Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced a 21-day nationwide lockdown in the wake of the deadly novel coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed 27,438 lives and infected 601,502 globally so far.
Amid the lockdown, 70 per cent of rural Indians do not have any kind of savings to make up for the employment or livelihood loss that they will suffer because of the COVID-19 outbreak in India, says a survey by 101Reporters.
The survey was conducted amongst 769 people over four days from 20-23 March 2020. A total of 438 people i.e, 70 per cent of them said that they did not have any savings amidst the lockdown. Nearly 47% of the respondents were from Bihar while the others were from Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi-NCR. 87.8% of them males, with 55.5% working locally as farm labourers and 15% as daily wage or migrant workers.
According to the survey, more than half the people knew about the pandemic, however, 53.4% of them had no information on any nearby primary healthcare centre (PHC) or any government facility where testing for COVID-19 could be done.
During the current lockdown only essential services which include grocery shops, milk diaries, chemist shops, banks, hospitals etc. are functional. However, workers and labourers are seen migrating back to their villages from the cities.
Meanwhile, 149 new positive cases of coronavirus have been reported in last 24 hours, taking the total positive cases in India to 873. After a 69-year-old man died at the Kochi Medical College on Saturday, the death toll in the country rose to 20.
