[The Indian capital lifted
restrictions on manufacturing and construction, critical drivers of an economy
that has been battered by the pandemic.]
By Emily Schmall, Karan Deep Singh and Hari Kumar
Officials on Monday reopened manufacturing
and construction activity, allowing workers in those industries to return to
their jobs after six weeks of staying at home to avoid infection. The move came
after a sharp drop in new infections, at least by the official numbers, and as
hospital wards emptied and the strain on medicine and supplies has eased.
Life on the streets of Delhi is not
expected to return to normal immediately. Schools and most businesses are still
closed. The Delhi Metro system, which reopened after last year’s nationwide
lockdown, has suspended service again.
But the city government’s easing of
restrictions will allow people like Ram Niwas Gupta and his employees to begin
returning to work — and, more broadly, to start to repair India’s ailing,
pandemic-struck economy. Mr. Gupta, a construction company owner, must replace
the migrant workers who fled Delhi when a second wave of the coronavirus struck
in April, but he was confident that business would return to normal soon.
“Immediately we will not be able to
start work, but slowly in six to 10 days we will be able to mobilize labor and
material and start the work,” said Mr. Gupta, who is also the president of the
Builders Association of India in Delhi.
At least one million people in
Delhi’s construction sector will be able to return to job sites.
Even a small opening represents a
gamble by city officials. Just 3 percent of India’s 1.4 billion people are
fully vaccinated. Because of limited health infrastructure and public reporting,
the state of the pandemic in rural areas — including some just outside Delhi —
is largely unknown. Experts are already predicting a third wave while
cautioning that the lull in Delhi may be just a respite, and not the end of the
second wave.
Six weeks ago, the number of new
cases in Delhi was soaring, reaching a peak of 28,395 new recorded infections
on April 20. Nearly one in three coronavirus tests came back positive.
Hospitals, full beyond capacity, turned away throngs of people seeking
treatment, with some patients dying just outside the gates. Cremation, the
preferred last rite for Hindus, spilled over into empty lots, with so many
bodies burned that Delhi’s skies turned an ash gray.
The nightmare in India’s capital
appears to be over, at least for now, even as cases rise elsewhere in the
country. The city reported 648 new cases on Monday, and about four-fifths of
the intensive care unit beds were vacant.
Officials in Delhi, and around
India, feel a need to strike a balance between pandemic precautions and
economic viability.
On Monday, India released a new set
of numbers that showed the country’s economy grew by 1.6 percent for the
three-month period ending in March.
But economists say those numbers, which
reflected activity before the full impact of the ferocious second wave, are
likely unsustainable in the near future.
The Ministry of Statistics and
Program Implementation also forecast that India’s gross domestic product would
shrink by at least 7.3 percent over the financial year that began in April.
Experts point to two main reasons:
India’s prolonged lockdowns and its vaccination rate, which has fallen to just
over a million doses a day now from about 4 million last month because of the
country’s limited vaccine
manufacturing capacity.
Though the lockdowns have helped
India slow the surge of infections, economists say restrictions might need to
remain in place at least until about 30 percent of the country’s 1.4 billion
people have received one vaccine shot.
“We estimate that India will reach
the vaccine threshold by mid- to late August, and, accordingly, expect
restrictions will be extended into the third quarter,” Priyanka Kishore, the
head of India and Southeast Asia at Oxford Economics, said in a research
briefing last week. “Consequently, we have lowered our 2021 growth forecast.”
She added that supply issues and
vaccine hesitancy could prevent the country from reaching the 30 percent
threshold by August, which could result in further economic decline.
One economist said that the impact
of the country’s shrinking economy would be even more pronounced in rural
areas.
“As things stand now, the scale,
the speed and the spread of Covid has once again given a push back to the
economy,” said Dr. Sunil Kumar Sinha, the principal economist at India Ratings
and Research, a credit ratings agency. Dr. Sinha added that the country’s
negative growth forecasts for the financial year were the lowest ever recorded.
The lockdown that began easing on
Monday was nowhere near as severe as the nationwide lockdown imposed by India’s
prime minister, Narendra Modi, last year, which pushed millions of people out
of cities and into rural areas, often on foot because rail and other transportation
had been suspended. Mr. Modi resisted calls by many epidemiologists, including
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases, to reinstitute similar curbs this year.
But in a nod to the chaos of last
year’s lockdown, throughout the second wave, core infrastructure projects
across the country, which employ millions of domestic migrant workers, were
exempted from restrictions. More than 15,000 miles of Indian highway projects,
along with rail and city Metro improvements, continued.
Most private construction sites,
however, were closed down, placing workers like Ashok Kumar, a 36-year-old
carpenter, in extremely precarious positions.
Mr. Kumar usually earns 700 rupees,
about $10, per day, but has sat at home idly for the last 40 days, unable to
pay rent to an increasingly impatient landlord. He hoped to be vaccinated
before returning to close quarters with other workers, but hasn’t been able to
secure a dose at one of the city’s public dispensaries, which have closed
intermittently because of vaccine shortages.
“My first priority is my stomach,”
Mr. Kumar said. “If my stomach is not filled I will die even before corona.”
In a meeting with the city’s
disaster management authority on Friday, Delhi’s chief minister, Arvind
Kejriwal, said the lockdown would be eased in phases according to economic
need.
“Our priority will be the weakest
economic sections, so we will start with laborers, particularly migrant
laborers,” many of whom work in construction and manufacturing, Mr. Kejriwal
said.
Millions of people in India are
already in danger of sliding
out of the middle class and into poverty. The country’s economy was fraying
well before the pandemic because of deep structural problems and the sometimes impetuous policy decisions
of Mr. Modi.
Epidemiologists in India generally
approved of the Delhi government’s approach to lifting its lockdown, but
cautioned that the low infection numbers may represent a reprieve from — and
not the end of — the capital’s terrifying second wave.
“It’s not a decision that can be
questioned on the merit, but obviously they have to take the maximum care,”
said Dr. K. Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India.
India averaged 190,392 reported
cases per day in the last week, a drop of more than 50 percent from the peak,
on May 9. The death toll also fell, though less precipitously, to 3,709 on
Sunday. The overall toll of 325,972 is widely
considered to be a vast undercount.
As cases have fallen in Delhi,
people have cautiously left their homes for evening strolls after the daytime
summer heat has abated, or to pick up groceries from the normally bustling but
now quiet neighborhood markets.
Elsewhere in India, the pandemic is
far from over. Cases are rising in remote rural areas that have scant health
infrastructure.
The state of Haryana, which borders
Delhi and is home to the industrial hub of Gurugram, extended its tight
lockdown by at least another week. And in southern Indian states where the
daily case numbers remain high, official orders allowing manufacturing to
resume have been met
by resistance from workers.
“It is a question of life versus
livelihood,” said M. Moorthy, general secretary of the workers union at the
Renault Nissan auto plant in Chennai.
Emily Schmall is a South Asia
correspondent based in New Delhi. @emilyschmall
Karan Deep Singh is a reporter and
visual journalist based in New Delhi, India. He previously worked for The Wall
Street Journal, where he was part of a team that was named a finalist for the
2020 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting and nominated for a national
Emmy Award. @Karan_Singhs
Hari Kumar is a reporter in the New
Delhi bureau. He joined The Times in 1997. @HariNYT
