Abstract
‘We will die of hunger even before catching the virus’, said a daily wage labourer to the journalist interviewing him during the initial lockdown period. It is not surprising that the oppressed somehow know the oppressor. The extraordinary Covid-19 pandemic situation has not created a new crisis; all it has done is add to the already existing miseries of the class conflict in our society. It would be delusionary to claim that the lowest rung in the economic hierarchy is suffering because of Covid-19. These sufferings are a continuum and the Covid-19 situation has only furthered that continuum with greater force by injecting a mismanaged lockdown into the already worsening economy. However, apart from that, it has played a remarkable role, in quivering our social consciousness and busting our opium bubbles of economic theology. It has exposed, right on our face that as scholars and citizens, we chose to ignore the evils of class-based oppression embedded in capitalism and the neo-liberal economic regime. In this paper, I wish to reinforce the verification of the aforementioned hypothesis that the socioeconomic sufferings of the economically oppressed sections—in my case, informal sector workers—are deeply rooted in the politico-economic organization of our society, and the Covid-19 lockdown has further depressed their economic lives in the deep rifts of economic inequality. This paper shall delve into how lockdown destroyed the means and methods of survival for informal sector workers and analyse the degree of irreparability of this damage.
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Notes
- 1.
Read more about this situation in Habib, Irfan (2002), Essays in Indian History: Towards a Marxist Perception, London: Anthem; Patnaik, Utsa (1983), ‘On the Evolution of the Class of Agricultural Labourers in India’, Social Scientist, 11(7), 3–24; Patel, S.J. (1952), Agricultural Labourers in Modern India and Pakistan, Bombay: Asia.
- 2.
‘The Gini index, or Gini coefficient, is a measure of the distribution of income across a population developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini in 1912. It is often used as a gauge of economic inequality, measuring income distribution or, less commonly, wealth distribution among a population. The coefficient ranges from 0 (or 0%) to 1 (or 100%), with 0 representing perfect equality and 1 representing perfect inequality. Values over 1 are theoretically possible due to negative income or wealth’. Retrieved from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/gini-index.asp.
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Harsana, P.S. (2021). Locking Down the Wage Labourers in Informal Sector. In: Tripathy, G.D., Jalan, A., Shankardass, M.K. (eds) Sociological Reflections on the Covid-19 Pandemic in India. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2320-2_7
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