India Makes Way for G20 Summit By Displacing Homeless People

Narayan Gaikwad knew something was wrong. 

For eight days in August, he was given intravenous drips of electrolytes and saline solution, twice a day. By the time he realized he was being treated by a quack, it was too late. Fatigue had grappled him, and in no time, he collapsed in his house in the village of Jambhali in the western Indian state of Maharashtra.

His family feared COVID-19 had caused his symptoms. They rushed 73-year-old Gaikwad to a makeshift public COVID center—10 miles from home. “There were at least 500 patients, while the facility had some 100 beds,” recalls his son, Bhagat. Next, they traveled another eight miles to a private hospital. “The doctor wouldn’t admit him because he didn’t have a COVID report,” recalls Bhagat.

“The entire system was saturated because many private doctors refused to treat COVID patients,” he says. Speedily, they rushed him to a local village doctor, who prescribed a few injections. “I did come to my senses, but my cough and cold didn’t go away,” remembers Gaikwad. All he wanted was a COVID test, which was hard to come by because the system was overwhelmed and unprepared. After that, he spent ₹5,000 (Indian rupees or $70 USD) and got a computed tomography (CT) scan. “We then rushed to a medical doctor, who prescribed week-long medicines and injections. It cost me another ₹13,000 ($180).” This was 10 days into his trek for proper healthcare and Gaikwad still couldn’t get a COVID test. “I was breathless.” To get tested, his family took him to a private university that had been converted to a COVID center—12 miles away. As anticipated, he tested positive. “I was put on oxygen, and within three days, I started feeling better,” he says with a sigh of relief.

Meanwhile, the nine members of the Gaikwad family tested positive for stigma. “People started circulating that my entire family tested positive,” says Narayan, a low-income farmer. None of them were allowed to step out of the house for a month. “We had to throw away 2,000 kilograms of harvested tomatoes worth $275,” says Bhagat. Gaikwad never anticipated this would cost them a season’s earnings.

After he tested negative, Bhagat posted a screenshot of this report on his WhatsApp status, with the caption ‘Negative’. “It was necessary. Otherwise, we would have died of hunger, as people wouldn’t let us step outside,” says Gaikwad. In India, as in many parts of the world, ordinary people rely on groups created inside the WhatsApp messaging application on their smartphones to communicate with wide swaths of people, like their neighbors, coworkers and political allies.

It didn’t take long for the second wave to devastate India. On May 14, India reported 414,182 infections in 24 hours—the highest single day spike in the world. India’s far-right prime minister, Narendra Modi, prematurely declared a victory against COVID in January 2021. Leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), of which Modi is a member, started addressing election rallies in four eastern and southern Indian states—drawing several thousand people without masks. At one event, Modi proudly said, “I’ve witnessed such a rally for the first time.”

On the same day, India reported over 234,000 infections. With an oversaturated healthcare system, India ran out of oxygen, hospital beds, ventilators and essential medicines. Soon, people took to social media, making SOS calls for healthcare facilities. Hospitals started petitioning high courts for the lack of oxygen supply as several people died. As of May 30, India reported over 28 million cases with 329,000 people succumbing to the virus. A New York Times analysis reveals a more likely scenario could be 539 million cases with 1.6 million estimated deaths. 

But Gaikwad couldn’t find a bed in the first wave. 

“For poor people like us, the system collapsed long ago,” he says.

 

Three Decades of Austerity

In 1991, India “liberalized” its economy, which meant opening it to international markets, leading to a mass-scale privatization of public services and goods. In 1993, the World Bank released its World Development Report, which focused on healthcare. Ravi Duggal, health researcher and activist writes, “This report basically is directed at third-world governments to reorient public health spending for selective health programs for targeted populations wherein it clearly implies that curative care, the bulk of health care, should be left to the private sector.”

The World Bank report said investments in specialized health facilities should be diverted to the private sector by reducing public subsidies. It encouraged “social or private insurance” for clinical services. The result: 85.9 percent of people in rural India have no medical insurance.

To encourage privatization, the government reduced the customs duty on imported medical equipment from 40 percent in the 1980s to 15 percent in the early 2000s. As of 2016, it was down to 7.5 percent. From 1986-87, India spent 1.47 percent of its GDP on healthcare. Now it has been investing a little more than 1 percent of its GDP. Meanwhile, it has 43,487 private hospitals and a mere 25,778 public hospitals. Yet, a 2019 World Health Organization report pointed out average global healthcare spending was 6.6 percent of GDP.

