 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us the well-known economist Pramod Pattaik and we'll discuss what is the government's road during such a public health crisis that we have now. Pramod, we have had a lockdown of now three weeks, possible extension for another two weeks or at least a graded lockdown if it doesn't really lift. Certainly it's not going to come back to normal for at least one or two months more. The question is, the government has, apart from the lockdown, the rules, what people should or shouldn't do, it has also responsibilities, particularly for the poor, the fact that we've lost their employment, daily wages, all of that, and we've already seen the crisis with the migrant workers. The second is what is called the casual employment economy, which is really the one which was the small-scale industries, small and medium-scale industries, employing a lot of people, plus of course a lot of domestic work itself. All of that is under the crisis at the moment. Is the government doing anything that you can see or is it entirely left to the states? No, I think at this moment the government is really doing nothing because the package which was revealed by the finance minister, Nirmala Sitaraman, was really a trivial package. It was extremely small, much of it in fact in the form of kind payments through the public distribution system, which many people who are not able to access the public distribution system or the shops are closed, is really meaningless at this moment. What is more even if we assume that the public distribution system function and people got their ration and so on, nonetheless there is a sheer cash shortage in their hands because they are getting no incomes. Now therefore the government could have done a number of things. One of the things which many people have suggested is for the government to actually give a certain amount of money to every household belonging to the bottom 80% of the households. I know it's a logistically difficult problem and so on, but on the other hand this is something which could have been attempted and logistics could have been sorted out. If you give let's say 7000 rupees per household to the bottom 80% of the households for let's say a period of 2 months, that would come to 3.66 lakh crores. The amount which the government has actually given in the form of cash transfers to widows, pensioners and so on, is something which amounts to for 3 months mind you 34000 crores. It's just one tenth of what could have been a reasonable package. The other thing which many people have been talking about is that for the workers who are employed in small enterprises and so on, instead of the money being given directly to them you actually subsidize their wage bill by paying the money to the employer. That again has logistical problems, comes to the same thing because you can keep the production going this way. But either of these or any of these options would require an amount of cash transfer which is at least 10 times what Nirmala Sitaraman's group package has even written on paper how much of it actually gets to them is a separate matter. The other thing which the government has to do the central government is that you know there has been an enormous centralization of resources. The GST itself amounted to a massive centralization of resources. You took away the right from the states for living, self-stacked which was their main revenue source and you centralized decisions about rates and what to do etc. With the GST council where the center gets represented then what is more has a pretty dominant voice. So this centralization of resources and mind you now even the GST compensation to the states has not been paid since August. So this enormous centralization of resources is something which is coming in the way of the states doing their bit and mind you this is a crisis in which the states have to play a very important role and their hamstrung by shortage of resources. So two things the center has to do one is to make enough resources available to the states. The other is to actually make sure that in cash and kind transfers are made to the poor household like poor I mean fairly large almost 80% of the households for at least a period of two months. So what we are seeing is that the government is neither taking these measures, nor when it talks to the states is there an attempt to work out something together. More or less the issue is almost looking at the lockdown, what are the measures to be taken. Entirely what I would call police measures in order to control the population movements and with that hope that it will somehow stop the the current the COVID-19 epidemic from spreading. But apart from that, the other parts of it, which is the hospitals how to make that work, what is the support to be given the kind of medicines we need we have stocks of that testing. None of this we seem to be also at least revealing what the government is doing. We don't know where it is. And most importantly, what's called personal protective equipment, which would also give a fit to certain kinds of industries. And we have the textile industry, for instance, which could be harness to making masks. None of that is also being activated under the central plan. In fact, we have ministers who are invisible at the moment. He only gives once in a week or once in two weeks. He gives the address to the nation, when he tells us either to clap and stay at home or to the switch off our lights and danger in the grid. But he doesn't really say what are the steps the government is taking, either to fight the epidemic or the consequences of the lockdown, which is the economic crisis. None of this we seem to see. And do you think that the government at this stage is abdicating its responsibility regarding the medical and the public health issues that it is facing? Yes, I would just like to make two points. You see, firstly, when the lockdown was announced, everybody took it that the argument was that you are actually slowing down the spread of the virus that gives you some breathing time, during which you can actually be prepared so that your public health system can now take care of the issues. So they should have utilized that opportunity precisely to get hold of equipment, precisely to get your public health system revamped to make sure that you have enough testing kit and so on. This is what they have not done. The other thing is that there is a complete, you know, while there's centralization of decision making, because after all, when the lockdown happened, nobody was consulted. Only Modi announced it with four hour notice. Even the states were not consulted. So the decision making was centralized. But on the other hand, the media, the talking to the media, the giving out information, the idea of questions being asked is done by some joint secretary in the Ministry of Health. I think the model on this, which has really worked very well, is in Kerala, where the Chief Minister every evening meets the press and takes questions and everybody in the state is actually looking at the Chief Minister handling these questions and therefore feeling reassured. There is a sense of awareness of what's going on, a sense of common kind of participation and fight against the virus, all of which is missing when you look at the central government. It's also interesting that Kerala has been able to flatten the curve. And what we saw in China, it's not just the government, but as Dr. Ailwan, the WHO person who went to China and was a part of the joint team, the Chinese and the WHO setup, he said it was an all in government and an all in people effort, which is what defeated the epidemic in China. What is missing here is the people are being asked to stay indoors without which police are being let loose. We have pictures couple of days back, for instance, in one of the markets in Delhi, the shopkeepers