Kuldip Maity

How would history remember 2020? For the losses suffered or the how the pandemic put our civilisation under the microscope? Going by the experience the answer could be both.

The global lockdown put us inside our home. Days, then, were marked by the rising number of deaths and ‘contagion’ jumped right back into our daily vocabulary. People searched for parallel in fiction and those that came close to the reality started getting hailed as being astute.

While we, the ordinary, learnt to find merit in living an austere life and mask and sanitiser took up pride of place on our shelves, there were others who went cracking, finding solutions to the challenge thrown at us by the coronavirus. From healthcare to communication, the pandemic while claiming lives, also forced us to take a relook at what we had missed in life.

Besides life, the most important victim has of course been the marketplace. But the need to survive has always been a powerful motivator for innovation. While the physical production requirements remained a challenge for a few months, all other services found a way through the net.

New edutechs took up the challenge of taking the schools to the students’ doorsteps, and the use of internet spread like wildfire. Social media transcended its basic use into an economic connector even for those who didn’t know how the technology worked. Even the local corner stores took up home services in a way that would have been impossible to even dream of in the pre-COVID days.

The production system quickly transformed itself into meeting the challenges of the days. India started producing ventilators in hundreds and hospitals started learning new ways of coping with the demand. The government healthcare systems, castigated for long as being negligent, started scoring brownie points. A gain that would serve the society even after COVID, provided we remembered what it means to be without an efficient healthcare system.

And then the vaccine! History doesn’t remember any such effective response in such a short period of time. While the healthcare response would be the pinnacle in our fight against the pandemic, the innovations for easing our daily lives must take the second place. Of the top 100 innovations listed by The Time magazine during 2020, the majority has come up spurred by the needs highlighted by the during the pandemic. For example, Caitin Daleart and Maria Rabinovich have invented an app that makes accessing emergency help easy to access. You don’t have to search for an ambulance number anymore. It would automatically access the nearest facility. Those who have tried to access ambulance during the lockdown would understand why The Time has given it a prize of place on its pages.

And the civilisation survived! So I would say, the history would mark the 2020 as a year in which a virus raged the world in an unprecedented manner. But more than that it would take note of how the people fought back the menace with grit and knowledge, by acquiring the new and dredging the existing; how the civilisation again bonded with the nature, and how they collaborated to resurrect the old values and learnt anew the meaning of the world being one.

On this note, I wish a very happy and prosperous New Year to all of you. Stay safe and stay true to yourself.

I always believe while urban India may be the face of India, the heart lies in our villages. We can experience the core of India's culture and life only if we go deep into the rural parts. But, unfortunately, penetration of organized banking and other financial services in these areas is still low, leading to poverty and poor financial inclusion.

And this is where microfinance comes in to play. Our mandate has always been to go deep into rural India, supporting aspiring women entrepreneurs who do not get credit from the traditional banking channels. The last few years, we have driven the agenda of financial inclusion and tried to get everyone to open bank accounts and transact through them.

But the task has not been easy. Digital communication has helped eliminate many of the major challenges of last-mile delivery. However, one should not imagine that digitalization would solve all problems in the last-mile delivery of financial services.

Firstly, let us look at the purchasing power of the population we address. Those who live right at the bottom of the financial pyramid hardly have the excess funds to purchase a smartphone and incur the recurring costs of internet services. While we must admit that the cost of such services has drastically come down, there still are many for whom food and clothing take precedence.

Let us come to education and gender neutrality. Poor women have always been less likely than poor men to have a formal bank account. While the situation of rural India has been improving, we still have a long way to go. Significant barriers remain for poor rural women with low literacy rates to use digital services. Our field force has to do some handholding for these women.

So microfinance companies, which invest in information technology and training to help the women use smartphones, will be an essential conduit in reaching financial services to the remotest rural areas.

Being an Aatmanirbhar Bharat or self-reliant India is a dream that will put the country in a significant position in the global market if we can implement it. And we can make this come true only when we have business prosperity across the economic pyramid, especially among those who are at the bottom. They have lots of entrepreneurial energy, but no access to affordable finance.

Nitin Gadkari, minister of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises, has lauded the role of MSMEs in the country’s fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly when it came to producing personal protective equipment (PPE) kits and sanitizers. The MSME sector rose to the challenge so well that India, which had a negligible production of PPEs, now has a surplus and exports both PPEs and sanitizers. Smriti Irani, the textiles minister, praised the MSME sector for the same reason.

The MSMEs showed that, with the proper support, the sector could ramp up production sharply and aim for the world market. With digital commerce getting popular by the day, reaching out to customers in other countries is no longer a dream for micro and small enterprises.

However, access to capital might remain a challenge: the micro-entrepreneurs continue to lack the financial muscle to provide the collateral, and the conventional channels of finance may not be able to trudge the last mile in rural India.

Microfinance companies such as VFS have been operating through a successful model of giving smaller enterprises easy ways of accessing funds for businesses. The social collateral model has proven its worth in removing the financial obstacles to growth and enabling entrepreneurial potentials to play out.

Let us also not forget how MFIs support the financial acumen of women entrepreneurs, helping them manage extra revenue streams that create personal prosperity apart from sparking business growth.

I am very optimistic that the combination of digital commerce (powering sales), and microfinance (providing easy access to capital) will play a key role in our Aatmanirbhar journey, not only for self-sustenance but also for export.

“May my children have an abundance of milk and rice”, says the loosely-translated verse from the Bangla narrative poem Annada Mangal by Bharatchandra Ray. This blessing is what the boatman seeks when Devi Annapurna wants to pay him for ferrying her across the river. A metaphor for the prosperity of children during those times.

Every interaction with VFS customers, the micro-entrepreneurs who are trying to make their dreams a reality, reminds me of this verse.

As you will have read in my earlier blogs, VFS customers share the same hopes—a better standard of living for the family and education for the children.

There might have been various situations that stole the opportunity of proper school education. A few might have been married off early in life, while for others, it might have been the sheer lack of awareness or social pressure. But once they are on track out of poverty, their topmost priority seems to ensure that the next generation goes to school and college.

What is even more encouraging is the fact that the dream is devoid of gender bias. The entrepreneur mother Manju welcomes her daughter’s help in finishing an assignment when she is down with stomach ache, but she makes it clear that she will not have her daughter as an assistant till she completes her graduation. There will be no repeat of the story of her life, where she could not study beyond Class 8.

It is encouraging to see how VFS customers realize that long-term prosperity does not mean just increased income, but also the education of the next generation.

