Over the past several weeks, a false dichotomy has been created between saving the economy and saving lives, with lockdowns justified on the grounds that containing the pandemic would prevent the loss of lives.
But this really is a ‘life-life’ trade-off, as India’s quarantine comes at the enormous cost of displacing the most vulnerable—migrants, daily-wage earners, and those in the informal sector.
As a short-term solution, India’s lockdown was urgent to ‘flatten the curve’, but as we think of the medium-to-long-term ramifications, the experience with the covid-19 pandemic exposes the deeper fault-lines of our economic and political framework.