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India is on track to lead the world in coronavirus cases, but from the factories of Maharashtra to the crowded markets of Kolkata, people are back at work and eager to forget the pandemic for the festival season.
After a strict lockdown in March that left millions on the brink of starvation, the government and people of the world’s second-most populous country decided that life must go on.
Sonali Dange, for example, has two young daughters and an elderly mother-in-law to care for. She was hospitalized this year in excruciating pain after contracting the coronavirus.
But after the confinement drained the family’s savings, the 29-year-old had to go back to work in a factory earning 25,000 rupees ($ 340) a month.
“Now that I have recovered, I am no longer so afraid of the disease,” he told AFP amid the roar of machinery at the Nobel Hygiene plant east of Mumbai.
The confirmed death rate from the pandemic has been higher in richer nations with larger populations: the death toll in the United States is double that of India despite having only a quarter of the population.
Poor countries have suffered much worse economic pain, and the World Bank predicts that 150 million people could fall into extreme poverty worldwide.
Many children in the developing world are now working to help their parents make ends meet, activists say, while thousands of girls have been forced to marry.
In Varanasi, North India, 12-year-old Sanchit no longer attends school and instead collects discarded cloth from bodies before cremation on the city’s ghats.
“On a good day, I earn around 50 rupees (70 cents),” the boy told AFP.
The IMF projects that India’s GDP will shrink 10.3 percent this year, the biggest drop of any major emerging nation and the worst since independence in 1947.
When India closed, it was a human catastrophe, leaving millions of people in the informal economy jobless, penniless, and destitute almost overnight.
No one wants to go back to that, said Gargi Mukherjee, 42, as he shopped in Kolkata’s New Market area, packed with festival season customers, many without face masks.
“To survive, people have to go out and do their jobs. If they don’t win, they can’t feed their family,” he told AFP.
Experts warn that the season from October to November, when Hindus celebrate major festivals such as Durga Puja, Dussehra and Diwali, can trigger a sharp increase in infections as consumers crowd markets to buy expensive items at a discount.
“Of course the crown is to be feared. But what can I do? I can’t miss the Durga Puja moments,” said 25-year-old housewife Tiyas Bhattacharya Das.
“Durga Puja comes once a year, so I can’t stop enjoying shopping.”
Sunil Kumar Sinha, chief economist at Mumbai-based India Ratings and Research, said Indians face a tough choice.
“People have to choose between starving or risking a virus that may or may not kill you,” he told AFP.
In fact, India’s relatively low death rate, around 1.5 percent of its more than seven million cases, has surprised many who warned that the coronavirus would sweep through their crowded cities, beset by poor sanitation and ruined public hospitals.
Even taking into account a possible undercount, it is clear that the nightmare scenario of corpses piling up in the streets as seen during the 1918 flu pandemic has fortunately not materialized.
The unexpected respite has given Prime Minister Narendra Modi leeway to resist a new shutdown, with the human and political cost of another shutdown higher than the increase in the number of cases.
But Bhramar Mukherjee, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, cautioned that the government shouldn’t just let the virus run its course.
“To open up, it is necessary to intensify public health measures … If you take your foot off the brakes completely, the virus will also take off,” Mukherjee told AFP.
Last month, the Indian Medical Association criticized the Modi government for its “indifference” to the sacrifices of front-line personnel in one of the world’s worst funded healthcare systems.
Back in Calcutta, 67-year-old bookseller Prem Prakash was philosophical.
“Some things have to be left to fate,” he told AFP.
“Fearing death too much is not a solution. When that happens, you must accept it with grace.”
str-ash-amu / stu / fox / kma / am / jah