I have mentioned it multiple times that the primary mandate of microfinance is to provide access to finance to the unemployed or low-income individuals or groups who otherwise would have no other access to financial services. This means that we generate self-employment opportunities for those who never had access to capital to make their entrepreneurial dreams a reality.

But what we fail to highlight regularly is the extent of indirect employment the microfinance industry creates through our borrowers.

Our internal sample survey indicates that for every new business opportunity that we create for an aspiring entrepreneur, other than those engaged from immediate family, an average of three individuals get employed from those at the bottom of the financial pyramid. As our customers grow their business we expect this number to grow further, but even as it stands today the indirect employment created through our customers looks considerable.

What was not possible to capture through our survey was the employment created beyond the immediate micro-organisation that our borrowers have set up. For example, a JLG which might be producing artifacts and other items of handicrafts would need someone in logistics to deliver it to the customer. It will not be uncommon if we find a logistics provider setting up shop in such a hub, employing local candidates to do the job - a job that would not have been there had the microfinance borrowers not started their business.

While the quantum of such employment creation through microfinance will be extremely difficult to measure, I feel the levels in which jobs creation happens are:
• Direct employees of Microfinance organization
• Entrepreneurs who borrow from microfinance companies, sometimes including family
• Those who get employed in such micro-enterprises
• Those recruited to provide ancillary services to such micro-enterprises

With digital commerce getting more popular by the day, expanding the market for our customers, such ancillary job creation is also expected to grow further, creating more employment.

It gives me great pride to be able to contribute to so many lives and families who have been overburdened with financial challenges for so long. Handholding towards prosperity has been a dream long nurtured by our society, to be fulfilled by us.

With the COVID-19 lockdown getting lifted in phases, all of us have been striving to return to our normal life. Some took small steps, some took long strides, but as a society, we are bouncing back even as we fight the pandemic.

As we resumed normal work, and our customers their entrepreneurial endeavours, we assumed a new responsibility. We had kept in touch with our customers — rural India’s women — during the lockdown as we realised the importance of mental health and the human connection that instils the feeling of belonging. During those calls, we learnt the strength and extent of the Indian woman’s willpower to overcome hurdles.

The lockdown forced Imrana, 50, of Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarabad district, to shut her cloth shop. Imrana bore the financial brunt of the shutdown with resilience. A mother of four, Imrana realised that once the government lifted the lockdown, she would have to restart her operations and regain her momentum. And she did! Slowly but surely.

Helped by her youngest son, now in Class 12, Imrana puts in every ounce of her energy towards her dream of prosperity. Imrana’s three other children are grocers or shopkeepers.

As she gears up for the winter with a new range of clothes and winter wear, Imrana reflects on her past and her struggle to set up her garments store with help from VFS.

Imrana started her entrepreneurial journey by selling Cotswool undergarments. But the wheels of fortune didn’t turn in her favour. She decided to start afresh.

Imarana realised that to survive the competitive market, she needed a more comprehensive range. That is when she decided to take a loan from VFS. Today, Imrana’s well-stocked clothes store offers everything from festive wear to winter garments, for children as well as adults.

Imrana’s story is not just a story with a happy ending. It is a lesson in perseverance. It is an example of willpower, courage and business acumen that our women possess. We are proud to partner with women such as Imrana, who didn’t stop with setbacks but are surging ahead with lessons from them.

Come what may, India will remain an agricultural country for quite some time to come. Despite urbanisation and the growth of industry and services, agriculture remains the largest provider of wherewithal to a big chunk of the population. Agriculture is the primary source of livelihood to 58 per cent of the Indian population.

The COVID-19 lockdown reminded us of this fact: agriculture was the sector that kept the wheels of the economy moving. Yet, we have largely neglected farmers in India’s growth story. They have borne the brunt of the sacrifices that a changing economic structure demands from the market participants. If it were not for the pandemic, the farmers and their issues might have continued to remain a matter of academic interest.

Just think about it. We still haven’t been able to create the cold storage chains and logistics required by a sector on which 58 per cent of the population depends. The result: 20 per cent of farm produce goes waste, and farmers continue to be at the mercy of market fluctuations.

Neither do the farmers have access to crop data to plan like their counterparts in the developed world. Though baby steps are being taken towards this, farmers at large are still clueless. Their crop planning remains primordial at best and they play safe by choosing crops on which the government offers minimum support prices.

The argument is not against the mechanism of minimum support prices, but more a lament about the fact that farmers cannot tap market information. While the poor infrastructure forces farmers to dump produce when demand falls short of supply, they cannot even choose a crop properly because they do not access market intelligence.

Putting such things right would go a long way in empowering our farmers. With the 58 per cent economically empowered, the nation wouldn’t have to struggle so much with basic issues. An empowered farming community would help all of us and push industry towards the growth we aspire to reach.

Microfinance will keep growing in importance in the days to come, as it has in the days past. Microfinance has grown from being just an instrument in poverty alleviation to the fuel for a national aspiration — the aspiration of being atmanirbhar or self-dependent.

To be atmanirbhar, as the Honourable Prime Minister, Mr Narendra Modi, has said, is not about being inward-looking. It is not about living in isolation in the global market. It is about strengthening the industrial frame of the nation. Being atmanirbhar, as the mission describes, is about exploiting entrepreneurship across the economic pyramid.

But the challenge is to provide financial muscle to entrepreneurs way down in the pyramid, who do not have easy access to the traditional channels of finance. Microfinance institutions are playing a significant role in keeping these entrepreneurs moving and growing.

The government is using the Small Industries Development Bank of India as the main source of funds, and MFIs as the channels of disbursement. Under the portfolio risk fund, the government provides the bulk of the security deposit that SIDBI requires from borrowing MFIs.

One should remember that within the conventional channel of loans to industry, lenders consider the smaller enterprises as very high-risk. Lacking the financial muscle to provide the collateral required by conventional channels such as banks to offset the risks that the loans entail, the smaller enterprises have no easy way of accessing funds for business.

Lack of funds not only hampers growth; it also prevents entrepreneurial potentials to play out. This is where the microfinance channels have stepped in to help. Why has the channel become so crucial?

Those who are small do not have the expertise in the efficient deployment of funds. With MFIs going to their doorstep and handholding them in using the borrowed funds, the financial transaction goes beyond a mere business engagement. It becomes a personal bond.

That’s where the microfinance industry scores in addition to providing easy access. And that’s why the microfinance industry will be a significant provider to the national dream of emerging on the global industrial theatre as a contender to reckon with. The microfinance industry will be the source of funds to enterprises in the last mile.

Manju sounded like a proud mother when she told me that her daughter had stitched a salwar suit the day before, entirely on her own, and with no help or guidance.

