 Welcome to Dispatchers from India, a show by people's dispatch where we bring you major news stories from across the country. As the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread across the world, the governments are rushing to save the corporates. But the crucial question is, what about the millions of workers, permanent, contractual and informal? According to the International Labour Organization, more than 25 million jobs will be lost due to the pandemic. In a country like India, where a large number of workers are contractual and informal, the lack of support from the government will be disastrous for the working class. Apart from the issue of livelihoods, many contractual workers who are involved in sanitation and security services are in the direct line of infection due to lack of proper protective gear. We take a look at the issues of contractual workers involved in the hospital and transport sectors. The number of confirmed cases of novel coronavirus in India had surpassed 270 with thousands under isolation and quarantine. Even if it may seem like India has been able to cope with the rising numbers, experts believe that the growing pandemic will soon break the back of the country's fragile healthcare system. Already, many public hospitals have complained about the lack of personal protective equipment like masks and gloves. While the supply is being augmented for the healthcare personnel, workers employed in sanitation and security services continue to expose themselves owing to the shortage. I work at a government hospital. The in-charge of the nurses there said that all first guards should be given masks. But no one was ready to give us masks, saying that they don't have any. The COVID-19 patients who are foreign nationals have been told to take all safety measures. But then one nurse said that what about these poor people who are working here? Where will they go if something happens to them? They are here to earn their livelihoods. She said to give us masks and sanitizers. Every morning I was asking for this protective gear but they weren't ready to give us masks or sanitizers. How will we raise our kids if something happens to us? These people keep saying that they are running out of supplies. You tell me what do we do? Who do we go to? Then one day the person in charge of distributing masks was doing the rounds at the hospital when she saw that a guard is not wearing a mask and has to touch the door every few minutes. Then she said that the guards are also workers, give them masks and sanitizers. She demanded to know why the rest of the staff was being irresponsible. She complained to another in-charge. Then from the next day we were given masks. We were given masks yesterday finally, one month after making repeated demands. I am a worker at Kalawati Hospital. I am a sanitation worker. We are not issued any masks. When we go to the ward we are told to take the masks from our duty stations. Even for the gloves they tell us the same. There are a lot of workers without boots or any protective uniform. We somehow manage to arrange masks and other protective items from here and there. There is no proper provision for hand wash. There are dead all soaps for us but they are never issued to us. Even the case of hand wash is same. For doctors the government has issued 300 rupees for nurses 200 but there is nothing for the sanitation workers. We do the cleaning, we are also exposed to the infection. The coronavirus pandemic which the world is witnessing has also reached India. Looking at this, the government and the Delhi Transport Corporation management should have taken precautions in the beginning itself and should have issued personal protective equipments to the workers whether they are masks, gloves or cleaning materials. These should have been provided. Despite requests from our union to the government and the management, these equipments are not being provided to us. Both DTC driver and conductor are at risk. A conductor has to give tickets and take money from thousands of people in a day. This creates a big risk for the spread of infection to the conductor and the passenger. The government and the management are doing nothing on this. The drivers without masks are also exposed every day to the threat of virus as commuters pass near by him. There is a risk of the spread of the virus. This endangers the life of the DTC worker and also everyday commuters. When we talk to these workers, they were on their way to the Labour Commissioner's office for their case regarding non-payment of their wages. Later they were turned away as the office was closed due to the pandemic. Some of the workers have not been paid by their companies for more than a month. Courts in India too have reduced their working and are taking up only urgent cases. But according to workers, their cases for wages and other rights are not part of the urgent cases list, nor have the labour courts devised any provision by which these cases can be heard using video conferencing. The workers raised an important question. If the courts will not hear them, where can they go to seek justice and who will safeguard their rights? Today was our court date, it is 19th March. The company in which I work, haven't paid me salary for more than a month, came here at the Labour Court for justice. But here we are only getting days. We are not even allowed to go inside the court because of the coronavirus threat. We also speak to news clicks editor-in-chief Prabir Purkayasta on the spread of the disease and India's strategy to cope with it. As far as the COVID-19 cases are concerned, India still has not reached the danger zone, so to say. But the numbers are