The veteran newspaper vendor delivering local dailies to The Statesman Mumbai office this morning after 81 days marked a small yet significant reality of these strange pandemic times: an overdue necessary normalcy facing a risk-fraught rebirth.
The risky journey of the great return began with Mumbai the past 48 hours stuttering back to work with shutters up in shops and lights in many offices switched on after nearly three months.
The city’s Marine Drive Police Station constables today training themselves to ride their new Segways (twowheeled, stand-and-ride personal transporter combining a skateboard and a scooter) reflected Mumbai’s crucial balancing act as part of ‘Unlock India’, the gradual three-phase journey to the fervently sought holy grail called normal life.
After Mumbai shut into a strict lockdown on 20 March, five days before the national version, this week begins the tentative, relief-filled baby steps of ‘Mission Being Again’ ~ as the Maharashtra state government named the tricky balancing of re-starting life beyond the pandemic amid the pandemic. ‘Mission Begin Again’ of resurrecting Mumbai’s economy faces the critical test of returning to work within the social distancing safety constraints needed to keep down the coronavirus count.
India’s coronavirus count surged with another 9,987 cases in the last 24 hours, as the country’s Covid-19 positive cases broke into the world’s worst-affected 10 countries.
Optimism comes with India’s reported Covid-19 death rate of 6 per one million citizens being among the lowest in the world.
In contrast, Belgium’s suffered 830 deaths for every million of its population, U.K 602, Spain 580, Italy’s death rate of 563 and the USA’s 365 deaths per one million citizens, according to Worldometer. Guarded optimism without false sense of security and complacency have to be mixed together as mind-medicine needed to walk the path ahead.
Practical problems infect the ‘Begin Again’ path. Shops that opened on 8 June faced both shortage of staff and customers.
Employers, particularly in the construction industry, are wooing back migrant workers with higher pay and airfare.
Transportation hurdles abound. Long queues were reported in bus stands, with the inadequate frequency of bus services compounded with social-distancing capacity fixed at 30 seated passengers and five standing.
The suburban rail network that serves as Mumbai’s lifeline does not yet feature among the ‘Mission Begin Again’ plan and looks unlikely until June end. Without the Western and Central Railway’s 2,342 daily train services for 7.5 million commuters, any normalcy of work in Mumbai struggles for light like a candle in the Covid-19 wind. Traffic jams in the arterial Eastern and Western Express highways since Monday showed only part of the challenges of a Mumbai entirely dependent on road transport.
Mumbai and New Delhi have heavily paid the Covid-19 price as India’s busiest international entry points, and India’s two key cities cannot again suffer another instalment of misery – particularly with hospital and medical care infrastructure already at breaking point.
During the past two days masked residents walking Mumbai’s Marine Drive promenade, street-food pining pedestrians re-united with the spicy ‘vada-pau’, people freely wandering out after months, showed the complexity ahead: impressing on everyone that the sars-cov-2 coronavirus does not follow governmental schedules for liberation from lockdown. It remains perhaps as deadly as ever.
The basic universal safety rule applies in the phased return tonormalcy: avoid going out of the house unless essential. The long-sought day of uncomplicated freedom has not yet dawned of taking a walk outside anytime we like. Local dailies reported ‘unlocking’ hopes brightening with the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) figures claiming Mumbai’s Covid-19 cases doubling rate has improved, from 11 days in May to the current 23 days.
But through all the pandemic confusion worldwide is the gloomy fact that statistics cannot be relied upon to accurately tell the full story of Covid-19 impact and the way out.
The core distressing reality though is there may not be a single person in the planet not suffering a loss, one way or more, the past pandemic months.
Dark monsoon clouds appropriately gather as Mumbai begins its ‘Mission Begin Again’, a double-edged reality of the generous annual rains delivering both life-saving water and destructive floods. But like the truth, hard work and hope will help us prevail through storms in this strange phase of life.