It so happened that Manju had not been feeling well, and there was a committed delivery to be made. That was when her daughter, who studies in Class X, pitched in confidently.

But, for Manju that is enough.

Manju does not want her daughter to be a regular assistant in her tailoring business: She is determined to make her three children graduates. She would not like them to repeat her life.

For various reasons, Manju had to drop out of school when she passed Class VIII. She got herself trained in different kinds of stitching techniques and quickly upgraded to be a trainer herself. When she got married and moved to live with her husband, she had to give up her source of income and concentrate on the responsibilities of being a homemaker.

It was only after the birth of her three children that Manju thought of picking up the reins of her career again, this time directly into production rather than training. With her skills, it did not take long to build a reputation and get customers beyond the local neighbourhood of Rishikesh.

“Show me any dress, and I will stitch another for you exactly like it,” boasts Manju when we asked her why her customers are so happy with her.

Manju’s story is not an isolated one. Many of our customers have not been fortunate enough to go to school or had to drop off. Enabling such women provides them with the means to fulfil the dream of ensuring that their children, especially the girl child, get a formal education.

The lockdown hit her business, but we hope that the current festival season powers Manju back on track. Our task at Village Financial Services is to help her grow.

I have always believed that repaying loans on time has a lot to do with the mind of the borrower. There is no model or perfect equation that can ensure compliance with the repayment schedule if the borrower does not have the right attitude. The social environment also has a significant role in the grooming of borrowers.

At VFS, we have been fortunate that most of our customers adhere to their repayment schedule irrespective of what they come across in life. One such story is about Punam Jha, a customer of Village Financial Services’ Mandideep branch in Madhya Pradesh.

A mother of two, Punam runs a kirana shop. In January this year, Punam approached a VFS JLG or joint lending group for a loan to buy extra stocks and scale up her kirana business. At that time, none of us could foresee the coronavirus pandemic or the lockdown that would be enforced in end-March.

Thankfully, because of the extra funds, Punam had enough stocks to operate until the logistics sector got going fully, and she could get fresh supplies.

While the lockdown hit the entire country, Punam always kept up with her repayment schedule. To her, sticking to the commitment she had made to VFS was of the utmost importance, and she did not want to falter.

Punam is just one of the many VFS borrowers who have been maintaining their commitments, not only in repayment but also in other aspects. It is because of customers with such a great attitude that VFS has been able to touch five lakh families, contributing to their financial prosperity. It is because of this experience that VFS also tries support its customers whenever they face any major unforeseen event. We never have the slightest doubt that our customers will get back on track once business gets back to normal.

We are sure that Punam’s two children will be model citizens if they have been brought up with her ethics and attitude.

The COVID-19 pandemic has confined more than half the population. While the lockdown has been lifted, people still fear meeting each other physically while others continue to avoid going out unless it is essential. With public gatherings such as fairs, carnivals, musical evenings and jatras unlikely to be allowed any time soon, the livelihood of people who depend on such events has become uncertain.

At Village Financial Services, customer welfare is a priority so we avoided face-to-face meetings. But we stayed in touch with our customers over the phone. On one such call, Keka Paul, who makes soft toys, told us how the lockdown affected her. As the mother of a five-year-old daughter, Keka understood that the pandemic lockdown will help in keeping the virus at bay. But the sight of her once-flourishing workshop remaining in darkness for more than two months crushed her spirit temporarily.

Before the pandemic, Keka used to sell her soft toys to distributors, who travelled from fair to fair in states such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Assam. With the lockdown, orders dried up. After the government lifted the lockdown, Keka realized that her business model should include sales to proper toy stores. And that she would have to add plastic “Barbie” dolls to her product portfolio.

Now, while soft toys remain her primary product, demand for the new plastic dolls is growing. Hopefully, the autumn festivities will help get her back in full swing.

Fairs and carnivals, both in urban and rural grounds, will come up again. But the new product line – and the extra revenue it fetches - is here to stay. A change that may have come much later had the hardships of the pandemic not forced her into a corner.

I am happy that Keka could make a bad situation better with her spirit.

Keka also spoke of her 5-year-old Ruplekha, who was to get admitted to Class 1 this year. Then the pandemic struck and no one knows when the government will allow the schools to reopen. Till then, Ruplekha will be “product-testing” the toys her mother makes!

Over the years, the Indian subcontinent has been witnessing regular natural disasters like cyclones, flash floods and earthquakes. As lives and livelihoods suffer devastation, the aftermath often takes years of recovery. It goes without saying that the most affected by the devastation is rural India. Acres of fields, cultivated with months of blood and sweat get uprooted or submerged in a matter of minutes. The prior warnings can hardly help save agricultural produce that have not been harvested. As it was with Amphan.

A chat with one of our VFS customers revealed how the twin trouble of the pandemic and Cyclone Amphan jeopardized her life.

Suchitra Mondal and her family dreamt a life of financial stability with the support from VFS. Their primary source of income was from the cultivation of three different kinds of marigolds and hibiscus. As a secondary source, the Mondal family used to be fish sellers in one of North Kolkata's prominent bazaars. The local train commute made it possible to give them access to Kolkata's markets where demands of fish remain perennially high.

The dream was upturned when Cyclone Amphan made landfall in the month of May. Their blooming fields were washed out, so were their hopes. As our conversation progressed, Suchitra reminisced how the day before Amphan came, she prepared to save her marigold buds by constructing fences around the fields. But which bamboo fence could ever hold ground against a super cyclone raging at a speed of 260 km/hr?

Adding to the grief, the pandemic induced lockdown halted the busy local train to an unnatural halt forcing fish sellers like Suchitra Mondal to sell in their local market at subsidized rates.

But what amazes me with our rural customers is their resilience. Even with the setbacks, Suchitra regains her hopes for the festive season as she looks forward to her hibiscus cultivation. Workers have been employed to clean the fields and restart cultivation. But the question remains, will the renewed efforts bloom in time for the Pujas?

Meanwhile, the struggle to stay afloat during the crisis remains. With the help of her husband, Suchitra somehow manages to meet the family expenses through their local fish shop. While the couple struggles to make ends meet, their 12-year-old son patiently waits for the school to reopen. The luxury of online classes is far from the reach of the Mondal family.

The process to rebuild their fields and renew their hopes has started again. Our rural India may get hit by forces beyond control but it will be impossible to keep them down for long.

Indian women are often referred to as Goddess Durga, the Devi with multiple arms. When I, in my current role, visit a VFS borrower and get to know of her personal life, I cannot help but agree with the comparison. It is indeed amazing to know of the various roles our borrower plays, other than being the budding entrepreneur whom we try to help with access to capital.

