Prioritising The Right To Life

Context: Critical analysis of the right to the life situation in India amidst the pandemic.

Multiple impacts of the pandemic on livelihoods:

• A health emergency more ferocious than any in independent India.
• Massive job losses and dramatic declines in in­ comes from work.
• Significantly increased mass hunger and worsening nutrition.

Violation of the right to life: A dire account of a humanitarian crisis in India.

• Limited court intervention: While the apex court for the first time acknowledged hunger crisis and directed various governments to provide free rations without insisting on ID proofs, the facility was limited -
  • It did not extend the facility to the country as a whole;
  • It did not extend the facility to cover cash payments by the state be­ sides meals and ration.
  • It made the facility a state largesse rather than a right.
• Violation of right to life in vaccine policy: Being vaccinated against COVID-19 is essential for defending one’s right to life and since state must respect everyone’s right to life, the vaccination should be free.
  • For e.g. While the most privatised medical systems like the U.S. are distributing vaccines free to all people, India is making people pay for getting it administered in private clinics.
  • Reasons for this grave failure of the Indian government:
    • It did not ensure adequate production through the compulsory licensing of more producers.
    • It did not order enough vaccines.
    • It reneged on its responsibility to provide these vaccines to State governments.
    • It introduced differential pricing, forcing State governments to compete with each other and with private clinics to buy vaccines.
    • It allowed price gouging by Bharat Biotech and Serum Institute of India.
• Precarious situation in the informal sector: Accounts 90% of workers, with no legal or social protection. Policymakers abandoned them, resulting in state inaction and long untold sufferings.
• Worsening hunger situation: A study by ‘Hunger Watch’ found that even two months after lockdown was lifted last year:
  • Two-third of families reported eating less than they did before lockdown,
  • For a quarter of families surveyed, incomes had fallen by half, and hunger was higher in urban India compared to rural.
• Lack of significant fiscal package: Actual Central government spending over April 2020 to February 2021 shows a rise in non­interest expenditure only by 2.1% of GDP. This is worsened by misplaced priorities:
  • While the government focused on infrastructure spending, spending on cash transfers would have had a greater ‘multiplier effect’ than just spending on infrastructure.
  • Free rations and meals, though bene?cial, have very little expansionary e?ect on the economy since the bulk of the commodities required to come from the decumulation of existing stocks of foodgrains.

Way forward: Urgent measures to prioritise the right to life.

• Rework vaccine policy: Enabling expanded production and central procurement of COVID-19 vaccines and distribution to States for free immunisation to all;
• Universal access to free food grains: 5 kg per month to the needy for next six months.
• Cash transfers: Of Rs.7,000/household for at least three months to those without regular formal employment.
• Increase resources to Integrated Child Development Services: To enable revival and expansion of their programmes.
• Make MGNREGS purely demand-driven: With no ceilings on number of days or number of beneficiaries per household and cover urban India with a parallel scheme.
• Address resource mobilisation: In an economy with substantial unemployment, unutilised capacity and unused foodgrain stocks (about 80 million tonnes at present), resource mobilisation is easy to pursue.
  • Enlarge the fiscal deficit and tackle its negative outcomes (wealth inequalities and declining investors’ confidence) by introducing wealth taxation.

Conclusion: India should not shy away from measures that give substance and meaning to the term ‘right to life and the pledges of equality and fraternity in the Constitution.