PARI reporters have also done a number of stories on India's sanitation workers, few of whom have been provided with gloves or masks. "The government is saying clean hands constantly," Mumbai sanitation worker Archana Chabuskwan told PARI reporter Ivoti Shinoli. "How do we do that?" Hand sanitizers are too expensive -- Chabuskwan makes $2.63 cents a day -- water supplies are iffy and social distancing is impossible. "We have to share a public toilet with hundreds of people."
If sanitation workers do get sick -- or, for that matter, any of Mumbai's 20 million residents -- they are in trouble. Government hospitals currently have 400 ventilators and 1,000 intensive care beds available for the entire city.
India's health crisis is longstanding, and while the actions of the Modi government will almost certainly worsen the current crisis, for the past 30 years Indian governments -- right and center -- have cut back on health care and privatized much of the system. "We have one of the lowest health expenditures -- barely 1.2 percent (as a share of the GDP) in the world," writes Sainath. Almost a quarter of a million Indians die each year of tuberculosis and 100,000 children from diarrhea.
The US spends about 17 percent of its GDP on health.
According to Sainath, "Health expenditures across India today are possibly the fastest growing component of rural family debt." A study by the Public Health Foundation of India found that in 2011-12 some 55 million people had been impoverished by health costs, 38 million by the cost of medicine alone.
That is what a substantial part of India's 1.3 billion people face as COVID-19 ramps up, and they are unlikely to get much help from the BJP or Modi. When China finally went public with the dangers posed by the corona virus, India was convulsed with sectarian riots touched off by some of Modi's cabinet members. Over 50 people were killed in New Delhi and hundreds injured as right-wing mobs organized by the Rashtyria Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) rampaged through the streets.
The RSS -- an organization that philosopher and political commentator Aijaz Ahmad describes as the "oldest, largest and most successful far-right group in the world today"is the real power behind Modi. The BJP is largely a front for the RSS, a Hindu fundamentalist organization that is "profoundly hierarchical and secretive," according to Ahmed.
The top-down, no warning decree on the corona virus is typical of the way the RSS functions. In 2016 -- again, with no warning -- Modi unilaterally canceled all 500 and 1,000 rupee notes, throwing the country into currency chaos and further impoverishing large numbers of poor Indians.
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