A daughter, a wife, a home-maker, a mother - she does not avoid any responsibility citing the excuse of the business that she is toiling to build. One might wonder how she manages her time, which after all is always limited to the 24-hour cycle that nature has provided us.

Her daily commute is one of the few activities on which she might be able to save time. While many VFS customers work from home or a location near to it, our employees might need to travel some distance to reach their workplace, a time that could have been used better in some productive activity or rejuvenating rest.

The recent restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic made us look afresh at our processes. We have started challenging all activities that we insisted had to be executed from office and find that many of them can easily be moved to the homes of the team members. While work-from-home is not possible for those who have to run machinery at work, many of our customers depend on manual processes or use small machines such as sewing machines. Easy access to mobile phones has been helping in communication for some time now, making coordination easy.

Accommodating work-from-home comes as a welcome change for team members. The time saved in travel can now be better used for either personal or office work, making it a win-win situation for all. If this becomes the practice, and there is no reason why it should not, we can expect more women joining the workforce, either as entrepreneurs or as employees.

The challenge to status quo has indeed come out as one of the few positives of this pandemic year.

The jury is still out on the actual contraction that the world economy will undergo due to the coronavirus pandemic. But, with a vaccine date in the zone of speculation, the global rating agencies are converging on their assessment of the world economic growth for the current fiscal. And they are more or less unanimous that the contraction would be over minus 4 per cent.

Fitch Ratings, in its assessment published on September 7, has brought the annual contraction figure marginally down to a negative 4.4 per cent from its June assessment of a negative 4.6. But, for the Eurozone, UK and India the predictions are not at all good. Fitch expects the Indian economy to contract a little over 10 per cent, which is worse than its earlier assessment of 5 per cent.

Fitch and other rating agencies, however, are hopeful that the situation might look up if the spread of COVID-19 is contained and lockdowns in all its forms are lifted. These conditions are highly speculative and the reality may differ drastically from the assumptions.

However, all may not be lost. The stakeholders of the Indian economy are known for their resilience, and the MSMEs or micro, small and medium enterprises even more so. The policymakers, having noted the nimbleness of the MSMEs, are reorienting policies and trying to redirect the funds flow through various fiscal interventions towards this segment.

This is the most crucial initiative, and if it works it can upset all predictions about a contraction. There is over-capacity in the system. The producing units are operating at around three-fourths of their capacity and the build-up is rising albeit at a slower pace. The under-utilisation of capacity has been prompted by the continued fall in demand.

There is a section of analysts who are speculating on a V curve revival of the economy. It means that, as the economy has contracted sharply, it would recover with similar sharpness and the fall and recovery would look like the alphabet ‘V’. They are saying this with the belief that the contraction has happened due to a non-economic exogenous factor, the coronavirus pandemic. With the passing of the pandemic, all other things remaining the same, and with the government initiating demand recovery through various fiscal interventions, the economy will get back its pre-lockdown strength.

With more funds available, demand will rise and absorb the over-capacity in the system. Right now, therefore, the key to a revival lies in the availability of funds and comprehensive cross-channel intervention, including non-banking financial companies and microfinance institutions.

The Honourable Prime Minister has taken his 2014 Make-in-India mission to its logical second stage by stressing the need to create a Bharat that is Atmanirbhar or self-reliant. As Krishnamurthy V. Subramanian, the Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India, explained recently, this is not about creating an inward-looking economy but about creating an economy that can stand on its own in the face of competition. It’s about creating a value chain that will stand global scrutiny of India’s quality and efficiency. It will also be about leveraging and unlocking values of our traditional economic strength.

In other words, his explanation is about tapping our own strength in all economic fields and being export competitive. I have always argued in favour of agriculture. And I think agriculture will have a bigger role to play as Make-in-India is taken forward.

The argument is very simple. Agriculture and the allied industry have huge employment potential. We are the sixth biggest market among all the nations in food and grocery. Yet our food processing industry still has a long way to go. Agriculture is the sector that has a huge untapped potential and can change the face of the country if the potential is realised the way Gujarat has realised its potential in the dairy sector.

This is not to say that the conventional industrial segment is not needed. Industry has its place. But agriculture has a huge potential to unleash a long chain of development related to it, from the field to the market. According to Invest India, a Government of India initiative, the processed food market is expected to grow to $543bn by 2020 from $322bn in 2016, at a CAGR of 14.6 per cent.

The Centre has rightly pointed out that food processing has an important role to play in linking Indian farmers to consumers in the domestic and international markets. And the Ministry of Food Processing Industries (MoFPI) is making efforts to encourage investments across the value chain. The industry engages approximately 1.85 million people in around 39,748 registered units with fixed capital of $32.75bn and aggregate output of around $158.69bn. However, the processing industry is largely focused on grains, sugar, edible oils, beverages and dairy products.

Keep in mind that the food processing industry is the single-largest employer despite being focused on just five areas. Imagine the growth potential. That’s the boost Atmanirbhar Bharat needs.

We need to answer why just one state should lead the race in specific fields, and why shouldn’t all other states, producing the same commodity, be on the same page in terms of an evolved processing industry. And that would deliver the developmental gains we are aspiring for.

Business in rural India will indeed be the key to an Atmanirbhar Bharat.

An enterprise is seen by many as a field that needs the highest form of intellectual creation. Agility and the ability to adapt quickly to a fast-changing environment are the hallmarks of business. Entrepreneurs who cannot come up with a creative response could be left by the wayside. That is probably why an enterprise is called not just a business but a value creator.

The recent dynamics of the business world are proving how true the understanding is. Take ventilators. Even four months back when COVID-19 bared its fangs, India had a limited production capacity for ventilators. We were a net importer and when USAID promised a few hundred ventilators to support our fight against the pandemic, we clutched at it as the proverbial last straw.

Yet, now, when the US government tweeted about shipping 100 ventilators recently, we are already producing enough not only to support our own needs but also some extra to help others. The same was the story with the PPE or personal protective equipment. From being a net importer, India is going to be a net exporter. And now the world is looking up to us as a source for vaccine production once trials are successful.

In each of these instances and in many others, we are finding the truth about all that we have learnt from a distance.

An enterprise that was making luggage found its production stalled, as there were no outlets to sell or customers for its products. But soon it realised that with a little rejig the production line could churn out PPE kits without a hitch. And the company found a new market in the premier hospital segment.

This is the story across the spectrum in Indian business.

True, it doesn’t make for the full utilisation of the production capacity. But manufacturing units across the board are innovating to cater to a clutch of demands of the new normal. They are creating value that is fitting the market to a tee.

