Covid-19: challenges and opportunities

The conversation around the Covid-19 pandemic is dominated by challenges posed to human lives and global economies. As death tolls, stories of injustice and suffering exponentially rise, the established wisdom that every disaster entails opportunities is fading away from our imagination.

The unintended benefits of the novel coronavirus outbreak are already quite visible. The lockdown around the world with less cars on the road, less planes in the sky and slowing down of industrial activities have given a chance to the planet to breathe some fresh air and slowly heal. A significant improvement in the air quality and ozone layers’ recovery is being reported by scientists. Now a post Covid-19 world will be able to meet the goals set in the Paris Climate Accord.

The improvement caused by the horrific pandemic in our environment and eco-systems will now save millions of lives in the post-corona world. According to the World Health Organization, we were seeing 4.2 million premature deaths due to air pollution and 600,000 children died in 2016 from acute lower respiratory infections attributed to air pollution.

Our flawed economic system based on excessive exploitation of nature was ignoring critically important life-support systems. Loss of biodiversity, soil degradation, deforestation, use of pesticides, toxic waste in water sources, burning of fossil fuel, toxic air pollutants were already playing havoc with life on earth. Millions of human deaths are due to environmental degradation. Our right to health was already under attack in any case before the onslaught of Covid-19.

It is ironic that it took a coronavirus pandemic to make public health the top priority of the world today. The healthcare rights of the people as the fundamental responsibility of the state had been ignored for far too long. The pandemic has forced the realization amongst power-holders and policymakers that health is a public good. Their primary concern with the health of the economy is completely dependent on the health of people and not vice versa. Now when the coronavirus is at our doorstep, injection of massive financial resources into the health system cannot make up for the neglect of the health sector which has been shown to be ill-equipped globally to deal with such pandemics.

There is so much haste to go back to the ‘normal’ way of life. The novel coronavirus gives us the opportunity to deconstruct the ‘normal’, which is riddled with abnormalities. We can certainly make different choices. The opportunities created by the coronavirus have unfortunately escaped the attention of our government and the political class.

The following decisions are a case in point where our government could have made different choices.

The Ehsaas Programme could have used the income support initiative because of the health emergency created by the coronavirus as an opportunity to expand and authenticate its poverty data. The haphazard rolling out of a disbursement plan of Rs12000 not only endangered the lives of women by exposing them to the contagion by gathering them in crowded places and in long queues all day long, but it also invited strong criticism from provincial governments and political parties for lack of transparency and politicization of the relief package. The relief packages should have been distributed through the local governments instead of through party cadre or inexperienced youth in the ‘Coronavirus Tiger Force’.

Each union council/town should have asked to form a ward-level corona-relief committee consisting of members representing diversity in the local communities. These are the people who can verify the financial status of people within their communities, instead of the district commissioners who are made responsible for the verification, despite not knowing these people directly. The data provided by local committees could have been cross-checked with the Ehsaas Program data set and new entries could have been made. If the information furnished by the local communities doesn’t include those households that are already registered in the Ehsaas Kafalat programmes, their credentials should be checked later in the post-corona phase for the authenticity of poverty data. The government can still adopt this mechanism for the next round of support if they wish.

Similarly, Pakistan has the fastest pace of urbanization (three percent annually) in the region. Internal migratory flow is from rural to urban centers. Population pressure in mega cities has stressed urban infrastructure to the extent that it is at the verge of collapse. According to the Labor Force Survey 2017-2018, we have 8.5 million migrant workers in the country; 65 percent are living in 15 districts across Pakistan. After the countrywide lockdown, migrant workers are moving back to their homes in rural areas, releasing immense pressure on the urban infrastructure and services.

The backward migration from urban to rural areas provides an opportunity to the government to correct the rural-urban imbalance through development of the agriculture sector. Fixing support prices for essential food items such as wheat and rice; creation of requisite infrastructure; promotion of agro-industry in rural areas is the trajectory to rural development. Livelihood support opportunities can retain these workers in rural areas. The agriculture sector must assume its due importance in the development planning now. The Covid-19 crisis could have a direct impact on agriculture and food shortages so making the agricultural sector more robust, thereby ensuring livelihoods and sustenance, should take top priority.

There is a looming threat of the spread of Covid-19 in kachi abadis. Rapid and unplanned urban expansion has given birth to mushrooming kachi abadis. Nearly 50 percent of our urban population lives in slums where they lack basic facilities such as clean drinking water, sanitation, electricity etc. Covid-19 has brought the focus on kachi abadis as it is logistically unfeasible to ask people living in kachi abadis to maintain physical distance when a family of seven to ten people lives in one or two rooms. It is high time for our state to deliver on its constitutional obligation to provide shelter to its citizens.

The incentive package offered to construction should have been driven by concerns of homelessness and low-income groups. Unfortunately, it simply protects the interests of powerful builders, developers and politicians. Pakistan has a deficit of 10 million house units with the demand of 0.7 million new units growing annually. This was a golden chance for the PTI government to fulfil its promise of constructing 50,000,00 houses for the poor.

In the relief package to the construction industry, the government should have incentivised only those projects that benefit the poor and vulnerable such as low-cost houses given on lease to people living in kachi abadis; purpose-buildings for panahgahs and shelter homes for women; granary stores for the government as lack of warehouse and storage capacity is the key hurdle faced by the food department to procure enough wheat and rice which compromise food security in the country. These are the necessary construction projects that should have been undertaken through public-private partnership where builders and developers could be offered public land for the construction of these people-centric projects.

Lastly, the coronavirus gave enormous opportunity to the government to establish its writ vis-a-vis the religio-political lobby in the country. Instead of becoming hostage to their blackmailing, the government should have dealt with their defiance with an iron hand in the name of protecting public health. Clerics who are defying the government’s call for social distancing should be arrested, and those on government payrolls should be de-notified. Covid-19 gives the government a chance to resist and end the blackmailing practised by religio-political groups and establish a new order where citizens’ lives and well-being is the utmost priority.

The writer is former director of Gender Studies, QAU.

Email: drfarzanabari@gmail.com