Covid-19 public health emergency in India

(c) Bhuvan Bagga/AFP via Getty Images

Context

On March 11, 2020, WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic. On 25 March, in an effort to contain the epidemic and avert a looming crisis, the Government of India introduced a nationwide lockdown.

Stringent public health protection measures were enacted for the public good, but engendered difficult circumstances for informal sector, short term, and day labourers, who typically have few economic reserves and no job security. With the sudden announcement of a lockdown, millions of migrant workers found themselves overnight with no source of income and no means to travel back to their homes.

In addition, fear and misinformation about Covid-19 were rising, and official sources of information were not accessible or adapted to the needs and living circumstances of the urban and rural poor.

Action

Used by rural and low-income populations, Gram Vaani is a federated network of voice-based community media platforms that we re-deployed to support India’s COVID-19 response. On March 13, 2020, two days after the global pandemic was declared by WHO, volunteers mobilised to launch the Gram Vaani COVID-19 response network.

The network used mobile phone technology and an association of ground level field partners to build awareness, counter misinformation, enable community feedback, and to link those in need (e.g. of food, shelter, transportation, health care) or facing injustice, to critical services. The platform was accessible using any simple mobile phone. A voice-based approach made it suitable for less literate populations to participate. Services were free to end users.

Colleagues at Gram Vaani provided the technology platform for mobile phone communication, sought funding, and federated civil society organisations. I provided public health expertise. Each day, I translated guidance from WHO and Government of India on Covid-19, into capsules for poor and less literate populations. Taking advantage of differing time zones to gain speed, the texts were translated into Hindi by a civil society organisation (Raah) overnight (my time), reviewed by me the following morning, and then recorded and published over the network by Gram Vaani. Civil society partners followed up with essential on-ground action.

Impact

In its first 100 days, as of 20 June 2020, the Gram Vaani COVID-19 response network included 26 civil society partner organizations across 10 states and 80 districts of India. During the same period, the platform logged over 1.15 million phone calls, of which 793 350 (69%) were outbound calls providing health information and guidance related largely to COVID-19, and 18 000 were user-recorded messages. These are the voices of the poor. Analysis of 6636 "SOS" audio recordings by network users revealed struggles to secure the basic necessities of survival, including food (48%), cash (17%), transportation (10%) and employment or livelihoods (8%).

With the help of our 26 civil society organisation partners, we were able to provide on-ground relief assistance to the vast majority of these 6636 SOS calls.

References

Johri M, Agarwal S, Khullar A, Chandra D, Pratap VS, Seth A. (2021) The first 100 days: How has COVID-19 affected poor and vulnerable groups in India? Health Promotion International. 2021;36(6):1716-26. https://doi.org/10.1093/heapro/daab050