Right at this moment when survival is important, when the situation calls for weathering the storm, business is doing just that by creating value in a way that wouldn’t have made business sense even in March.

Agility, adaptability and creativity are coming to the fore in keeping the wheels of business running.

A CMIE survey claims that a little over 12 crore people in India have lost their jobs during the pandemic till date (July 2020) across the economy. Going by the Economic Survey, we had a workforce of a little over 47 crore in FY 2018. Factoring in the four crore that the NITI Aayog had claimed as net addition at the self-employment level in FY 2019, we may safely assume a workforce of about 50 crore at the time COVID-19 hit us and prompted the government to declare a lockdown.

So the COVID-19 lockdown may have claimed nearly 24 per cent of the workforce as its economic casualty, not counting those who were incapacitated or killed by the novel coronavirus. The figure may vary, but the proportion may not be very wrong.

Yes, the situation looks dire on the economic front. But that is because we are looking at it only from the single perspective of job loss or sectoral figures during the last four months. With the prolonged lockdown that began in end-March having been lifted and markets adjusting to a ‘new normal’, the registrar of companies has some good news to share. The RoC says it has registered 16,000 new companies during the pandemic till June.

There are other interesting figures that can be cross-read with such green shoots. Most of the jobs created in the last three years were by the MSMEs or micro, small and medium enterprises. And of all the jobs created, more than 70 per cent were in the micro-units.

There is an interesting parallel that can be found with the Bengali proverb that says, “storms claim big trees as victims, while the grass stays untouched.” The resilience and operational flexibility of an MSME allow it to react quickly and adapt well.

In a previous blog, I had said how microfinance could be the economy’s saviour in the current situation. Microfinance can enable the MSME segment to regenerate opportunities for the jobs that we have lost. While all of us thought that lack of PPE or personal protective equipment was a major hurdle in our fight against COVID-19, the MSMEs turned the situation around. India, which was a net importer of PPE, became a net exporter.

As for new jobs, while the RoC has not yet given the breakup of the new companies it has registered, one suspects that most of them will be in the MSME category.

Microfinance could once again be a saviour in creating jobs.

The pandemic has thrown up an economic challenge that has never been experienced in recent history. Shop floors are mostly deserted, jobs are vanishing, unemployment is rising and markets are unstable. There is no easy way out. And more and more people are trying to do something themselves as they struggle to survive.

While India’s core agriculture sector is estimated to have performed at half its capacity, the activities at the margin are barely surviving. The rurban or rural-urban sector,which marks the boundary between the rural and urban, is struggling to survive. In many states, this is the sector to which a major percentage of migrant labour has returned. With the organised economy in a tizzy, hope rests with the small, tiny and micro industries.

And this is where microfinance could be the saviour. The new-unemployed, with little or no capital to invest, need finance to start something that will generate an income for them. Microfinance institutions (MFIs) are seen as the only saviour for these self-employed persons.

Unlike the usual financial institutions, the MFIs are unique in that they have to tend to two bottom lines - financial and social — not just one. MFIs are not charitable organisations: they need to look after their financial bottom line to stay afloat, but they also have to handhold their customers and fulfil their social mandate of tackling poverty.

With this mandate in mind, the regulatory structure for MFIs was drawn up in a manner to enable them to provide credit not based on financial collateral - which by definition their customers lack - but based on social collateral. By making a group accountable for each member’s repayment liability, the MFIs ensure that their default rate is considered next to nothing compared with the banking sector.

As the lockdown is relaxed in phases and the economy tries to return to normal, a large pool of the previously employed will struggle to get gainful employment. It’s here that the MFIs are being seen as crucial. MFIs don’t just provide credit; they also train their customers in the productive use of money. And greater access to microcredit could jump-start the economy by creating gainful employment.

The COVID-19 pandemic has not been kind to us. It has stressed us out in a manner that we couldn’t have anticipated even a few months back before the lockdowns began in end-March. Newspapers, television and social media project this feeling and keep reminding us of the gloom and doom.

The situation is bad. But is it so bad as to make us blind to opportunities created by the very gloom and doom that envelopes us? People on the up and go are constantly reminding us that bad times do not last forever. While COVID-19 will now be part of our life, we also need to remember that so will the flu.

Those who cultivate a positive outlook stand to gain as the recovery begins. With the world at war against the novel coronavirus, the best scientific talent is working to find a vaccine. Never in the history of medicine has so much of resources and talent been harnessed to find one vaccine. Some claim to have already invented a vaccine; some say they will have one by January 2021 and others opt for a more cautious timeline. But a vaccine we will have.

While the novel coronavirus started spreading even before 2020 began, it was only in March that it was declared a pandemic and nations began imposing lockdowns. It is August now, and the talk of a vaccine is now stronger than the feeling that civilisation is under threat.

Over the last four months, schools have begun teaching their students remotely, business meetings are being held on virtual conference platforms and, as I have already talked about in my previous blog, work from home has become part of our life.

Life always bounces back with new promise. We have found ways to fight many of the challenges to our lifestyle. We are now talking about a vaccine, higher rate of recovery and lower death rate, and, of course, the green shoots that are being seen in the economy.

The question that we should ask ourselves is: what have we done with our lives during these days? What have we learnt, and how have we coped? Let us create affirmative answers by being positive. That’s the only way to go. Stay safe and stay positive. Being negative makes you blind to opportunity.

An article in a consumer behaviour research journal has described smartphones as an “adult pacifier”. The term is catching up very fast. However, the issue goes one step further during the pandemic. With a very big percentage of the working population working from home, the line between the personal and the professional life is getting blurred.

This has put the traditional understanding of the professional and personal into direct conflict. Questions are being raised, rejoinders are being written and the space of debate on this has begun to open up.

In 2018, a Virginia Tech professor, William Becker, in a study on working in the electronic age found that the need to keep oneself updated on one’s emails has a significant cost. It takes a toll on one’s mental wellbeing. His study found that the concept of ‘flexible work boundaries’ actually turn into ‘work without boundaries’.

But this study was done at a time much before the pandemic. And now with the work from home being the new normal, the question, therefore, is how to cope with the new situation while respecting the private space in the ‘virtual workspace’. For the virtual space is now not an option but a compulsion.

This is the question that is now haunting the HR professionals and the search is now on for new ethics in employer expectation.

All of us have seen various photos of parents working from home with kids hanging around, cartoons showing workers attending VCs and online meetings with a formal shirt but a pair of shorts (which cannot be seen on screen)! The question that haunts the HR professionals is how best to resolve these conflicts. If a parent is working from home, it’s but natural that the kid will seek parental help while doing homework! Will the parent take a break and help the child?

