Lockdown lows, with a dash of highs

As the city opens another lock…

Not new to working in slums, activists recall tales of social exclusion and state apathy; they say the generosity of those themselves in need balanced it out

Five months after they began doing relief work among the poor, Mumbai’s activists are still at it – running community kitchens, sanitising public toilets (a task abandoned by the BMC), distributing vitamin C tablets… All of them had worked earlier in slums and faced challenges arising out of the State’s indifference to the poor, but this lockdown brought a whole new range of experiences.

“We do feel scared taking rations from Muslims, but we can’t be choosers.” Bilal Khan heard this remark while distributing rations in Dharavi.

In the midst of his relief work, Khan was also house hunting, and encountered the usual eager house owners who turned reluctant when they came to know he is Muslim. So, did the Dharavi man’s remark hurt even more than it would normally have? “In the same galli (lane), another man said that whoever works for us is god, be they Hindu or Muslim, so it balanced out,” he says.

Despite his years of activism with Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan, Bilal Khan had occasion to be surprised while interacting with the vast numbers of needy Mumbaikars through the pandemic. What struck him was their generosity. While some refused to take rations because they had already received them from other sources, a number of migrant workers who were leaving for their villages asked him to give their meagre household goods to those who needed them.

At the other end of the spectrum were donors who laid down conditions such as ‘no relief to Muslims’ and ‘the food distributed must be vegetarian’. When told that his condition would not be met, the former settled for ‘50% should go to non-Muslims’. The latter was persuaded to agree to the necessity of protein in the form of eggs and chicken for the recipients.

A relief organisation distributing cooked meals refused to serve a colony of transgenders. Roshni Nugehalli of Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action (YUVA) says this section continued to remain one the most vulnerable groups because they survive only by begging. “Most don’t have ration cards because they’ve broken away from their families and can’t go back to get their names removed from the original card. They also tend not to venture out and queue up with the rest of the basti for free rations,” says Nugehalli. YUVA found that children, ragpickers and households headed by women also featured among the most deprived. Nugehalli says even a trip to the ration shop became a challenge for these women because of police patrolling the roads, and the dilemma of where they would leave their little children.

Most of the needy belonged to Scheduled Castes and OBCs. However, even among these, there were levels of deprivation. YUVA volunteer Sachin found that streetperformers and Pardhis had it really bad materially and psychologically, because of their illiteracy and itinerant lifestyle. “The first generation of Pardhis is only now finishing school,” says Sachin. He adds, “They have never realised the importance of documents and in the lockdown, documents were the key to government relief.”

A YUVA survey shows that government relief – inadequate as it was – reached only a small percentage of the intended recipients, thanks to bureaucratic requirements of registration and proofs. For example, while YUVA managed to get loans under the PM SVANidhi scheme for hawkers in Panvel, the NMMC refused to give them space as they were unregistered.

The activists found that the State was treating the poor as criminals, not citizens. “Dharavi showed that wonderful results are possible once you take the community with you,” says Khan. “Why couldn’t it have been done everywhere?” Sachin found families hiding elderly parents in the loft when the BMC sero survey was being conducted. “We had to explain to them that the survey was for their own good. They were scared of being sent to quarantine centres. These centres were meant to protect them from the risks of using public toilets, but the centres they were sent to had three toilets for 50 persons!” he says. Sachin also found that your dwelling determined the medical treatment you got: the fancy Seven Hills Hospital or ill-equipped trauma care centres.

Sachin encountered at least two cases of slum-dwellers suffering mental breakdowns, brought on by days spent running around for ambulances, hospital beds and ventilators for parents, and then the bleak isolation caused by the lockdown.

As a housing activist, Khan discovered that the denial of housing rights aggravated the crisis. “Relief could not reach the last person because of the unplanned nature of settlements. Those dumped in SRA buildings in polluted Mahul, who are always sick, had no access to healthcare because the nearest hospital was six km away and no transport was available,” he says. Nugehalli points to the chaos in May in the distant suburb of Nallasopara, where thousands of migrants headed for UP gathered in a maidan for over three days. “The area was a bomb waiting to explode. These workers had run out of money to pay rent, had no connection with any corporator, and no NGO worked there,” she says. Everywhere, corporators catered only to their narrow vote banks, relief activists found.

Amid all this, relief work during the lockdown proved to be liberating for some, like the girls working with the NGO Vacha. “We’ll manage, Didi.” With these simple words, these Vacha members, aged 16-21, took over the distribution of rations in their slums, doing everything from choosing a local grocer to supervising the distribution of relief packages with adequate social distancing. These rations were only for girls associated with Vacha, but some of them could get local leaders to arrange rations for the rest of the slum, and even persuade corporators to get toilets in their dwellings sanitised.

“The respect we got from our families increased,” says 21-yearold collegian Aanchal Mistry proudly. “The lockdown had rendered our fathers and brothers jobless. But our families saw that rations were coming into the house because of us.”

With the unlocking of the city, these activists, now struggling for funds, have shifted goals: trying to create jobs; linking the needy to specific government relief schemes; providing smartphones for online classes. So, once again, they’re doing the government’s job.