English 
हिन्दी 
By any measure, Kamala Devi has lived a difficult life.
Born in one of India’s poorest regions, in northern Bihar, the 45-year-old woman spent her youth tending to her children, then followed her labourer husband to Delhi, where she found work as domestic help, to add to the family income.
Her days are a long cycle of trudging from one house to another. Nights are restive and disturbed in the cubbyhole they call home.
Yet, no hardship prepared her for the extraordinary journey in the summer of 2020, as the country shut down at four hours’ notice in the face of a once-in-a-century pandemic.
A still-mystery virus was stalking the populace. The government was sounding repeated warnings to people to stay home. But the fear of starving in a city with few friendly faces and no immediate hope of normalcy took hold. People like Devi and her husband Babulal were stuck in indifferent neighbourhoods, their sources of income gone, food running out, and their homes now unaffordable.
Soon, they were on the highways, alongside groups of men, young couples with toddlers in their arms, and families that walked for days, sometimes collapsing along the side of the road from thirst or hunger. The life that awaited them in their villages was bleak. There was no work there either, only ramshackle health centres, and the same morass of social constrictions that throttle any aspiration for social mobility.
Within a year, Devi was back in Delhi. She has stayed here ever since, knowing now, more keenly than before, how little the city sees her, or accounts for her needs.
***
When Covid-19 gripped India in early 2020, it underlined critical gaps – fragile healthcare services, especially in the vast hinterland, inadequate public health surveillance, massive disparities in infrastructure in urban and rural areas, supply chain issues and the upending of the global (and national) economy as a consequence, deep disruptions in education, increased vulnerabilities of marginalised communities such as lower castes and disabled people, a widening chasm between the well-to-do and the rest, and gaps in the welfare net.
Some of these were addressed, even expeditiously. The government rapidly expanded healthcare capacities and emergency medical infrastructure. It increased domestic production capacity for critical medicines and personal protection equipment. After some hiccups, it mounted a massive vaccination programme and expanded domestic manufacturing capacity.
Intensive care units were expanded, and more oxygen cylinders produced, though the second wave of the pandemic in 2021 proved just how devastating the shortfalls still were.
Meanwhile, vitally, the government leveraged the Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile trinity to transfer welfare benefits to the poorest Indians at a time when offices and banks were operating only minimally, and physical disbursal was either hazardous or impossible or both.
Some long-pending reforms such as the one nation-one ration card were catalysed. But an equally significant bouquet of shortcomings were identified but never addressed.
Primary among these was the fragile state of India’s healthcare system, especially in poorer states. Desperate scenes at hospitals where distraught families and overworked medical staff attempted to save patients exposed a system long neglected. In the harsh pandemic light, the festering reality of decades of underinvestment was laid bare.
The pandemic carved a stark geography of suffering across the nation, where the lottery of birthplace determined one’s chances of survival. In villages such as the one Devi returned to, distance from the nearest city centre began to shape survival rates. Five years on, rural healthcare infrastructure continues to be scattershot; as the pandemic receded from public memory, so did the pledges to augment hospital capacity and inject doctors and medical care into the hinterland.
***
The pandemic also underscored India’s inadequate public health surveillance systems. The absence of robust data-gathering echoed through crowded cities and quiet villages alike — virus carriers unknowingly becoming vessels of transmission.
This ignorance of the pandemic’s true footprint rendered early intervention difficult, allowing initial embers to grow into wildfires of infection. The government’s pledges for more transparent and robust systems are yet to be fully realised.
The devastation wrought in education is still reverberating in India’s cramped classrooms. The pandemic turned technology from a luxury to a necessity overnight. As all classes moved online, children such as Devi’s stayed largely logged out, while their wealthier counterparts continued learning in digital classrooms.
Only in 2024 did school education begin to recover from the pandemic’s losses, according to the 14th Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) released by the NGO Pratham Foundation this January. A generation of young Indians are still struggling to shake off the years lost to the scourge, and it will be difficult, if not impossible, to make up for lost time for the tens of thousands who were forced to sit idly by, or drop out entirely, in those Covid-19 years.
In the chaos of the pandemic, promises floated in the air: greater equity, more flexible work options, cities that were not harshest with their poorest citizens, affordable housing that was also dignified, better-designed homes and workplaces, better working conditions for women, disabled people and caregivers.
Five years on, the digital canyons carved by economics, geography and infrastructure have reshaped destinies, creating parallel pandemic experiences within the same nation.
Roughly 800 million people drawing monthly government rations five years ago continue to do so. Scientific temper is still struggling to coexist with dogma peddled by pseudo-medical practitioners, politicians and celebrities. Data transparency, as exemplified by the recent controversy around the quality of water at the Maha Kumbh, is still falling prey to political considerations.
Despite science helping humanity overcome Covid-19, there is no large-scale course correction in favour of data-driven policy. And civic empathy – once engendered by a virus that affected everyone – has once again run out, ensuring that a crushing social hierarchy keeps people like Devi “in their place”.
“No one has forgotten that we are the small people,” she says.
(dhrubo.jyoti@htlive.com)