Creation of flexible work boundaries without making it a 24X7 flow is the challenge in the new normal. The fact that this can be done is unquestionable. Different organisations are at it, working from their perspectives. A consensus is bound to emerge as the corporate standard. Question is when and not if.

When it started there was a feeling that we wouldn’t be bound to our homes for very long. But we put up a brave face as the lockdowns continued. It was cooking time, sharing-of-hobbies time and learning-new-things time for some.

Now it has been four months and counting. And these four months have changed our lifestyle in a way that we couldn’t have thought possible. Except for those in production units, others were forced to embrace new ways of conducting professional engagements, wherever their line of work permitted them to do so. Even in early March, before the lockdown, who could have thought of a new sales pitch happening without physically sitting across the table with a client? And accounts getting settled without a closed-door physical meeting?

Notice how I am putting ‘physical’ in italics! Or writing ‘meeting’ with physical as its adjective. Four months back, a meeting by default would have meant physical as opposed to virtual. And if we needed a virtual meeting, only then would we have described the meeting as virtual.

Even the addas are happening online! Who would have thought that a bunch of ageing school friends, living in the same city, would get together on a virtual platform to chat or share jokes? Something that was once quite unacceptable despite all the tools being there is now an accepted as normal.

Yes, life has changed in the last few months and it has also changed the way we conduct business. We are now afraid of physical closeness let alone contact or crowds. And we are finding online meetings much easier to deal with than physical ones.

The lockdowns have made “WFH” or work-from-home an everyday phrase. I haven’t come across any authentic productivity survey related to this yet, but some evidence suggests that WFH is working fine. Even employers have found new advantages in allowing their people to work from home.

But is too early to jump to conclusions. Changing social behaviour across the board is not very easy. And we should remember that professional behaviour is but a part of our societal character. But there are a few points that have been noted by everybody across the spectrum. It is possible to work without being ‘there’. And work from home may not necessarily reduce the productivity of an employee. In the coming days, we will see a lot of changes in the functioning of a business, but the extent of change will take time to crystallise.

Getting a job is easier than keeping it. This mantra has perhaps been there ever since business organisations came into being. Yet very few pay heed to this timeless, classic advice - be flexible and adapt themselves to changes in the workplace.

How many times have we witnessed employees getting frustrated after seeing a peer getting promoted! The person getting bypassed sulks without even trying to understand why it happened. Look at the turmoil in workplaces that has been caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Work from home, downsizing, pay cuts – one of them or all three of them together. None of this has any precedence in living memory.

The challenge of adaptability is now more intense, testing our nimbleness, our willingness and capability of fitting in with the changes, more than ever before. Who will survive? If you are a person who, instead of sulking or blaming others for the change, usually goes searching for the reason behind, you will have a better chance of survival than others in the team. This is a trait that will help you understand the ground reality better.

Once you start realising the 'whys', you will also know or anticipate the impending changes. It may so happen that the line of work that you are involved in may vanish – either due to changes in technology or due to an organisation’s strategy to merge roles. For example, in the not-so-distant past, in every newspaper there used to be a very important function called proof-reading. The proof-reader’s job was to check spellings and punctuation and tally the copy with what had been sent by the editors. The proof-reader was the last line of defence before the news got printed. Now, following computerisation, proof-reading is no longer a separate job profile. Those who could anticipate the change upgraded their skill and shifted to other lines of work. Those who failed fell by the wayside. The same thing is happening in the information technology business as artificial intelligence automates many tasks.

So try to anticipate change and upgrade yourself or learn new skills.

But employees often do not understand their job role and the expectation of the organisation about that role. Before everything else, one needs to understand this and deliver. And then will come the change realisation. Then, of course, is the issue of understanding the change and its implication for your job. As in IT or in the newspaper industry, the lines that vanished left some survivors too. And the survivors were the ones who had kept upgrading themselves for a higher, or a different level of fit.

So, it’s important to relentlessly keep building on your skill. Staying updated is staying one step ahead of change. And, of course, you need to be flexible enough to accept the change. Nothing is permanent; nor is your job. And to meet this challenge of uncertainty one needs to have an entrepreneurial mind-set to ride over these ups and downs. In short, this is what adaptability is all about – ability to analyse your job role, to anticipate change and be ready to float with that through continuous skill upgradation.

As in Nature, adaptability is the only survival mantra in the job market.

The use of social media has been rising sharply following the advent of smartphones. Facebook and Twitter added to the acceleration and platforms such as Orkut fell by the wayside. The fact that social media, by providing us with a platform for group interaction, has changed our world is now irrefutable.

It’s also irrefutable that there are views that are critical about social media. The critics hold the platforms as responsible for spreading unsubstantiated content that can be misleading or harmful rumours.

Be that as it may, the pandemic is credited with transforming even the sceptics into neo-converts on social media. Look at the figures of newspaper reading. In April this year, one of the largest newspaper houses in India did a survey and found that 72 per cent of the total readership is getting their daily newsfeed online. A large chunk of the increased readership is sourcing their newsfeed from the social media itself!

People have also started hitting social media more to check on national and global developments. Politicians are tweeting their thoughts, individuals are sharing their issues, and organisations are telling us what they are up to. From Sushant Singh Rajput’s suicide to Big B’s COVID-19, we are now getting to know about everything even before the TV channels get it. In short, the information-consumers have never had it so good. Whatever may be the area of your interest, you click a "like" on some news or comment on social media and more of similar content will be headed your way.

The pandemic has singularly contributed more to the rise of social media subscriptions than any other events in recent history. There has been a 100 per cent rise in screen-time use even among the children and adolescents. Those who were denied access to smartphones by their parents now own smartphones because classroom teaching has shifted online and schools demand it.

This is also getting psychologists worried. What is interesting is that even this fact is getting streamed to us through social media! While social media indeed has been the greatest information sharing and updating platform in human civilisation, critics, including the not-so-conservatives, are worried about its impact on mental and physical health. Even a large section of adults is not equipped to handle information that is not mediated. For example, all the medical "facts" about corona on social media have created more confusion than awareness.

Similarly, staring at a mobile phone’s screen for hours on end has implications for our eyes and general health. This addiction is keeping us away from physical movement and affecting our general health as well. What is interesting is the fact that doctors and others are reaching out to us through the social media!

Weighing the pros and cons and of course from personal experience, I would say use social media to the hilt. But use filters so that facts are mediated so to minimise the chances of being misinformed. And please don’t stay hooked to a level that your health suffers. And yes, teach your children to benefit from it and how not to get sunk by the sirens on social media.