 

Frontline Health Care Workers Bear the Burden

In March 2020, India’s Health Ministry tasked the Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) workers to contain COVID across 600,000 villages. For this, they survey households, find suspected COVID cases, and monitor oxygen levels and body temperature. ASHAs also support COVID patients who are home-bound and act as a liaison to people who are able to get treatment outside the village. This is in addition to over 50 responsibilities that include universal immunization, ensuring proper pre- and post-natal care, spreading awareness about contraception, hygiene, and maintaining health records.

For every 1,000 people, an ASHA worker—normally a woman from within a village—is appointed under India’s National Rural Health Mission. Swati Nandavdekar, 40, from the village of Mendholi in Maharashtra’s Kolhapur district, is one of 970,676 ASHAs. “We are tired,” says Nandavdekar, who has worked without leave for 410 days. “People abuse me verbally and don’t answer my survey questions.”

In avoiding her, people are bypassing the ostracism that follows if they test positive, as in the case of Narayan. “In the previous lockdown, everyone lost their livelihood, and now they can’t afford an isolation of 14 days,” she elaborates. This is in contrast to last year, when ASHAs like Nandavdekar were able to successfully contact-trace COVID patients.

Dr. Sangita Gurav, the only public doctor for 15 villages that Kolhapur’s Bhuye Public Health Centre serves, commented on the rising fatality rate. “People consult us only after a week from testing positive,” she says. “By this time, their symptoms become severe, and oxygen levels start dipping.”

Sandhya Jadhav, an ASHA supervisor from Kolhapur, who oversees the work of 24 ASHAs, says, “Every day I get calls from ASHAs who talk of mental stress and the instances of verbal abuse.” ASHAs receive “performance-based incentive.” In Maharashtra, they average a meager monthly income of ₹3,000-4,000 ($41-55). But it comes down to $25 for ASHA workers like Nandavdekar, who is from a smaller village. “Most of them haven’t received PPE kits, masks, hand sanitizers and gloves for surveying even in the containment zones,” says Jadhav.

On May 24, ASHA workers across India had gone on a 1-day strike demanding legal status of permanent workers, adequate health safety gear, insurance and a hike in their wages. Last year, over 600,000 ASHA workers protested with similar demands.

For 833 million people, India has a mere 155,404 sub-health centers (which are the first point of contact for rural communities of 5,000 people), 5,183 community health centers, 24,918 public health centers and 810 district hospitals. That’s 1 district hospital for every 1 million people. With such a poor infrastructure, it’s the ASHAs who remain in direct contact with the villages. “We have been working since 2009 and have saved countless lives, which even the government knows,” Nandavdekar says. “But they won’t even treat us with respect.” 

Last year, the Indian government announced an insurance program of $69,000 (USD) for frontline healthcare workers. “If there was insurance, why weren’t we informed of the company and other details?” Jadhav says. “They took our signature on a blank paper.”

As cases continue to rise, the job of ASHA workers is far from over. 

“We are dying daily,” Nandavdekar says. “The only difference is that it’s not called death.” 

Sanket Jain is an independent journalist based in the Kolhapur district of the western Indian state of Maharashtra. He was a 2019 People’s Archive of Rural India fellow, for which he documented vanishing art forms in the Indian countryside. He has written for Baffler, Progressive Magazine, Counterpunch, Byline Times, The National, Popula, Media Co-op, Indian Express and several other publications.

We are honored regular contributor Sanket Jain has been named a Top 10 finalist for Oxfam’s 2021-22 Journalism for an Equitable Asia Award. With his eye for detail, Sanket has sensitively reported on and photographed the stories of several rural Indians. All of his subjects have felt the pain of losing their livelihoods as the country locked down at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Indian government provided little to no recompense for the 833 million people who live in rural India.

Special thanks to Charlotte Dennett, who guest edited Toward Freedom from late 2020 until May. Her experience as a journalist and author helped shape the article up for consideration, “COVID-19 and the Desperate Lives of India’s Sugarcane Workers.”

Other articles Sanket filed during the pandemic include:

• Photo Essay: India’s Lockdown Happened Two Years Ago, But the Poor Still Suffer
• How Neoliberal Austerity Stripped India’s Healthcare Infrastructure
• How Covid-19 Is Wiping Out India’s Traditional Craft-making… and Millions of Jobs

The award winner will be announced at 2 p.m. Bangkok time on March 15. The event can be attended in person and watched online by registering here.

