The 'Essential' Estrangement

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Amid the spread of deadly COVID-19 (or C-19) virus, countries around the globe have gone under lockdown. Countries are under complete or partial lockdowns, except a few. 

India, a country with 1.3 billion people, is under curfew for 21 days till April 15. Soon after the announcement of lockdown by the Prime Minister, people stepped out in masses to stock up their refrigerators and kitchen cabinets with food items for the coming weeks. However, in poverty-stricken India, one does not have to be outrageously creative to imagine thousands of people starving without food if the government did not take effective steps to ensure food security of millions of poor and downtrodden. The government came up with guidelines for the lockdown and list of essential commodities which will be available to the public during the lockdown. The essential commodities which the Government of India notified includes vegetables, sanitizers, masks, milk, etc., The public was instructed to step outside their houses only to purchase these essential commodities. UP government has promised to pay all the daily wage workers 1000 Rupees per day and Karnataka government is also drawing up schemes on those lines.

However, as the best-selling author and thinker Yuval Harari points out, there are two major problems with such schemes of universal basic income or essential/basic commodities - firstly universal, and secondly basic.  These are very subjective terms being used objectively by politicians and public policy experts. The classic example of this is the incidents of suicide in India over the non-availability of alcohol. In my home state of Kerala, 6 individuals committed suicide because of non-availability of alcohol while only 2 had died of C-19 (as of 30th March 2020). 

If you ask Keralites (I don't prefer the word 'mallu')  many of them need a peg or two in the evening to keep their engines running. Alcohol is not only a commodity of extravagance, but many manual scavengers also gut down alcohol before immersing themselves in the toxic liquids in manholes. They might survive without food but not without alcohol. They need that dose of liquor to 'voluntarily' climb down manholes filled with toxic fumes and liquid. 

Have you seen beggars and vagrants sleeping on the roadsides drunk? How many of us can sleep on dirty footpaths with complete consciousness? However, one bottle of liquor in the stomach and many are on the floor sleeping in a pool of vomit without being able to remember any of it the next morning. I am not justifying alcohol consumption here. The point I am trying to make is that alcohol which is the cause of many crimes might be essential for survival for few if not many. It is not possible to come up with a list of essential-commodities for all because 'essential' is subjective and has varying scale.  

Similarly, a basic income cannot be universal. Cost of living varies from kilometre to kilometre in metropolitan cities. And if the government provides different minimum incomes to individuals based on various factors then it is not universal. And again, what is basic? Internet is a basic requirement for city-dwellers. However, it might not be for village-dwellers. Basic is again a very temporal and relative concept. 

Universal basic income, essential commodities, and schemes thereto sound appealing. Although, to ensure effective implementation of the schemes they need to be anything but universal and basic.




Nikhil Erinjingat




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