The maskless and exuberant festivities during Navratri, as also the pomp and splendour during the recently-concluded Ganeshotsav, are clear signs that the pre-pandemic rhythms of life have been recovered after the two-year hiatus. Mumbai’s markets are crowded to the hilt, the traffic congestion could not be worse, trains and buses are packed with commuters, party venues are booked for weeks in advance, weekend getaways from the city have no rooms to offer. Ask people about wearing the mask and the standard reply is a shrug often accompanied with a stare that seems to ask: Are you still wearing masks?
The pandemic seems to be a particularly terrible nightmare. But it is deceptive to think of it as firmly back in the past. The Covid-19 virus has not been eradicated. Far from it, the goalposts have changed every few months — from initial attempts at elimination, to fearful coexistence during the second wave, replaced by an acceptance akin to a flu. The numbers are going down; reports this week showed that the country’s Covid count was at a three-month low and a fraction of what it used to be during the two waves. Whether Covid is officially declared as over or not, there are aspects of it that demand close attention, specifically the socio-economic impact on people’s lives and the systems and structures of a city.
The low level of prevalence does not mean that people are unaffected. There are immuno-compromised people around who are still contracting Covid-19 and suffering its effects, there are Covid-19 survivors who are battling symptoms of Long Covid, and there are those who may or may not have contracted the disease but are suffering the impact of the pandemic on society-economy. Studies show that many people have cut back on their food consumption — something as basic as that — given that incomes have fallen and work is harder to find after the pandemic-related disruption, schoolchildren have fallen behind by two academic years in places that did not have the luxury of online schooling, and inequality has become sharper.
From gated complexes and social mandals that are busy with festivities, Covid-19 does seem like a nightmare that’s past us but it lingers on in the ruptured small and medium businesses, in families who spent fortunes in accessing medical treatment during the pandemic, in migrant workers whose carefully-constructed lives in cities were upended during the harsh national lockdown, in children who took up work to bring food to their homes, and many more sections of society that usually fall into the crevices of a default “normal” life. There were no safety nets back in 2020 when the pandemic landed or later as it unfolded; there are none now.
The pandemic showed that cities attract people for work but they are not home for many who migrate; cities do not offer the comfort and community their homes do. As an emerging superpower, we cannot continue to divert our attention to building temples or importing cheetahs while ignoring the urgent but silent need to rebuild cities that work for people when a crisis is upon us. What would help? Having crisis shelters, affordable accommodation, food banks, reliable information channels, crisis transport plans, nodal officers with authority, and so on.
The Covid-19 pandemic offered cities, especially chaotic ones such as Mumbai, the chance to put a basic disaster response system in place and later rebuild themselves. Mumbai did well to contain the pandemic despite the high numbers, unlike cities like New Delhi where the second wave in 2021 unleashed an unprecedented dance of death. The world’s attention was on Dharavi, among the most congested and dense places in the world, but the slum settlement acquitted itself with honour; the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation led by commissioner Iqbal Singh Chahal won accolades for the hub-and-spokes response system with war rooms in every civic ward, in what came to be called the “Mumbai Model”. The jumbo Covid centres, still up in places like Bandra Kurla Complex, are reminiscent of the planning and preparation then — but what after?
The pandemic years left us lessons in urban planning, urban design and infrastructure, on where the gaps in the existing infrastructure are — too few public hospitals in Mumbai and private ones had to be mandated to release their beds, for example — and what can be put in place to tackle the next crisis. It could be another health crisis, or an ecological crisis given the rising sea level. Does our pandemic experience reflect in the rebuilding or designing of the city or will its imprint be gone once the jumbo Covid centres and vaccination kendras are dismantled?
For those with a sense of the city’s history, it was not surprising to watch how much Mumbai had circled back to the era of the deadly plague in 1896-97 or the Spanish Flu in 1918-19. As in the 19th century, during the pandemic too, the approach was to isolate and quarantine, hospitalise in specially constructed shelters as sepia photographs show, force use of masks, develop and use vaccines — the history of the Haffkine Institute in Parel traces back to this time — restrict movement of people, shut down commerce and business, and so on.
The imperial government appointed Plague Officers who were often way too harsh with Indians, especially the poorer classes who were the most affected, and often unmindful of cultural differences. People’s latent anger against these officers, which Bal Gangadhar Tilak gave vent to in his newspapers, are said to have inspired the Chaphekar brothers in the then Poona to murder Officer WC Rand. Fast forward to 2020-21 when in Delhi, hordes of migrants gathered on a road were sprayed with a disinfectant ostensibly to contain the Covid-19 virus.
The basic template to address an epidemic does not seem to have greatly changed across centuries but the British government subsequently rolled out a plan to rebuild Bombay to contain the disease so that the city’s economy would not suffer. That’s how the Bombay Improvement Trust was set up, through an Act, and public health became the driver of how the city would be designed. It is another story that the BIT was subsequently shown to have created and/or encouraged the marketisation of land in the city, but there was at least a concerted effort to renew urban design, create living and working spaces, to ensure public health. This aspect seems to be missing in the new normal after the pandemic. It’s an opportunity lost to reimagine and rebuild a more sustainable and inclusive city.
Smruti Koppikar, journalist and urban chronicler, writes extensively on cities, development, gender, and media. She is the founder editor of ‘Question of Cities’