being beaten up. Now, this is even though the shops are supposed to be kept open for a certain number of hours of people to come, but we are talking about curfew, we are talking of section 144, that participative feeling that the people have a role is not, doesn't seem to be there. And in the absence of this, that they feel that only their role is to sit at home and do nothing. And particularly for the hospital and hospital staff who are being asked to find what you said that protect that if the government had used this time, at least protective gear should have been available. We are being asked to wear masks, but actually masks and gloves are not easily available. And this is in Delhi, forget about rest of India. So that responsibility of following up on these issues, they seem to have abdicated completely. Yes. In fact, this has a very serious implication, you know, this was an occasion in which the people should have come together as a community to face the challenge. And the role of the political leadership was really to encourage the formation of that feeling of community. But if you do it the way the government is doing, then far from there being a sense of community, you actually find people being split apart, being alienated, being separated from one another. And this can actually give rise to fairly serious social tensions. Alright, there is the obvious case of anti-Muslim, communal sentiment that were generated because of the markers. And then, even if you leave that aside, you look at the fact that the teams who go to test are getting beaten up. Yesterday there was an incident of the police being beaten up. I mean, of Nihang's taking on the police and so on. All this really is a reflection of social tensions really getting out of hand. And they arise and get accentuated precisely because no effort has been made to form a sense of community. Precisely because you have this police idea of the lockdown. And as you said earlier, when you talk about the poor, the migrants sections who have been now locked up in various camps across various states, they do not have the access to basic necessities as of now. They're completely dependent on what the authorities may or may not provide them. So you can have what earlier has been said by, again, products and money economists, that we can start seeing food rights if this continues and we don't get food. So do you think that the government, as of now, there is any change in the last three weeks in this regard or it's still continuing the same track? You know, the only discernible change you can see is that the government, the Prime Minister talked to all the chief ministers. Now, to what extent he actually got the chief ministers on board, to what extent they agreed, to what extent that is going to serve some higher purpose remains to be seen. But at least the first time around, he had not talked to anybody. This time at least he has talked to chief ministers and got their views. Where that leads, we don't know. But on the other hand, judging by the kind of mood the government has been in all these days, where the idea is really to deflect blame rather than to cope with a crisis. It's like all those bogus figures about 8.2 lakhs would have been the number of infections if they had not had the lockdown. I mean, you know, this is a deliberate attempt to mislead people by just quoting bogus figures. Now that kind of thing augurs ill for combating this virus as a community. So the common virus being spread while the coronavirus, the novel coronavirus needs to be spread, you know, needs to be fought. Coming back to my last question, assuming that another one or two months will be difficult and we do not know which way it's going to go, are we at a tipping point where we'll see some flattening of the curve is quite unknown at the moment. The figures don't look good for at least four to five states. And again, we see the figures, both in terms of infections and in terms of death rates. So flattening of the curve is a little bit can be probably thought to be there, but still not clear whether it's a statistical blip or is it something which is real. And at least as a situation in Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, even Delhi is not looking very good. But if we look at this two to three months dislocation, which is the minimum we are going to see, what is the prognosis for the Indian economy? The economy, of course, is in a very bad way. It depends how long this crisis is going to last. I believe that production activities should begin from tomorrow itself. In other words, even if you continue with some lockdown, production must begin. This is something which is essential both as far as the economy is concerned and what is more as far as the poor people getting some incomes in their hands is concerned. So production has to be, production also is a strange thing. I mean, you can't have manufacturing but closed retail outlets and production is a whole chain of activities interrelated. Now that being the case, how to actually have some kind of a selective lockdown while production goes on is a tricky business. One of the suggestions which has been made, which I think has some merit, is that don't have a national lockdown, have a lockdown of particular areas which may actually be particularly affected. But whatever it is in the rest of the country, you have to have the resumption of activities with social distancing and generally, as I said, the inculcation of a sense of community. Somewhat of the Kerala model, which actually did manage even before the lockdown to snuff out the community level infections that were there and were able to contain it. So some kind of variant of that, it allows the hotspots to be controlled, but it's participation of the people, but allow other places to resume some level of economic activities. Actually, you know, even in China, it was not a national lockdown. It was only a lockdown in Wuhan. So I think that seems to be. Hubei province actually broke the whole province of 60 billion people. It's not 1.5 billion of China. That's right. Yeah, exactly. It's a local. I mean, in China, even local is very big, but nonetheless, it is something which was localized. And they did close down the whole lot of things, for instance, the closed down cinemas. I think that we can continue with because that can happen even at a national level. You can, you know, because congregation religious ceremonies, for instance, congregation on a large scale can be closed all over the country, but production must begin. And even schools and colleges can be out for, say, two to three months. Yes, it has a lot of effect, particularly on poor children who don't have access to the internet. So that's not going to work for them. But at least two to three months of a holiday for the schools and colleges, apart from the meetings, all of that can reduce at least the kind of transmission we are seeing. You know, it's interesting, New York has a lockdown, but the metro still work because you still have emergency workers. In India, actually, we have stopped all transport. The lockdown is actually much more severe than what it was in China, for example. So I think it's a very strange kind of policies we are taking, partly because you're not willing to look at the consequences of the hospitals and other places. And we do not really have faith in the people to come together. So the stick is the only answer whether it's a virus or whether it is any issue. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Pramod, for being with us, having a bird's eye view of the economy, what are the possible lines the government could take. And we hope that we can continue this discussion, because I think we are in for next two to three months of both the epidemic and the economic consequences of the epidemic. Thank you very much for being with us. Thank you. Thank you for calling me.