Unfortunately, most decision makers are still seeped in the corona virus even after becoming sufficiently aware that the pathogen will lurk around the human societies for several more years. In the last two years, the most-hated virus has caused incalculable devastation, changed its shape and inner mechanisms several times to remain potent and also lost steam and virulence midway before its latest Omicron edition materialised. Super-brain scientists too slogged like mad to come up with fairly-effective vaccines and drugs to obstruct the pathogen’s passage and beat down its virulence.
In the wake of all this trying times, India is now bound to face quite a few very critical challenges that seem to have escaped notice of the policy and decision makers, probably because the virus has rendered them all witless:
• Woes of the non-Covid patients have touched an all-time high. It’s a widely-known fact that at most quality hospitals, critically-ill non-Covid patients have been denied treatment unless the patient was tested yet again, an impossible inhuman condition. Heart and brain stroke victims have had the worst kind of nightmares because of this attitude of hospital authorities.
Potable water crisis doesn’t bother anyone as much as it should. Indians in big metros and the countryside, more than ever before, are going through the worst potable water shortage crisis. On record, 21 of the biggest cities have run out of groundwater. And many of them have no rivers or lakes nearby. As per official survey reports, water nightmare is now a common phenomenon for 600 million Indians. In the last two years, the crisis has further worsened due to focus remaining on the corona. In 2020-2021, even rainfall has been far below usual in most western and southern States. The NITI Aayog, least credible for being a Government agency, has warned that the demand for drinking water will outstrip supply by 2030 if preventive steps are not taken from now. About 2,00,000 deaths per year are attributed to lack of access to safe water. Water stress felt by half the population is beyond belief because the popular media doesn’t carry reserched stories.
Fake news menace is another big disease without any medicine in sight. Misinformation, hate speech and false propaganda on social media are dividing India’s community fabric particularly on Facebook and WhatsApp. Technology is playing havoc. And crooks are having the best of times at no cost. Fact-checkers say what gets maximum likes on Facebook goes viral at least five times more on WhatsApp. Lack of digital literacy makes fake news acceptable as nearly everyone has a smartphone to watch the crap manufactured through easily-accessible technology.
• Agrarian catastrophe is of course a grave issue. More than debt burden, falling prices of agro produce have put India’s farm economy in perpetual turmoil. Highly-trained agro experts don’t do farming. They only teach or preach as consultants. The poor illiterate rural folks till land without technology at hand. They do not know what’s ailing them critically. An estimated 26 crore Indians are engaged helplessly in the agriculture sector, which is about 55% of India’s productive population. The Government’s new MSP regime has eluded farmers even today. So, agriculture that contributed 21% to GDP in 2004-05 has dropped to around 13% in the past 15 years.
• Urban flood is now considered impossible to manage. In the recent years, more and more cities, big and small, are finding it overwhelmingly-difficult to recognise causes. Although it is crystal clear that indiscriminate expansion of cities and townships is root cause of urban flooding, authorities keep expanding cities to accommodate much bigger number of housing facilities to make money through populist schemes the way insane governments scoop easy money from liquor business that drives societies crazy, sick and violent. Monsoon is now synonymous with floods in cities that have been raised on ancient water bodies and canals and grain fields that absorbed water smoothly with every resident gaining joy on all fronts. The rural zone floods have also worsened because grain fields have been sold away to greedy property dealers and headless civic authorities who have no sense of respites between concrete jungles and green spaces between housing communities. In recent times, rains have killed nearly 500 helpless people across villages of India. Six lakh houses and over four lakh hectares of crop were damaged as per a Home Ministry report, which is normally half the truth. Every year, thousands get evacuated, hundreds die and core livelihoods are lost. Scores of villages and settlements are washed away; houses get submerged while the authorities are caught napping. People die in Mumbai, the financial capital where residents get panicky as mansoon sets in. Lately, Delhi is beginning to experience the same agony like many other hitherto-dry and clean cities.
• Unemployment has hit an all-time high by 2021. One in three formally trained youths was unemployed in 2017-18, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey 2017-18. But the problem grew so acute in the post-Covid period that the automobile sector alone that employs a big chunk of the productive population shows now a very dim and disturbing picture. The automakers, parts manufacturers and dealers have laid off about 3,50,000 workers since April last year.
• Pending justice is one of the least-discussed and most-ignored subject matters among the intelligentsia. Bureaucratic sloth coupled with slow settlement of cases in India’s courts is a scourge the country has to fix on priority. A freedom fighter spent decades to be recognised as one by fighting for rights at courts. Then, his second battle began to avail a pension. After a Kafkaesque trial, the Tamil Nadu Government initially turned down his application to be eventually passed only in 2010 when life was nearly over. His application for Central Government pension is yet to be approved, it is learnt.
There are more tales of woe by way of challenges ahead. But India shall not tide over the crises well mainly because political arrogance has exceeded all limits in recent times. The executives cut out of big majority political parties through electoral processes have turned demonically-dictatorial. It is time the job-seeking youths raised voice and forced monopoly regimes to make room for bigger-hearted creatures by stepping down.