ABSTRACT
Imposed with just four hours’ notice, India’s lockdown in March 2020 unleashed a catastrophic humanitarian disaster, unforeseen in recent modern history. The sudden announcement, without consultations or planning, was meant to burnish prime minister Narendra Modi’s strongman credentials. But the scale of this lockdown – imposed on 1.3 billion people – made it the world’s largest and sternest lockdown. The human cost of the lockdown made it the cruelest and possibly the most exclusionary. This chapter traces the lockdown’s effects to demonstrate how the country’s poor and marginalised suffered disproportionately and were rendered further economically and socially insecure due to the scale and the nature of the lockdown, as it triggered mass unemployment. The overnight lockdown resulted in widespread hunger and stark penury, especially among the 400 million informally employed members of the labour force. The chapter will highlight how the lockdown ended up exposing the country’s social and economic fault lines while reinforcing pre-existing structural inequalities in the country, and concludes by demonstrating how its effects will continue to shape people’s lives adversely in the near future.
