On Walking While in Lockdown:
Pedestrian experiences from Hyderabad, India.
My apartment’s watch-woman, Laxmi, is so thankful that her younger son was back home with relatives in their village when the lockdown in India started on March 24th, 2020. Her husband, who is an Uber driver when there isn’t a pandemic happening, was with their younger son when all the transportation systems shut down — attending a function at their village, which is about fifty kilometres away from the outskirts of our city Hyderabad. A few weeks later, he somehow made his way from his home village back to our building, to his wife and elder son. He managed to get back here by a combination of hitching rides with trucks and walking but felt that this was too uncertain for his younger son to attempt.
Since the schools are closed and there is no way for either of Laxmi’s sons to study without access to books, a laptop, or smartphone, she feels as though it is much better for her sons to be away from the city for now. At least in her home village, they can still play outside, as enforcement of the lockdown is not as strict there. Her other son, who is here in the city — confined to their tiny, cramped, single-room house that exists in the setbacks of my apartment building — agrees, and wishes that he could be with his brother. He is bored out of his mind, stuck either inside in a stuffy, small room in the heat of a hot-dry Hyderabadi summer or listlessly sitting on the steps of our building with nothing to do. He misses playing outside on the street with his other friends and jumps at any chance to do any sort of errand that takes him outside, to escape for at least a short amount of time in a permissible way.
I also look forward to being able to walk outside now, and volunteer to be the main forager for things my family needs, in a way that my lazy self never really used to before. Like many other cities, Hyderabad took advantage of the lockdown (in one way) to finally resurface a couple of the more busy commercial roads, and I feel guiltily happy when walking almost in the centre of newly-resurfaced, clean, quiet roads. As a pedestrian, even on the local, more narrow streets I now have as much space to myself as international street standards give to sidewalks, but at a huge cost to the public life of these streets. Compared to the versatile nature of the streets around us during normal times — streets with the dimensions of a one-way road that are used at once for two-way transport, bus stops, parking, pedestrians, all sorts of vendors, and a myriad other socio-economic functions — the lifelessness now is pretty surreal. It is not as though the streets are completely empty; for those who unluckily have nowhere to go and nowhere to be during this pandemic, they move from street to street in constant wariness. Produce is being sold by just a few cart-vendors, eager to just sell their goods as quickly as possible, at throwaway rock-bottom prices. Some bigger shop chains engage in price gouging for the same produce. For my elderly neighbours, Laxmi is now their main link with the rest of the world, their main means of getting produce from passer-by vendors. A building’s watchwoman interfaces with the outside for us now.
Our locality is loosely bordered by busy (well, normally) commercial roads, and consists of an assortment of residential building types: tightly set-backed apartments; older houses that have not sold out (yet) to apartment developers; dense single-family, single room, single-story houses all interspersed with street frontages of local shops that are maybe five minutes away from any point in the locality. The streets get progressively narrower and more residential towards the inside of the neighbourhood.
There are similar neighbourhoods in other Indian cities — those areas that used to be in the centre of the city a few decades ago, but now form a part of the older, dense, mixed-use sections of the city. I think it is easier to live through a lockdown in such areas, where there are still a good number of local shops, where vendors and their carts can even now be depended on. I might have felt differently about this had my locality been declared a containment zone — a neighbourhood a few kilometres away did face this. The entire area was barricaded with makeshift barricades, with strict stay-only-in-place rules and a single entry-exit system enforced when cases of the virus were found there¹. Even within my neighbourhood, this lockdown is being spatially experienced in different ways by different families — with income, savings, housing type, and location all being factors, of course.
What could post-pandemic urbanism be like in India?
Many Indians — most out of sheer necessity — have found themselves walking more during this lockdown, within and across the scales of the neighbourhood, city, and even the state. With the lockdown, a very poignant, stark, definitive reversal in urban migration trends from urban back to rural began². Their experience of walking back from cities along highways and across state lines, is one that some warn may not be reversible, even if the pandemic resolves itself³.
The lockdown in India closed all non-essential manufacturing, commercial, industrial, and transportation activities, with a strict category of what constitutively defines ‘essential’ and how to enforce it⁴. As case numbers rise, but governments also simultaneously try to find their way out of the lockdown, I keep wondering how to stop thinking of the pandemic and the lockdown interchangeably. Is it possible to contain a pandemic without a lockdown?
This whole lockdown experiment has shown how concepts of social distancing and stay-in-place (as opposed to stay-at-home) rules don’t really work for people like Laxmi and her family, or other children stuck in a similar situation⁵. They are used to being able to, at the very least, play outside on the streets or in nearby open pockets of spaces to escape from the crampedness of their living quarters⁶. Urban Indian streets and their frontages are also the economic lifeblood for many informal workers, and depended heavily on social interaction during pre-pandemic, normal times⁷. Even after the lockdown, they might never be as they were before.
For further reading: An informal mix of a few news articles, research, and government circulars.
¹ Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India. Micro Plan For Containing Local Transmission Of Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19).
² Ajay Dandekar & Rahul Ghai, for Economic and Political Weekly. Migration And Reverse Migration In The Age Of COVID-19.
³ Archana Chaudhary & Anurag Kotoky, for Bloomberg. Migrant Workers in India may Shun Cities after Lockdown.
⁴ Dunu Roy, for India Legal. Who Locks up the Lockdown?
⁵ Seema Chishti, for Indian Express. New Research: How Lockdown has impacted non-migrant poor in Delhi.
⁶ Olga Chepelianskaia, for Resilience. Urban Resilience: Learnings from COVID-19.
⁷ Sneha Mandhan, for Urbanet. Adopted Spaces: How Social Life on India’s Streets is Increasingly Threatened by Top-down City Planning.
