Post COVID, a few changes will occur as the notion of ‘prime real estate’ will be dislocated as people will work more from home.

Ed-Tech will rule:Education will be transformed as a number of non laboratory programs will be fully online. Global education will be affordable for students in the global south.

Healthcare will fly: More hospitals will be built and lesser offices. Laboratory diagnostic business will boom. Hygiene services market will be the next big thing.

The ‘Home’ in the ‘WFH’: Residential homes will be bigger, and located away from city centres. One room in the apartment will be a dedicated sound proof office. I see sound proofing and better retrofitting of existing homes taking off.

Jobs: All skills based, value creation oriented paradigm of work, where reskilling though painful will be the new normal.

The pandemic just preponed the ‘Future of Work’

Any ideas?

Reading ‘These Truths’ by Harvard Historian Jill Lepore. A majestic treatise on American History which is not intimidating but illuminating. This snapshot of the Great Depression sounds eerily similar to the present economic carnage thanks to COVID-19.

Health is Serious Business: Day 19/21 national lockdown field note.

It’s Easter, and Sunday which means all the vegetable vendors are in swing than usual. The Kirana shops are buzzing. People by now have seen the value of masks or even handkerchiefs around the mouth. More social distancing happening although much more is needed. The gram panchayat folks were preaching on the loudspeaker regarding social distancing at the heart of the market. Such direct communication is vital. Fumigation was taking place as well as shown below.

The seriousness has caught on. That’s the biggest plus. In a conversation with the pharmacist in the urban village, the bald and pot bellied middle aged man, said when i enquired regarding the business during the lockdown,

‘The business is not unusual as we stick to the MRP and do not overcharge like the grocery shop due to supply shortages. People are taking health more seriously, taking the entire course of medicines. As pollution and dust has reduced, there are less patients coming to buy as well. Many have gone back to their native places too.’

I hope post COVID-19, the focus on healthcare, hygiene and research should be the main takeaway post this carnage.

Blessed Easter! Festivals are now a days images ingested from Instagram feeds and digital greetings. Festivals rupture the indefinite nature of extended time during the lockdown, reminding us of what normal used to be, and if we regain that again, how precious would that be. A good plum cake is missed.

We need the resurrection of our lives more than ever.

I have been rather hesitant about commenting about the migrant worker impact of the circuit breaker in Singapore. The Gulf is also under a lockdown as is India. These are all sub geography’s in Asia where I have worked with/on migrant workers and health. Migrant workers are vulnerable, and medical care is on the margins of their everyday life. The focus is on feeding mouths back home. Many of these brothers are incredibly young, and mismanage finds they work so hard for. They are us, and have all kinds of aspirations as well.

When migrants fall ill they depend on panadol treatment. They have no insurance, no medical leave and often are fired for being ill. It’s a crime to be poor. Poverty is only glorified in Satyajit Ray films. There is no romance in sickness and poverty.

Even middle class professionals such as me have had salaries not paid for 8 months, medical insurance which was cancelled and precarity faced every single day while working in the Gulf.

Having worked with community mentors and leaders such as Mohsin Da, I have seen the desperation. I get angry as I write this. Many good willed souls will offer piecemeal solutions. As an engineer, I am predisposed towards solutions. Blending ethnographic work and an engineering bent, we can make health for temporary guest workers if-

• Projects build in the cost for better housing and healthcare for migrant workers. Do not go for the cheapest contractor, but evaluate bids based on social sustainability.
• More civil society actors investing in clinics for migrants.
• Host countries creating avenues for migrant workers to access socialised healthcare.

Migrant workers are not sources of infection. They are human beings. They get sick like you and me.

They come because you can get cheaper real estate and project executions. They are tolerated because the injury for the 3D work is done by them.

If you don’t like them, please do the work yourself. Please create the correct incentive structures so that your citizens can take up these jobs. For civil society actors, migrant workers are not your subaltern for a grant pitch deck. All your migrant literature festivals cannot save a life.

The focus should be on making a business case from an unit economics standpoint as governments understand the language of cost benefit analysis a lot more.

Day 16/21 #LockdownCoronavirus stringent measures finally to be seen. My apartment block security staff taking a log people entering and exiting the building. Roads to the Devachi Uruli Chowk are blocked by the local community. Hardly any crowd today. Good stuff.

Spoke with the chap running the poultry shop who is from Mushirdabad in West Bengal. He says that the business is moderate, up on asking the state of his business.

He said in Bangla-

‘Kharap o noye, bhalo o noye. Sobai ke khete toh hobe’

People have to eat to survive.

Cannot be truer words.