring to, calling, oh, it's just another mild viral fever as the chief minister of a popular state in the country has characterized it. Is that true? Yes, it seems to be true that the frequency of severe illness by Omicron is a little lower. But on the other hand, if transmissibility of Omicron is as high as it is showing every sign of being, then within a week, for example, case total infection numbers are so high that even a very small percentage of those landing up in hospitals is going to overload hospitals. This is why again and again and again, it is brought home to us that COVID-19 is not so much an individual risk where each one of us is in atomized terror for our lives as a collective risk that demands a societal, inclusive, collective, mutually supportive response. We don't seem to have a special focused set of policies to address the problem of the unvaccinated. All of us should remember that the unvaccinated are not simply random individuals distributed in communities. The unvaccinated tend to cluster as communities, as communities of the marginalized, as communities of the underprivileged, in places like the United States, the communities of the irrational conservatives, the irrational conservative radicals, whatever you call them. All of these are communities in which virus populations can grow enormously, both in terms of rapidity as well as in terms of generating potential virus variants for future selection and so on and so forth. So focusing on the unvaccinated and completing their second dose vaccination and where necessary first and second dose vaccination is going to take specifically designed policies. Whether we have the drive or not, we don't seem to have developed policies or at least they're not heard of in the public domain. This is one major issue that I think across the world and particularly in India, we are deficient. The second issue connects to this point about communities remaining unvaccinated. And when communities remain unvaccinated, what we are doing by allowing communities on the one hand to remain unvaccinated and on the other hand creating hyperimmune communities. These living cheek by jaw with booster doses is allowing a growing virus population with all the potential variants included in it to be repeatedly tested against the hyperimmune population so that future true immune escape variants acquire the likelihood of emerging. In all these, however, in all these terms therefore inclusive approaches are absolutely essential. And what that means in vaccine terms is that we should not be in a situation where we are thinking about vaccinating on the ratings, vaccinating with additional doses, those at high risk such as healthcare professionals and completing the basic vaccination should not be either or situations. Our vaccine manufacture, our vaccine supply, our vaccine distribution and our vaccination implementation systems need to be geared to deliver all of these simultaneously. It's worth asking if we are doing that. That's all for this episode of The Dispatchers. We will be back next week with more stories. Thank you for watching.