We at Toward Freedom congratulate Sanket for being recognized for his rare coverage from India’s countryside. This work continues our 69-year legacy of documenting oppressed people’s struggles.

Sincerely,
Julie Varughese
Editor

On May 6 and 7, Instagram users in India noticed that some of their posts were starting to vanish. Gone were their COVID-19-related posts that demanded improved conditions for overworked crematorium workers, publicized volunteer-led relief efforts, and linked coronavirus deaths in the country to “abject callousness” of the government. Stranger still was the removal of private chats on the matter.

“There is a growing trend of internet shutdowns, takedown of social media content, particularly around political speech in India over the last few years,” said Vidushi Marda, global AI research and advocacy lead at ARTICLE 19, an international freedom of expression organization that has been tracking the deleted content.

In India right now, whether or not people have access to COVID-19 information on social media is a matter of life and death. Such censorship, however, is not unique to the country. Over the past month, activists and researchers have also collected numerous examples of suppressed content related to unrest in Palestine and Colombia, as well as posts related to the National Day of Awareness of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women in the U.S. and Canada.

On May 7, Instagram said that “this is a widespread global technical issue not related to any particular topic” and that the issue had been “fixed.”

But the following day, the company acknowledged that there were issues with posts relating to unrest in Colombia and Palestine.

“We are so sorry this happened,” Instagram noted in a statement. “Especially to those in Colombia, East Jerusalem, and Indigenous communities who felt this was an intentional suppression of their voices and stories — that was not our intent whatsoever.”

But Instagram failed to acknowledge reports of censorship in India.

A representative of Facebook, which owns Instagram, wrote in response to questions about why dissent in India, Colombia, and Palestine seemed to have been disproportionately impacted: “This was a widespread global technical issue that affected users around the world, regardless of the topic of their Stories. We fixed it as fast as we could so users around the world could continue expressing themselves and connecting with each other through Stories.”

Despite the company’s claims that the takedowns were automatic and universal, Marda said there was “overwhelming evidence of the disproportionate impact these takedowns have had on political speech and dissent.”

In India, she noted that ARTICLE 19 observed “significant overlap between posts about activism, COVID-19 relief and government critique.” All of this, she said, points to “a significantly larger problem than just a single automation tool,” and noted “the opacity of content moderation practices” means that there are gaps in accountability.

Such digital suppression isn’t simply a matter of being able to speak freely. In each of these countries, thanks to government failures and limited media coverage, people have come to rely on social media to share information, track resources, and protect themselves from violence.

Part of the problem is automated content moderation, which uses machine learning to filter content. The systems are blunt instruments that often misunderstand context and remove too much or too little content, noted a report by the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation. These developments, adds the report, can negatively impact minority groups because these tools are often trained on English-language datasets, so they have trouble properly parsing dialects and rarely-used languages.

“[There is] overwhelming evidence of the disproportionate impact these takedowns have had on political speech and dissent,” said Marda. “[This is] precisely why… human rights organizations and defenders around the world have pointed to the dangers of automated content moderation for years.”

 

India’s History Of Digital Censorship

Because of the Indian government’s monumental failure in tackling the coronavirus, people in the country have come to rely on social media to seek and provide COVID-related help like oxygen supplies and vaccinations. Many people have also used social media to collate lists of supplies into a larger, searchable database.

Silicon Valley-driven censorship in India, therefore, has become a matter of survival, despite the fact that Instagram has yet to acknowledge it.

“Despite documented instances of censorship [in India] and Instagram users highlighting them very prominently, there was a complete lack of recognition [by Instagram] of what’s happening in India,” said Apar Gupta, Executive Director, Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a New Delhi-based organization that seeks to ensure that technology respects fundamental rights.

Digital suppression in the country isn’t new, despite the fact that the Indian Constitution guarantees the right to freedom of speech and expression.

In 2020, India had the highest number of government-instigated internet shutdowns in the world. The digital crackdowns were one of the reasons Reporters Without Borders recently ranked India 142 out of 180 countries in terms of press freedoms.

On April 28, Facebook temporarily hid posts critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi that included the hashtag #ResignModi for “violating its community standards.” A Facebook spokesperson later said that the posts were hidden “by mistake, not because the Indian government asked us to.”

“Silicon Valley platforms have a very natural interest in keeping governments happy in the regions that they operate,” Gupta said, pointing to the fact that India is Facebook’s biggest market.

The lack of institutionalized free speech protections is further compounded by laws and regulations in India that allow the Ministry of Electronics and Information to not disclose censorship orders sent to social media companies, said Gupta.

