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Access to Healthcare and Rights during the COVID-19 pandemic in India
2021-05-19
By Dr Alice Tilche
On the 20th of February 2021 we launched Season 2 of our Budhan Video Podcast series on indigenous people’s health and rights during the Covid-19 pandemic in India. Episodes will be released monthly, on the 20th of each month (11 am, IST). Please follow us and share.
Budhan Podcast is an initiative which began during India’s first national lockdown in 2020, aimed at documenting the short and long-term impact of Covid-19 among India’s most precarious indigenous and nomadic groups (DNTs) through arts-based methodologies. The project led by Alice Tilche and funded by the GCRF and the AHRC at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, has been co-designed in partnership with Budhan Theatre and Bhasha Research and Publication Centre – a grassroots theatre group and an NGO with a track record of working for the rights of India’s indigenous and nomadic groups by linking art and rights-based campaigns; and Dr. Akshay Khanna, a medical anthropologist.
India counts more than a hundred million Denotified and nomadic Tribes (DNTs), communities that were ‘notified’ as born criminals during British colonial rule under the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act. Despite de-notification following India’s independence, the stigma of criminality continues to be associated with these groups. It negatively affects their ability to access basic state provisions from schools to food and health services, and the lack of citizenship rights and entitlements. As precarious workers at the margins of India’s informal economy (manual labourers, migrant workers, street performers, sex workers) DNTs are among the communities most severely affected by the health and economic consequences of the pandemic.
In May 2020 a group of seven artists belonging to Budhan Theatre Group and the Chhara DNT community of Ahmedabad (Gujarat), began an extensive project of documentation of the lockdown and post-lockdown experiences of DNT groups. They produced a series of video podcasts in the Bhantu indigenous language, disseminated through community social media platforms and especially WhatsApp. The episodes address the health, socio-cultural and politico-economic dimensions of the pandemic through multiple arts forms that include monologues, songs and poetry. They cover topics ranging from health and safety measures, changes in death and marriage rituals, precarious livelihoods, the lives of children and the transformation of the domestic sphere.
In February 2021 Budhan-Podcast launched its second season, documenting the plight of DNTs across the country. The series begins with an extraordinary portrayal of the Bahurupi community of itinerant theatre performers, and their struggles to continue their century old art and make a living during the pandemic. Communities with itinerant lifestyles have been the most affected by public health measures like lockdown aimed at containing the spread of Covid-19; and so have communities of wandering artists who depend on public gatherings for their everyday livelihoods.
What we see across the episodes is a tale of impoverishment – from artists to beggars – of groups who used to make a life by selling their art and, with no permanent address or ID cards, now fall outside the mechanisms through which humanitarian support is provided in times of crisis. What these episodes also show is the enormous talent and courage of a group of young DNT artists who stepped out during the pandemic to tell the little known stories of their communities.
As I write, India is in the grip of Covid’s deadliest second wave, facing a shortfall in oxygen, vaccines, medicines and wood to burn the dead. Too many people are being left to die without help, without dignity. When we began working on this project in 2020 what we witnessed was mostly the disastrous effects of India’s unannounced lockdown, when with four hours’ notice millions of people who live on the breadline were left to fend for themselves. Some people died of Covid-19.
But then, the poorest mostly died because of the effects of lockdown and sudden lack of access to basic necessities. In contrast, despite the scale of the current crisis there is no national lockdown, and the government has decided to continue with its election campaign and religious congregations. This time on, the virus is spreading rapidly beyond the capital centres to remote rural areas, where people are dying without any diagnosis or care. We are scared, is the title of our episode made just before the second Covid-19 wave took over the country.
These are the words of a woman who lives by selling ropes, her husband cleaning ears at railway stations. “If there will be another lockdown, we will die”, she told the filming crew. There may not be another national lockdown. Yet it is hard to imagine how much more these groups will have to endure and more importantly, how they will survive.
In the next episodes Budhan Theatre actors will tell the stories of the Madari snake charmer community, the Nats traditional acrobats and of migrant workers who walked hundreds of kilometres towards their villages during the first lockdown and are now again in the grip of uncertainty. We hope that their voices get listened to and that they can inform fairer policies through which access to health and resources are distributed.