creeping up and we really cannot say what the extent of the epidemic is in India without more extensive testing. So at the moment the numbers seem to be that it is in the range that would still seem to show it is within the communities. It can be contained through contact tracing, looking at who are the people who have come from outside. You could have brought in infection, their contacts, tracing the contact who already tested positive. So that's the scene we are in. But it is also true to repeat that and getting over to a community spread when you don't know who is infected, who is really a tipping point, which is difficult to figure out. So at this stage we need to do more extensive testing, random testing, testing of patients who have tested positive for pneumonia and check whether it's actually COVID. See what the doctors are saying in their symptoms, which appear to be COVID-19 like the test them as well. This is one set of testing we need to do and the other hand we need to really increase social distancing and that is perhaps the only measure that we have. But at the same time we have the problem that the number of test kits we have is small, there seems to be only 100,000 test kits, therefore it's been conserved and therefore extensive testing is still not possible. We are looking at getting a million test kits into India, but we don't know when that's going to happen. Manufacturing still some way off. It comes also to the second set of issues that if there is such a large scale of social distancing, what is being called the people's curfew and all of these measures, then a country in which the economy rests a lot on casual workers is going to see a huge dislocation. Where will the casual workers go and what will be their daily wages on which to live. So this is what calls for immediate government intervention. The left government in Kerala has intervened and has made available people, rations available to people, some support, financial support to be given, children to be given, school needs and so on, which is what the schools used to do earlier, sending the rations to the houses. So all of these are measures to see the casual workers on whom the large part of the income rests don't starve because of the so-called people's curfew. So I think all those measures require the third measure, which is also equally important, that how to strengthen the hospitals. In India already, the hospitals are trying to say they don't have enough protective gear. So the government has to have the task of flying immediate supplies to all the hospitals, getting in the supplies to the country by which you have masks, you have protective gear, and it's not only for the doctors and nurses, but the entire support staff of the hospital. And that means those who clean the hospital, who run the hospital, do the auxiliary services, give food to the hospital patients. So a lot of other people are also involved and really all of them need to be protected because if they get infected, then the hospitals also become a source of infection. In our final news item, India witnessed a curious development this week. When a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, India's top court, was nominated by the president to the upper house of parliament just four months after his retirement. Observers argue that Ranjhan Gogo's appointment is not just unprecedented, but bodes ill for the independence of the judiciary. We spoke to senior journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurtha on the significance and dangers of this appointment. In India, politicians have become judges and judges have become politicians. But the decision of the president of India to nominate the former Chief Justice of India, Ranjan Gogo, as a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of parliament in India, that too within four months of his retirement as Chief Justice of India has resulted in a huge controversy. The government's critics have argued that Mr. Gogo has been given that post because he's given his headed benches of the Supreme Court of India that have given a series of judgments that have favored the right-wing Hindu nationalist ruling regime in India. Mr. Gogo, of course, says there's nothing wrong. There's no quid pro quo that this is almost in the normal scheme of things he's been nominated as a judicial expert. But many would argue that there is much more than meets the eye. That despite the fact that in the past other judges have given judgments that have favored the ruling regime in the hope of post retirement jobs. Mr. Gogo's case is particularly unique. Why? Because it was given barely four months after he retired. Secondly, the kind of judgments that were given by the Supreme Court at the time when he was heading the Apex Court of India, the series of these judgments were so obviously in favor of the government that political commentators have gone to the extent of describing him as a virus in robes. Now this has obviously not been liked by spokespersons of the government and they've given dozens of examples in the past of how previous governments have actually done help judges or given judges impressive, ornamental, sometimes even lucrative post retirement jobs. But a strong argument can be made that this decision has undermined the independence, the autonomy of the judiciary in India, which is seen as perhaps one of the last bastions where ordinary people can hope for justice. That image of the Supreme Court of India has been terribly undermined and compromised by Mr. Gogo's nomination as a member of the upper house of parliament. That's all we have today in this episode of Dispatches from India. See you next week. Thank you. Bye.