Because the threat is far from over, and so would not be anytime soon. We are now in an era of continual crisis management, and things would only go south from here, unless our businesses step in.
TL;DR:
- We do not have a public healthcare system - what we have is fundamentally strong medical & healthcare businesses supported by diabolical uncertainty.
- We simply do not have enough authentic data to track and predict the future mutations & variants. Considering our present system, we can only act in a reactive mode rather than being pre-active.
- There could be far worse diseases than COVID-19 lurking around the corner considering our encroachment of the biosphere. The overlap of the operating spheres of economy and ecology can bring catastrophic new diseases in to the foray. And considering the density of the economic activities, it is far easy to infect the first million.
- The pandemic merely unearthed a severe problem with our industry - that it is sustaining itself by turning valuable resources in to hazardous wastes. The effect of the pandemic may end soon, but the Pandora’s box that it opened would linger for quite some time.
- our industry and economy is sustained by global trade, and there are still 130 countries which has not received a single vaccine.
If we have learned anything from the ongoing pandemic and the catastrophic societal failure out of it, a strong social recovery should be at the top of our priority list.
Industries and businesses are an extended (& also integrated) part of the human society. It is the people at large which makes as well as consumes the products of such. But what happens when the same people are constantly grappled with economical and social uncertainties?
Post economic revolution of the 20th century, our entire product narrative had shifted to selling certainties rather than products - Want the certainty of a good wash, try Tide; certainty of a good diet? try certified organics; want to have an eco-friendly car, electric is certainly the future; want your kids to become IITans, certainly Aakash can help!
All apart from just one product - Healthcare. It does not bear any certainties, it does not bolster the guaranteed solution to a problem - it plays the thread of life and death, and people just hope that it would certainly help them save their near and dear ones. It’s hard to imagine how such a large industry (certainly trails the Indian politics by transaction volume) is entirely based upon selling hope, not certainty. [According to IBEF March 2021 report - “The healthcare market can increase three-fold to Rs. 8.6 trillion (US$ 133.44 billion) by 2022.”]
But this strategy might fill the coffers of the healthcare (& political) industry pretty fast, but is a bane for the other ones. The COVID 19 just unearthed that problem. Any industry or business flourishes when the people working there, especially the one at the very bottom of the pyramid are provided the certainty of a few basic factors (also, SDGs) - no poverty (1), good health & well-being (3), access to education (4), and decent work & economic growth (8).
And to ensure the first two points above, we need a strong public healthcare system (not public healthcare business, which we unfortunately do have in plenty now). It is not feasible for every industry to run their own healthcare infrastructure - and that is borderline impossible for our prized MSMEs. But the question remains why we have failed miserably to provide basic affordable healthcare to all our citizen despite having such vast healthcare infrastructure - in my opinion, the failure was purposeful.
Any government’s primary role is to govern, and there are two distinct pathways to public healthcare - nationalise everything just like Canada, UK or several other EU countries, or liberalise everything like USA (and be prepared to bear the brunt of it). Corruption is a human trait, not a political one - and if we allow the private healthcare industry prosper along with having a barebone public healthcare system, I wonder what we are trying to achieve here! [Fun Fact: According to the same IBEF report, in Budget 2021, India’s public expenditure on healthcare stood at 1.2% as a percentage of the GDP.]
Apart from the fact that it is a systemic failure to address the basic healthcare needs of the people, the challenge that has perplexed our Industries most is the disowning tendencies of our localised identities. If you go to USA, you’d find American people; go to China, and you’d find Chinese people - but in India, you’d find Bengalis, Marathis, Gujaratis, Tamilese, Telugu, Assamese, and all kinds of people demarcated by their language, native places, dressing sense etc. But what happens when a poor labourer from Bihar or Bengal goes to Mumbai in search of their livelihood? All good till the good stays - as soon as anything of the scale of COVID happens, Maharashtra would completely disown these migrant people (so does their home state, we have seen the hard proof of that last year) forcing them to walk 1000 miles to their doom.
These are practically stateless people with voting constituencies, devoid of access to any basic governance schemes and policies. These are the people who works in the industries, construction sites day and night - and when these vulnerable people are displaced so easily, so does the industries. And till we provide these basic certainties to the people at the very bottom of the pyramid, industries would suffer gravely, because it runs more on people than technology.
Moreover so, adaptation of technology is more important than prevalence of it. In India, we do not have enough authentic data to handle a pandemic, or something even close to that magnitude. Our entire healthcare system runs on intuition and consensus rather than solid data driven decisions. The people who work in the field often find themselves working in silos, with arbitrary guidelines made by people who care more about constituency results than constituents themselves.
What we are currently experiencing is the paradoxical state of technology - it is there in surplus where it is absolutely not needed (like armaments, warfare, surveillance, advertising), and at the same time having acute scarcity where it is extremely needed (like healthcare, agriculture). In simple words, technology follows money, and money itself follows the money.