Users are therefore often given no official explanation why their posts were suppressed.

 

Content Moderation In Colombia

There have also been numerous reports of censorship related to ongoing protests in Colombia over proposed tax increases and the resulting police crackdowns.

“We identified a specific problem with Instagram,” said Carolina Botero Cabrera, a researcher with Karisma, a Bogotá based civil society organization that works on technology and human rights. “We have over 1,000 reports of censorship, around 90 percent of it was by Instagram and the content was overwhelmingly about the [ongoing] protests,” she added.

Deleted posts reportedly related to the national unrest, unemployment numbers in the country, and the death of a protester.

For Colombia, a country with a long-lasting civil war, such automated content moderation is all the more contentious because journalists and human rights activists often find that their content is removed, their reach is diminished, or their accounts are blocked because their content is deemed too violent.

Jesus Abad Colorado, an experienced Colombian photojournalist, recently had his Twitter account blocked after he posted photographs of an armed dispute in the Chocó Department in Western Colombia. A few days later, when an independent media outlet livestreamed an interview with Colorado about the dispute, their account was blocked, too.

Another challenge, said Botero, is that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — People’s Army (FARC), the longtime leftist guerilla group that disarmed and became a political party in 2017, “was flagged as a terrorist organization [by social media companies at the time] even though they were in peace negotiations.”

The peace process spanned about four years, culminating in a peace agreement in 2016. “Any research about the peace process will have to deal with important problems to [understand] FARC’s position, actions, and voice,” said Botero, noting that blocked social media accounts and deleted content hamper documentation of the process.

 

Suppressing Palestinian Voices

As tensions escalated in Israel and Palestine, digital suppression in the region also appeared to increase.

“We have over 100 reports of censorship on Instagram,” said Alison Carmel Ramer, a researcher at 7amleh, a Haifa-based digital rights organization based in Haifa, Israel.

Ramer’s research and other reports found that most of the censored content was related to Israeli forces storming Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque. Other censored content was related to the eviction of Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem.

Muslim, a media publication, also documented blocks on Instagram livestreams related to Palestine.

According to ِRamer, Facebook told 7amleh that a majority of the Instagram takedowns were mistakes because they did not violate community standards and that they have restored the content.

“This means there is a problem in the way content is moderated,” said Ramer. “Why is content which is not against community standards being taken down? [Facebook] also did not tell users under which policy the content was taken down.”

In general, Palestinian content is “over-moderated” Ramer added, noting posts are often suppressed either because they are considered hate speech, or the posts appear to be connected to terrorist organizations. Many Palestinian leaders are designed as terrorists by the United States, meaning Facebook censors content related to them. Ramer also explained how hate speech in the region written in Hebrew is not censored to the same extent as hate speech in Arabic.

A March 2021 report by 7amleh which analysed 574,000 social media conversations in 2020 showed that one out of every 10 Israeli posts about Palestinians and Arabs contained violent speech, a 16 percent increase compared to 2019. “We have sent reports like this one to Facebook for several years and every year, [but] we find that this content just remains online,” Ramer said, adding that Facebook has not informed them of what, if any, actions it intends to take.

A recent report in The Intercept also noted how Facebook censors the word “Zionist.”

“Zionism is a political ideology,” Ramer said. “Political speech must be protected. Words like ‘Zionist’ and ‘shahid’ [martyr in Arabic] should be protected.” Censorship in the region is especially concerning because of the longstanding lack of transparency around Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, political activist Noam Chomsky told The Daily Poster.

“Israel’s brutal repression of Palestinians for many years, with strong support from the U.S. particularly, is a shocking crime in itself and has ominous international repercussions as well,” said Chomsky. “There have been extensive efforts to block efforts to bring the facts and their significance to the general public. These efforts amount to direct participation in the crimes.”

When asked about social media companies’ ability to freely censor content, Chomsky replied, “Their enormous power should not be tolerated.”

 

The Path Ahead

At ARTICLE 19, Marda said that in order to align itself with international human rights standards, Facebook “must publicly and transparently acknowledge the reasons for recent takedowns” and “provide information for the substantive and legal reasons for takedown.”

Marda added that Facebook should also “restore all blocked content” and “publicly commit to not bowing to governmental or judicial pressure that requires it to act in violation of international human rights standards and jurisdiction-specific standards on freedom of expression.”

This article was originally published in The Daily Poster.

Rishika Pardikar is a freelance journalist in Bangalore, India.