Cultivating Resilience through the Grassroots During COVID-19
By Emma Marks
Although restrictions are slowly starting to ease in India, the world’s largest lockdown continues to disrupt value chains and access to services across sectors. COVID has impacted no group more than daily wage-earners and small farmers, who have limited savings to get them through times of crisis.
The pandemic has highlighted the importance of continuing to build up resilience by addressing the root causes of financial exclusion for Small and Medium-Size Enterprises. These businesses are critical drivers of economic development, employment, and innovation in emerging economies like India. The public health situation is necessarily changing the lens through which waste workers and smallholder farmers are viewed, and though still on the margins, these groups have a critical role to play in ensuring public health, food security, and providing decent livelihoods for the millions employed in the informal sector.
S3IDF Chief Program Officer, Avinash Krishnamurthy (pictured left), shares what it’s been like on the ground for these two critical sectors, highlighting current challenges and future opportunities for growth.
Can you describe some of the challenges waste workers are facing in southern India in light of the ongoing health crisis?
Avinash Krishnamurthy (AK): Something that continues as close to an as-business-as-usual manner, apart from health workers, is the work of waste workers. Collection of solid and wet waste workers simply cannot stop. However, waste generated is not always very well segregated. What should ideally be classified as biomedical hazardous waste, used masks, for example, are thrown out as if they were solid waste and it is up to the waste workers to dispose of it safely. I think at the macro level, urban and rural areas are struggling with this challenge of waste management more broadly.
In the Indian context, waste workers have been historically marginalized, and, therefore, there is an inherent power structure between waste workers and people who generate waste in the household, the city, or the village. It’s often difficult for the waste worker to assert and say, “No, I won’t take [used] masks,” for example.
A conversation on a sector-wide level here is to demand that governments treat waste workers on par with health workers and doctors. But of course, there is also a significant informal sector in India, which means that while the government can serve the formal workers, the informal workers are still at risk. There’s a big demand from a human-rights, equity, and good management perspective as a response to COVID, that sanitary workers and waste workers of all kinds be treated on par with health workers and be given the same levels of importance and priority to deploy safety protocols and safety materials.
Second, there’s a demand for more generous pay. Some argue that waste workers should receive salaries on par with some of the kinds of health workers. The third and equally important demand is that they should receive some form of health insurance given the dangers that they are exposed to as a result of the kind of work they do. Broadly, there has been a demand from civil society to treat sanitary workers according to these three primary demands from local governments.
In the Indian context, waste workers have been historically marginalized, and, therefore, there is an inherent power structure between waste workers and people who generate waste in the household, the city, or the village. It’s often difficult for the waste worker to assert and say, “No, I won’t take [used] masks,”
And what about farmers?
AK: The other very important conversation that’s happening is looking at agriculture from a food-security perspective. If the lockdown conditions are lifted, we know it’s not going to be business as usual for some time to come, so there have been forebodings of supply chains not reviving, which could lead to food insecurity. This angst is driving a particular response to the farm sectors and farmers as stakeholders.
In the Indian context, around 80% of the farmer households engaged in food production are small and marginal. Around 40–50% of the land used in food production is in the small and marginal bracket, so the vulnerability of being a small and marginal farmer is now converging with the vulnerabilities created by COVID. Compounding the situation, many farmer households are dependent on income from a family member working in a nearby city. In many cases, the person who was sending income is now back at home, so there are more mouths to feed, but farming and agriculture is suffering from the impacts from all the restrictions form the lockdown. It’s a very complex and vulnerable situation.
The vulnerability of being a small and marginal farmer is now converging with the vulnerabilities created by COVID.
It’s also being asked whether this is an opportunity for institutions, such as the farmer producer organizations with whom S3IDF works, to make direct connections with local markets? Because the rest of the supply and value chain and the rest of the players in the value chain have been disrupted and they are not going to be functioning for a while, so perhaps this could create an opportunity where farmers and markets could interact more directly. There’s some merit to that argument, but I think producer organizations will not be able to do it without an enormous amount of support. As a nation, a civil society, and a government, we really need to figure out our responses to all of this and work together so that we come out of it together both for the farmers’ sake and food security’s sake.
How has the ongoing crisis affected access to finance for the groups with whom we work?
AK: Even under business as usual, access to finance for these groups is very limited. Institutional finance for small and marginal farmers is no more than 10–15%, and most of their credit needs are actually embedded in the value chain. For example, the fertilizer seller gives the fertilizer on credit to the farmers and recoups the credit as part of some next transaction. Sometimes the person who is providing the fertilizer and the person buying the produce can be the same. Of course, this kind of credit has its own costs, which are often very high, much higher than institutional credit.
What will be important is continuing to work with formal institutions to ensure that credit can flow to groups like farmer producer organizations (FPOs) because their connection to individual farmers is far more intimate. In some sense, it will be important to look at how credit flows to aggregate institutions such as farmer institutions. There is a whole lot of learning to be done on what institutions like FPOs really need in crisis contexts because they have not been conceived as institutions to handle crises. Still, crises of this nature are very disruptive. It will be interesting to see how perceptions of these institutions evolve. I think they will become vital to building resilience.
Because they are very vulnerable, with the waste workers a combination of state support and increased access to formal credit is going to be critical. It will take time for credit institutions to learn how to engage with these segments of the population because it calls for new processes and a better understanding of the client. The state, civil society, and these institutions need to work together to help overcome COVID-related challenges.
There is a whole lot of learning to be done on what institutions like FPOs really need in crisis contexts because they have not been conceived as institutions to handle crises.
What’s the role of grassroots organizations in increasing resiliency for waste workers and farmers?
AK: Grassroots institutions like FPOs, SHGs (Self-Help Groups), farm-interest groups will play a critical role in responding to addressing needs on the ground. Therefore, it is essential to strengthen them and ensure that different forms of knowledge converge. It’s ingrained in the social fabric to be able to respond to crises like this.
I think both in terms of healthcare and food aid, it is going to be grassroots organizations that are critical. One example from our own work with the Salugatte farmer producer organization — a recent grant from the International Foundation allowed them to buy a vehicle that the FPO now owns. One of the FPO’s responses to COVID has been to use this vehicle and go to a decently functioning agricultural market, procure vegetables, and make sure these vegetables actually reach different people. It became a sort of business model for the FPC in these times, which was enabled by that asset [the truck]. Also, they are playing a critical role in ensuring that food reaches those who need it. Logistics had completely broken down, but this grassroots institution, the farmer producer company, was able to fill the gap and make this happen. Giving them the asset and the autonomy to make these decisions and run with it has been critical in allowing that response to play itself out on the ground.
Grassroots institutions like FPOs, SHGs (Self-Help Groups), farm-interest groups will play a critical role in responding to addressing needs on the ground. Therefore, it is essential to strengthen them and ensure that different forms of knowledge converge. It’s ingrained in the social fabric to be able to respond to crises like this.
Any closing thoughts that you would like to share?
AK: At the foundation of the larger formal sector is the massive informal sector that the formal sector stands on the shoulder of in direct or indirect ways. Hopefully, through this crisis, we realize this structural problem. In the context of crises, this can become our most vulnerable thing, and we need to build resilience in informal sectors. Going about building resilience in informal sectors may need a very different kind of thinking from building resilience in the formal sectors. I hope we understand that and learn that and continue with our work keeping these leanings in mind. Therefore, doing everything we can to learn more about informality, how it works, and how we need to integrate informality into the formal in a way that’s humane, transformational for the people who survive on it and realize that without them our economy will not be very strong. I hope we learn that.
