The average Indian national daily gives 0.67%
of its front page for news of rural origin,
where 69% of the population live.
So, obviously — there is not a single newspaper,
not a single national newspaper, not a single
TV channel that has a national-level rural
affairs editor or correspondent full-time,
nor is there a full-time correspondent on
the farming beat, nor is there a full-time
correspondent on the labor beat.
So, obviously, that gap is very huge.
And we try filling it.
But I’d like to answer your thing about
the boy, Paras Madikar.
He was at school.
He had never been a child laborer before.
When they shut down the school, his father
lost his job.
His mother lost her job.
Amy, according to the Centre for Monitoring
Indian Economy, India lost 122 million jobs
in the single month of April — OK? — at
an unemployment rate of 27.1%, now down to
24%, 25% — 122 million jobs.
And those were nonfarm-sector jobs, like his
father, who was a watchman, a Chowkidar, a
security guard in a building; like his mother,
who was a cook in a canteen.
All these jobs went.
Ninety-one-point-three million of those jobs
— mind you, the 122 million jobs is three
times what you’ve lost in the United States.
The 91.3 million were people who were small
vendors, hawkers, tiny little stores, mom-and-pop
stores, whatever.
These are the ones that have got out.
Many of those jobs are not coming back.
Paras Madikar, that boy, he is one of those
children who was thrown onto the streets to
earn something, because his school shut down,
and you don’t get the midday meal anymore.
Right?
But it’s also very important for you to
look at the large picture of what’s happening
to these migrants.
And it’s not just the migrants who are in
trouble.
You know, I think that COVID-19 has presented
us — and, I think, much of the world — with
a complete and total autopsy of the corpse
of neoliberal policy of 28 years in India.
Yeah.
I think it’s done the same elsewhere for
other countries.
We now know how fragile large sections of
the population are, after all the boasting
about 8% growth and 9% growth and stuff.
Yeah?
There are, I mean — and it also gives us
a pretty good brain scan of neoliberal thinking.
On last Sunday, the government of India passed
an order.
You saw that long march of the migrants, right?
The government of India passed an order for
a nationwide curfew between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m.
You know what that does to the migrants on
the highway, the millions of people on the
highway?
Yeah?
It means that they can only now march hundreds,
thousands, I mean, anywhere — they’re
marching anywhere between 300 and 1,000 miles,
Amy.
And these people now can only march between
7 a.m. and 7 p.m. in temperatures ranging
— you know, in temperatures ranging from
103 to 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
That’s what the marchers are now — the
people on the highways are now doing.
Imagine that kind of thinking.
Imagine the kind of — and that is neoliberal
thinking.
It makes rules to protect the beautiful people,
and it has no part for the marginalized.
