What is the city but the people

India’s second COVID wave has overwhelmed the nation including its institutions and citizens. The unsparing nature of the pandemic’s spread can be gauged from the fact that the daily fresh infections crossed 4 lakh cases in early May as against the peak daily infections of about 85,000 in the first wave last year. While the first phase remained largely confined to India’s urban centres, this more aggressive version has marked its presence in rural India too. And all this at a time when the country is rapidly rolling out the world’s largest vaccination drive. Though constrained by availability of vaccine doses while manufacturers ramp up output, over 180 million shots have already been administered; there were none during the first wave.
The bright spot has been the rapid response by our city managements in dealing with this more deadly phase. Rolling out temporary hospitals and other medical facilities, putting necessary restrictions on citizens’ movement (including limited lockdowns), surveys of households, are among early responses. During this wave, one is also seeing new problems – shortages of some medicines and reports of their black-marketing by some unscrupulous elements, and more importantly dearth of oxygen for critical patients. Local bodies are faced with new challenges here and the way out is not easy. While cities and their managers grapple with these, there have appeared related new health dangers such as mucormycosis or black fungus and white fungus in some infected patients. These cases call for coordinated action by health care professionals of various specialities; these infections have the potential to quickly turn serious and even fatal. In other words while the second wave is proving deadly in terms of numbers affected, it is posing severe challenges in other dimensions as well.
Therefore, one believes that cities’ responses must now go beyond ‘more of the same’. One plank could be deeper and wider roles for the community and its various groups. For several reasons – one is that the growing incidence of the pandemic, both in terms of volumes and complexities, will constrain authorities and their machinery; two, the communities are the ones feeling the impacts of the disease and therefore are best equipped and will be motivated to assist in mitigation of the risks and in recovery. Others are corporates. These have significant resources in terms of competence and manpower to support various local measures. We are already seeing vaccination drives beginning to happen in housing societies and corporate/industry premises. These bonds of local government with the community must be strengthened progressively in order to develop a system to detect future dangers, alert both authorities and the community, and put in place remedial measures both at the administration level and the citizens. The youth in our cities are another force with potential to work alongside local administrations in such times. City managers must find innovative ways to engage with and harness the significant potential of these groups to build the resilience of our cities to future shocks. For as Shakespeare said, ‘What is the city but the people’.