Stay safe. Stay well by staying well-informed.

It’s difficult to avoid the context of the COVID-19 pandemic while discussing any aspect of our lives now. With the economy (and our life) having lost a quarter of a year to the lockdown that was imposed to contain the pandemic, a view on the importance of the MSME sector naturally gets tagged to the reality that is the pandemic.

And the coronavirus behind COVID-19 reminds us how, without MSMEs - the micro, small and medium enterprises - we would still be struggling to meet the sudden and huge demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) that is so crucial for doctors and healthcare workers who are in the frontline of the battle. At the end of March this year, when the first lockdown was announced, there was an acute shortage of PPE for healthcare staff. Sanitisers vanished from medicine stores, as did handwash soaps. As the lockdown snapped the national supply chain infrastructure, there was a cry of anguish and helplessness all around.

But it did not take months to fix the supply crisis. Stores managed to stock up with fresh supplies, we started going out with masks on our faces and sanitisers in our bags, and doctors got their supplies of PPEs. It happened not because the big industries swung into action, but because local MSMEs got into the act to meet the national challenge head on. Local inventory and local transport got strung together into a singular act while the nation got busy to settle the countrywide supply chain issue.

Statistics and data do not always reflect reality. We knew that MSMEs are the second-largest employment generators in India after agriculture, and that MSMEs account for half of India’s exports, but the pandemic showed us how nimble this sector is in responding to drastic changes in market reality.

We realise now that we need to be self-reliant in manufacturing, and it is up to the MSMEs to rise to the challenge. We need to ramp up production capabilities, and very fast. Achieving the target through large-scale industries - that too in the present state of the economy and physical distancing constraints imposed by the pandemic - seems an extremely challenging task. But, with proper support and some handholding, MSMEs may be the logical hope that we have in ensuring that India overcomes the challenges.

This is the only sector that is nimble enough to rise to the occasion as we saw in the early days of the pandemic.

Green shoots. A term that is slowly getting into everyday use as did “social distancing” after the coronavirus began wreaking havoc earlier this year. Before March, when the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic and many countries including India announced lockdowns, social distancing had a negative connotation. If you did not like someone you would try to distance yourself from that person socially. But social distancing (physical distancing is the term the WHO prefers) is now part of our daily life. Irrespective of your liking or not liking a person, you need to keep that precious physical distance – two to three meters for strangers and one meter for family and good friends. This is the defining boundary between possibly getting the COVID-19 disease and staying uninfected.

From March-end, when the nationwide lockdown began, to July, when it has been eased, economic activities had come to a standstill. We struggled to keep the wheels of business and industry running remotely where possible. But work-from-home cannot keep a tractor factory or a steel furnace running: so core economic activities remained firmly shut except for agriculture and essential services. Every day, newspaper headlines reminded us about the number of people who had been afflicted by COVID-19 and the number who had succumbed to it that day. Even the pink papers kept the COVID-19 news at the top. Unemployment kept inching up while growth rates dipped as we watched the spread of the disease with horror.

It was natural. With factories forced to shut down production lines and markets closed, how could there be any growth? Globally the scene was the same except for a few countries such as Vietnam. We worried. And we talked about disasters in the marketplace. Closures and more unemployment were anticipated.

It is July and COVID-19 still rules. But we have realised that life needs to move on and it’s time to unlock in phases. Instead of death, we have already started talking about green shoots! Green shoots are the signs of recovery. And as the Honourable Prime Minister mentioned, there are strong signs that the economy is finding its way back to pre-COVID-19 days. The employment rate is picking up as are market transactions.

But given the situation, we should not expect a steep recovery trajectory, as the menace of the coronavirus still rules. The workplace is getting redefined by the rules of physical distancing and sanitising everything. We cannot have the same workspace as we had in the pre-Coronavirus days. We will take time adjusting to the new reality. And the marketplace is reflecting this. With new distances specified between employees on the production floor, the workspace is being redrawn. That will take time to evolve through trial and error to reach an optimum level. What is the work that can be done from home and how, so that workplace crowding can be avoided? But the market wheels have started moving and the green shoots are out.

So, it’s time for us to get back to work – slow and steady – adjusting and adapting to the new reality.

As the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to adopt lifestyle changes such as social distancing and home-quarantine that we have never experienced, the fabric of the urban economy unravelled and we are yet to weave a new one that can handle the new equations dictated by the coronavirus. The shocks on the rural economy have been milder in comparison. The reasons, starting with lower population density, are many. In the first phase of the nationwide lockdown that began on March 24, some agricultural activities were allowed. In the urban sector, however, the government shut down all our familiar activities barring those considered essential for surviving.The rural economy, helped with the normal pre-monsoon showers, trudged on.

The rural economy did feel the pain of the lockdown, but this pain was mostly the result of logistics issues that had not been factored in by the lockdown’s planners. For example, the dairy industry continued production but it was cut off from its market, which is predominantly urban. The government took some time to realise this and managed to sort out the issue before it extended the lockdown.

The pandemic has taught us to value the basics in our lives. The nation survived on essentials. Not since the Sixties has the nation as a market become so focused on agricultural products.The lockdown, imposed to prevent the spread of the highly-contagious SARS-CoV-2, shut down all economic activities save those in agriculture. So whatever little movement that we are sensing in the GDP’s engine is being powered by the rural segment. Now that the monsoon is expected to be normal, the nation is expecting a bumper crop. Add the recently-announced stimulus packages for small- and medium-enterprises to all this, and it looks like the rural economy will resurrect India’s GDP since manufacturing and services were locked down.

The government’s decision to free farmers from the agricultural produce market committees and so remove barriers to trade in agricultural produce will allow farmers to earn more.

As farmers start earning more, the return of migrant workers to their villages and small towns looking for jobs closer home is expected to power rural enterprise.

Meanwhile, scores of joint-liability groups and self-help groups, all led and staffed by women, have gotten into the new business of making masks, sanitisers and personal protection equipment. This rapid entry and scaling up is not only helping protect our corona warriors but is also creating more entrepreneurs, startups and business leaders.

When Nature unleashes her fury, the only option for many is to pick up their lives and start from scratch after the storm has passed. Devastation is an acceptable outcome. It should not be. Improvements in science have given us early warning systems for rains and cyclones. In India, the east coast, though, is more prone to cyclones than the west. To make matters worse, West Bengal also sits on an active seismic zone.

One may ask why cyclones hit the Bay of Bengal coast and why they are so frequent. Meteorologists have an answer but that doesn’t help us much in saving ourselves from Nature’s fury. The more important question is how we can recover from the impact of a cyclone.

