Locking Down the Poor

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DescriptionIn early 2020 the first cases of Covid-19 infection were confirmed in India, andon 24 March the country's prime minister announced a nationwide lockdown, giving the population of over 1.3 billion just four hours' notice. Within days, it became evident that India had plunged into its biggest humanitarian crisissince Partition. In this powerful book, Harsh Mander shows us how grave thiscrisis was and continues to be, and why it is the direct consequence of publicpolicy choices that the Indian government made, particularly of imposing theworld's longest and most stringent lockdown, with the smallest relief package.The Indian state abandoned its poor and marginalized, even as it destroyed theirlivelihoods and pushed them to the brink of starvation.Mander brings us voices of out-of-work daily-wage and informal workers, the homeless and the destitute, all overwhelmed by hunger and dread. Fromthe highways and overcrowded quarantine centres, he brings us stories ofmigrant workers who walked hundreds of kilometres to their villages or wereprevented from doing so and detained. He lays bare the criminal callousnessat the heart of a strategy that forced people to stay indoors in a country wheretens of crores live in congested shanties or single rooms with no possibility ofphysical distancing, no toilets and no running water.Combining ground reports with hard data, Mander argues with great clarityand passion that India is in the middle of a humanitarian catastrophe, theeffects of which will be felt for decades