In The Shadow of Covid-19
Overview of India Exclusion Report 2019-2020

By Harsh Mander

Harsh Mander is a writer and social activist, and founder and Director of the Centre for Equity Studies (CES), New Delhi. He was the former Special Commissioner to the Supreme Court, in the Right to Food case. Email: manderharsh@gmail.com

Most of this, the sixth edition of the annual India Exclusion Report of the Centre for Equity Studies,
was written before India and the world were stricken by the most lethal of all pandemics in a
century. However, the report was concluded in the shadow of Covid-19, as it had to, because the
lethal impacts on the lives of people of disadvantage may be felt for years, decades, even for a generation.
It is important to stress, as I will argue later, that these impacts of a sudden and precipitous fall into mass
hunger, joblessness and illness without care were not the inevitable consequence of the virus, but of public
policy choices, cumulatively of the past and those made to fight the pandemic, like lockdowns.
The next, the seventh India Exclusion Report, will examine in close detail the impact of the pandemic and lockdown strategies on vulnerable people in India. In this report, I will try to dwell on some early
evidence of these in my introduction here. We also invited one of India’s best regarded progressive public
health practitioners and teachers, Dr T. Sundararaman, to write an additional special chapter for this report,
and he kindly agreed to do so within a very short deadline. Some other writers, too, revisited their chapters
in the light of the experience of the pandemic and early months of lockdown.
I will first reflect critically, from the consistent vantage of the Exclusion Reports, on the strategies
chosen by the Union Government of India to combat the challenges thrown by the pandemic of this new
and highly contagious virus. The central premise of the Exclusion Report series is that it is the central duty
of any democratic State to ensure equitable access to every person, including the most vulnerable, to all
public goods. These, in turn, are understood in the framework of political philosophy, as goods, services,
capabilities and functioning which are essential for a human being to live a life of dignity. In the context
of the pandemic and lockdown, the most pertinent public goods are healthcare, food and nutrition, decent
work, social protection, safety, information and custodial rights, among many others.
In the second part of this introduction, I will introduce briefly the remaining chapters of this report.