Virus, what virus? India gets back to work

After the lockdown exhausted their savings, people are returning to work

Sinnar: India is on course to top the world in coronavirus cases, but from Maharashtra’s whirring factories to Kolkata’s thronging markets, people are back at work – and eager to forget the pandemic for festival season. After a strict lockdown in March that left millions on the brink of starvation, the government and people of the world’s second-most populous country decided life must go on.

Sonali Dange, for instance, has two young daughters and an elderly mother-in-law to look after. She was hospitalised this year in excruciating pain after catching the coronavirus. But after the lockdown exhausted the family’s savings, the 29-year-old had to return to work at a factory where she earns 25,000 rupees ($340) a month. “Now that I have recovered, I am no longer so scared of the disease,” she told AFP amid the din of machinery at the Nobel Hygiene plant east of Mumbai.

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When India went into lockdown, it was a human catastrophe, leaving millions in the informal economy jobless, penniless and destitute almost overnight. No one wants to go back to that, said Gargi Mukherjee, 42, as she shopped in the New Market area of Kolkata, thronging with festival-season customers, many without face masks. “For survival, people have to come out and do their jobs. If you don’t earn, you cannot feed your family,” she told AFP.

Experts caution that the October-November season may trigger a sharp increase in infections, as consumers crowd markets to snap up big-ticket items on discount. Sunil Kumar Sinha, principal economist at the Mumbai-based India Ratings and Research agency, said Indians faced a stark choice. “People have to choose whether to die of hunger or risk getting a virus that may or may not kill you,” he told AFP.

“In order to open up, you need to intensify public health measures… If you completely take your foot off the brakes, the virus will take off too,” Bhramar Mukherjee, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan told AFP. Back in Kolkata, bookseller Prem Prakash, 67, was philosophical. “You have to leave some things to fate,” he told AFP. “Fearing death too much is not a solution. When that comes, you should accept it gracefully.”