Role of Civil Society in the Pandemic

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmuWgBJ9OWM Duration: 342.9s

Speaker (00:05): The pandemic has done two things. Yes, you are right that it’s expanded the scope and the scale of government role or engagement. Right? There’s no doubt that’s true across the world. But it, I think, also at the same time — that this something is not as emphasized or talked about, unfortunately. Right? Is the scope, the scope and the scale of civil society. Right? As you know, it is in India that we know more, more specifically. Right? Much of the initial help that people needed, right, as the businesses, as a lockdown got implemented, right, businesses got closed down. Right? People who were daily wage earners, the small entrepreneurs on the streets of India, right, all of them lost their livelihood almost overnight. And much of the support for that group of people in the country — and there are 700 millions of people in that group, right, who live, making living on a daily basis. Right? And they got support not so much from the state. A civil — how civil society has come together and take up the mantle of leadership in providing that initial support. Yes, civil society is limited in capacity to some extent — it comes so hard, the skill that they can provide you support. And, ultimately, you do depend on the state to continue that work, but much of the initial help came from civil society. Right? And it also makes sense. The government does not know where the people are in that sense. Right? People know where the people are, and therefore, people are the best sort of early helpers in any, any catastrophe, any tragedy. I think lockdown impact, in the severity of that impact, to the extent that it was so counterbalanced is largely because of civil society efforts. So I think that part must be emphasized. I think we don’t see much talk about it because data is not easy, as easily available. Right? Nobody talks about that I contributed 10,000 or 20,000 more, plan to lakhs, or 10, right, to various groups of people, including people who used to work in my own company or household. And then that part of this is difficult to collect data, but I think it’s important to remind people how critical that has been in weathering the storm. I, I do agree that, no, there’s a huge challenge of the scale at which state has expanded, both in terms of, in terms of private lives. And, of course, there are very good reasons given that we need to do contact tracing, that requires that you authorize particular apps to be able to track you down, right, and also track who you are meeting, who are the people in your surrounding areas, where you have gone. Now I think we know there are better ways of doing it. Right? You can have contact tracing without any central database being created. So we can keep things localized on the cell phones of the people, right, the app that people are using. So there are many ways in which we can follow some of the procedures we need to follow for safety and health, right, without giving too much power to the state, without giving the data the state can abuse now or later. I think there’s a lot of learning that we had in terms of how to use technology more effectively and then constructively, so that we don’t give up the personal liberties and freedoms. And also, I think, personal information, to people who don’t need to add that information. There’s also other side to it is a fiscal problem. Right? So one is the privacy and personal freedom issue. Second is, there was fiscal issue in terms of the expansion of the state. Right? And as you know, the scale of subsidies and handouts and the state support which has been given to people. I think that this needs to be analyzed a little more deeply in terms of how much is really helping, how much is simply helping the state to expand its powers and intrusion in people’s lives? I think there has to be some balancing act that we need to think about. Yes, people do need help. There is no doubt. But there are better ways of helping them, as we found in case of technology, better ways to do the contact tracing without really giving all information to one single central database. I think we do apply that thinking also to the fiscal support that we need to provide. I don’t want to go into sort of mechanics of how to do that because there are, of course, many ideas on the table. Right? And this is well discussed, debated issue. I think it does require deep thinking on our part. But how do you create a system where people get the help they need without actually the fear of the future? Important phase. The internal vigilance is the price of liberty. Right? It’s far becoming far more evident, right, on a day to day basis now. Unless you keep eye on what the state is doing, how it’s been done, we are going to be in a far worse situation coming out of the pandemic than we went into.