According to the National Cyclone Risk Mitigation Project, between 1891 and 2000, 308 cyclones have hit the eastern coast of India out of which 103 were severe. Given the early prediction system in place, the question that begs an answer relates to our readiness to face the next cyclone of Amphan’s intensity and our ability to repair the devastation wreaked by such an intense cyclone.

The West Bengal government claims super cyclone Amphan has left a repair bill of Rs 1.02 lakh crore. The state has announced financial aid for eight lakh people hit by Amphan. The prime minister has announced a grant of Rs 1000 crore as preliminary relief.

Apart from the financial burden left behind by Amphan, there is the cost of the lockdown triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disrupted the economy on a huge scale and forced us to think of a new way of functioning that factors in social distancing, work-from-home, a depleted labour force in manufacturing and how the pandemic will play out and how many it will kill before we can control it.

The experience sadly has underscored our limited resources to contain damage resulting from Nature’s fury.

One must, in this context, keep in mind the fact that West Bengal has been a lucky sufferer. Odisha and Bangladesh have faced many more powerful cyclones than Bengal. It is argued that Odisha has mastered the art of managing cyclones and other states can learn from it. (After Amphan, we did borrow Odisha’s disaster management teams to work alongside our teams.)

So, in a sense, our mission to become better prepared to face natural disasters starts now. The era of technological advancement and digital Darwinism calls for advanced protective measures. From building embankments to disaster management technologies, cities and villages must build the infrastructure that can handle such natural disasters.

We need to focus more on sectors such as health, finance, housing, food supply, energy supply and communication while preparing for such eventualities. The immediate response and rehabilitation procedures should be laid out in a detailed framework. Timely preparation will not only save lives but will also minimise the damages.

When we speak of society today, we shall only be referring to the collective of people state-wise, and not in any broader term. Our country as such consists of many such societies together. Let us look at any one such society.

The people in it speak more or less the same language, share more or less the same culture, the topography, climate and sociological opportunities and, as such, are best suited to have an economically symbiotic relationship with each other.

Where one group of people will understand the opportunities and be willing to work on them, they will need another group that can put in their mental or physical labour to make them a reality. This other group can either come from the same society so everyone is acclimatised in most respects and are in sync with each other or can come from a different society with different existing constants.

The cost of utilising the manpower in the two different cases will be vastly different. While in the one case the people will understand the language and nuances, in the other case considerable costs will be incurred in decoding and correcting. While in the one case societal money will be saved because the people will live in their own homes, in the other, each society will pay double the needed amount in running dual establishments. While in the one case people will get a morale boost from being with their family and long-term acquaintances, in the other case the workers will be distracted and will have to be provided motivation more often, and everything comes at a cost.

The list is endless. But the point here is one. One half of society should aim to provide employment based on more factors than only daily-wage considerations, while the other half may want to explore the local opportunities before they search for employment in a distant land, away from a known social structure.

The sooner the two groups in any society understand this and work together, the sooner we shall be able to avoid the complex issues that arise during unforeseen calamities and pandemics.

“A natural disaster is an act of nature of such magnitude as to create a catastrophic situation in which the day-to-day patterns of life are suddenly disrupted and people are plunged into helplessness and suffering, and, as a result, need food, clothing, shelter, medical and nursing care and other necessities of life, and protection against unfavourable environmental factors and conditions.” – Ref.: Guide to sanitation in natural disasters WHO (1971).

On the other hand, a pandemic can reasonably be defined as a disease worldwide that affects such a large proportion of the population as to create a catastrophic situation in which the day-to-day patterns of life are suddenly disrupted and people are plunged into helplessness and suffering, and, as a result, need medical and nursing care, and protection against economic and social factors and conditions.

Now imagine a double whammy of a natural calamity during a pandemic!

Some privileged among us have the luxury of merely imagining this double whammy. But the vast number who are experiencing the effects of both are still wondering how to deal with the dual effect of the blows on their lives.

While they seem to have a few common factors that can be jointly addressed, the reality of the situation only doubles the concerns of the financially challenged rural community. Where a pandemic requires social distancing between the micro and macro, individuals and communities, a natural disaster calls for mass evacuations into crowded shelters simply not designed for social distancing.

Such and more are the challenges faced by us this year during which super cyclones, earthquakes and fires have ravaged people already crippled by the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown it prompted. People reaching out to help have been stricken down, people being helped have walked from certain destruction into the already destroyed. Death has become so accepted that it has transformed into a mere number being reported in the news at night.

It is a time to introspect on the fact that some of us still have the luxury of introspecting. Or to do as much as one can for others in the hope that we may not fail ourselves as human beings and carry each other into the next era of happenings.

We knew it but did not realise its importance till the coronavirus pandemic pushed it down our throats. The importance of taking care of our mental health just as much as we do of our physical health suddenly became a reality as the lockdown aimed at breaking the infection chain confined us to our homes and we are bombarded with news about COVID-19 deaths, the devastation of the economy and job losses across entire sectors.

As the virus keeps stalking us, we, in the confines of our homes, have started not only to miss our old unfettered “outside life”, but are also getting anxiety attacks about the new world. How many of us had seriously imagined that work-from-home would one day define the new normal?

Mental health includes our emotional, psychological and social wellbeing. This pandemic, by shredding the fabric of our social wellbeing, has, in turn, impacted our emotional and psychological existence. A successful professional who is also a known face in Kolkata’s social life has become a wreck. Now in his seventies, he has served on company boards, runs a consultancy, draws a hefty pension for having served a multinational as an executive director abroad and worries about his children staying in foreign lands. His biggest worry is about the staff of his office and how to look after them. For the last two months, he has been paying them from his reserves. At this rate, he will have to draw down his savings for their upkeep. He had given up smoking but now has gone back to his old vice.

This is a story that is common now across the entire spectrum of society – globally. Even those who have the relative safety of a government pension or salary are worried about buying their medicines and what to do when they need medical help, as they can no longer drop in at their doctor’s chamber or hospital because of the coronavirus scare.

The total disruption of life as we knew it is playing havoc with our mind and so our physical wellbeing. Earlier, we had chosen not to care about our mental health as much as we had cared for our physical. But now, weighed down by our anxieties, we are increasingly becoming aware of the importance of keeping ourselves mentally fit.

Mental fitness so far has meant our ability to reason. But this pandemic has laid bare the spectrum of mental health with all the three components -- emotional, psychological and social wellbeing. And that we need to take care of mental health as much as we need to take care of our physical has become glaringly obvious now. It’s not just important, it’s as essential as your daily walk or run to stay wholesomely fit.