So when we talk about the pandemic, our so called experts still do not even have the simplest tools to track the future mutations and variants that could wreak havoc; or warning people with certainty who would be worst affected by it. We have no structured record of any kind of the medical profile of the people, what disease they have been struggling with in a particular locality (and more importantly, why?), or even what kind of events are leading to the uncontrollable severity of the organ failures. In the industry, there are multiple companies which bolster about lighthouse factories, Industry 4.0, AI, predictive maintenance etc. etc. - but in case of fighting a pandemic, nobody is doing a Failure Mode Analysis (FMA) or a Sequence of Events (SoE) documentation yet, barring a few drug manufacturers who are competing to generate the next billion dollar profit by introducing a new anti-viral steroid or even better, a vaccine with “80%” efficacy under trial conditions.
It’s like we are perpetually in a reactive mode rather than a pre-active one. We still don’t know what other diseases are lurking around and is secretly spreading to us through our continual encroachment of the biospheres. There could be something new, something deadlier than COVID-19 emerging even before the 4th wave ends. We just don’t know yet. The overlap of our economic and ecological boundaries can bring catastrophic new diseases into foray, and considering the economic and societal density now, it is far easier to infect the first million patients.
If our economic systems, especially the industrial capitalism does not guarantee a separation of that boundary - it is the industries that would be subject to frequent disruptions, especially the smaller ones. Consider the case of Wuhan, the China’s powerhouse of manufacturing where the poor underpaid populations flocked to the markets to buy wild animals because those costs a fraction of the high quality processed proteins. This single act of human exploitation & profiteering of a handful few resulted in such a massive global catastrophe. Our highly industrialised cities like Indore could be the new Wuhan, if the industry itself does not wake up to the fact that industrial growth is intertwined with social stability.
In fact, the pandemic merely unearthed a severe problem with our industry - that it is sustaining itself by turning valuable resources into hazardous wastes, which is directly affecting the human society that they are serving. If we look at the amount of plastic pollution we are creating while fighting the pandemic, that too without a plan; it is not surprising to see a pattern - we are just hopping from one crisis to another and trying to make some money out of it on the way.
This linear take>make>waste model has never proven well for any industrial activity historically. Following this model, the world is absolutely running out of natural resources to exploit. The industry itself is making the new raw material pricier for themselves. Over the last decade, the input costs of almost all industries has increased multifold, be it energy, water, raw materials, or human engagement. Yet, the common trend among the industries (especially smaller ones) is not to reduce their operating footprint through strategic intervention or Business Model Innovation, rather they are aggravating the social crisis by ceasing to operate under the pressure.
Since last year, a lot of micro, small and medium industries had to shut shop due to the prolonged unplanned lockdowns and the resulting labour crisis. Just when they started picking up the bits and pieces again late last year, they are staring at a bleak future now in the midst of the second wave lockdowns. This is the new normal - full of disruptions, uncertainties, and human suffering.
And the problem with globalisation is that everything is grand in nature - these seemingly localised disruptions and uncertainties ripples at a global scale. Our entire industrial schema is based upon Global Trade and Free Market Economy, where even the most localised labour agitation and vandalising of a mobile manufacturer’s plant in India can cause a global backlash against mis-utilisation of corporate influence. The cost of such global impact is great for the industries, especially when it involves trade.
To put it into perspective how vulnerable and fragile our global trade systems are, let’s look at Italy. Italy was one of the early adopters of the Chinese 5G technology as well as one of the vocal supporters of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which is being primarily financed by China. At the very onset of the pandemic (during the last quarter of 2019) , a lot of Chinese engineers and technicians were sent to Italy to work on the infrastructure projects for the 5G & BRI, who ended up massively spreading the virus among the Italians. To this day, Italy remains one of the worst hit victim of the COVID-19 pandemic, with significant per-capita death rate.
For us, the worst part is that there are still around 130 countries who have not been provided with a single dose of vaccination, and these countries are participating in our global trade networks. It is impossible to isolate them, but it is possible to provide them the access to a good social healthcare instead. It is also possible to temporarily wave off the vaccine patents and foster cooperation towards bringing people under the safety net. And that step would be actually good for the industry all over the world.
By now, it is evident that our industrial systems are so intricately intertwined with our societal or human systems that it would be borderline impossible to confine those within their own separate boundaries. There is an old Japanese proverb which goes something like - “the purpose of every business is to serve the society”; which I find particularly true in our present context. Every company chases profit, that is very natural, they absolutely should - but the definition of profit is becoming a blurry canvas everyday.
When we bolster about shareholder’s value addition and quote multiplying growth numbers, what timeframe are we considering? Being a shareholder or a stakeholder, are we asking the right questions to the companies we have invested in; inconvenient questions like - how long this would remain sustainable? Are we paying the fair and ethical wages to the people at the bottom of the pyramid? Are we moving them out of poverty or pushing them in to it? Are we doing our best to prevent the next pandemic?
The answer to those questions are often very inconvenient. That is why we should be talking more about social recovery post COVID rather than anything else.