The Virus, The Architecture of Poverty, and The Tough Balancing Act Ahead

As governments take on the tough balancing act of protecting lives and livelihoods, it’s clear that the hardest is the economically poor. While not a surprise, the urgent need is to go beyond this realization.

Controlling the virus mandates the safety of each of us

Consider this: how deeply do you know the lives of those you employ for cleaning your home, cooking, delivering milk and vegetables, driving the auto rickshaws, constructing the house you live in? The irony is, most people reading this article have a very superficial understanding of the lives of the economically poor despite being surrounded and served by them.

Amidst the present crises, such indifference cannot go on. History shows that, pandemics worsen the socio-economic inequality, which in turn spreads the pandemic (article). Poverty and ill health are mutually reinforcing. Thus, successful control of coronavirus necessitates safety of every individual — not just of those who can afford it.

How to build such a safety net? For it, we must first meet everyone’s basic need — shelter, food, and medicines. Doing so requires understanding the present nature of interdependence.

The Architecture of Poverty

Income and wealth have been the dominant measures of poverty. While they are the most visible proxies; in the present crises, when the geographical implications of poverty matter equally, let us consider poverty from the perspective of the nature of interdependence.

Here, a useful perspective comes from blending economics and ecology, as done in the Indian context elegantly by influential works like Ecology and Equity. From this angle, anchoring the urban end of the dependence spectrum are the Omnivores, those who have the money to buy their food and medicines (and other products) produced anywhere in the world. Their ecological footprint is global. These are white-collar employees in the private and public sectors, professionals, owners of businesses, and larger landholding farmers. About a sixth of India’s population is omnivores, mostly urban. If you are reading this article, you are most likely an omnivore.

Anchoring the rural end of the spectrum are the ecosystem-people-with-asset, those who depend on the natural environment in their locality to meet their material needs like food and medicine. These are the majority of India’s small farmers, milk producers, poultry farmers, and artisans in village economies. They produce to feed themselves and others and use the surplus to buy medicines when necessary. About one third of India’s population is the ecosystem-people (with assets), mostly rural. You have driven by them on your long trips.

Connecting these two groups are the Omnivore-dependents, those whose livelihoods depend upon the opportunities generated by the economic activities of the omnivores. These are laborers in construction work, domestic helpers, servers in restaurants, cleaners in hospitals, and so on. Many in this group migrate seasonally between rural and urban areas. About one third of India’s population is the Omnivore-dependents, mostly the urban poor or seasonal migrants. If you were a city-dwelling omnivore, your life would be much less luxurious without them.

The final and the most disadvantaged group is the Ecosystem-people-dependents, those whose livelihoods depend upon the opportunities generated because of the economic activities of the ecosystems people with assets. These are largely land-less laborers working as sharecroppers or farm labor on someone else’s farm. They represent the rural-rural migration, which in India is larger than rural-urban migration! About one sixth of India’s population is the Ecosystem-people-dependents, mostly the poorest of rural poor. If you are a land-holding farmer, your flexibility to migrate to urban area is because of them. If you are a city-dwelling omnivore, your food is thanks to their farm labor in scorching heat.

Which groups, in your opinion, will find observing social distancing most difficult? It is clearly the two groups of dependents (orange bars in the figure) whose daily wages depend upon either the omnivores or ecosystem-people (green bars). The mass reverse migration presently witnessed represents these dependent groups. One half of all families of India depend upon their daily wages. For them, the idea of social distancing, vital as it is, has a real and immediate constraint — hunger!

The Balancing Act Ahead

The tough balancing act, then, is to preserve both life and livelihoods. This is an extremely complex puzzle, so let us not pretend that we have a silver bullet. For now, let us first formulate the problem right.

Consider the following formulation:

Goal = Minimize Loss of Life and Maximize Livelihood

Strategies to meet the goal = Strategic Social Distancing

+ Equitable and Affordable Healthcare (Medicines, Testing, Hospitalization)

+ Direct Stimulus to the two Dependent Groups as a Buffer

+ Indirect Stimulus through Omnivores for Industrial Employment etc.

+ Indirect Stimulus through Ecosystem-people for Agriculture Employment etc.

Constraint that cannot be violated = Access to food

In other words, can we strategically use social distancing, healthcare, and economic stimulus such that no one goes hungry and everyone stays healthy?

Hunger and indebtedness matter to all, but the ugliest manifestation of violating this constraint is one we have painfully witnessed in the hundreds of farmer suicides over years. This we must avoid.

Strategic social distancing is something we are learning to do. Many activities that can be performed remotely are already moving online (e.g., education, meetings, tele-health). For activities that require physical presence, we will discover ways to maintain physical distance (e.g., delivery of goods, working in factories or offices). We must find these configurations for both organized and unorganized sectors.

Healthcare will have to be deeply subsidized in the near term, and will require creative solutions for equitable access.

For the economic stimulus, the most urgent is a financial buffer for the two dependent groups so as to alleviate their pressure to earn a wage during lockdowns/slowdowns. Once we know how to distance safely, an indirect stimulus can be structured via omnivores or ecosystem-people.

This is one way! Good? Wrong? Underspecified?

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Dr. Chintan Vaishnav is a socio-technologist. He teaches at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and builds solutions for resource-poor communities.