Rebooting Community from the Frontlines in Bangalore

When I had the opportunity to reboot TEDxBangalore digitally as COVID-19 restrictions eased in India, I focused on the theme of “Living with the Pandemic.” It was one that resonated with the eagerness and anxiety of my community to return to normal or, at the very least, grapple with the new normal. 

The collective hopes and aspirations of a billion Indians is something even the coronavirus was finding hard to infect.

However, the world’s largest lockdown, nationwide migrations, and a sudden shift to remote work had introduced new stressors on all of us. It exposed the fragility of our systems and the complex interdependence of urban and rural populations. India’s multi-pronged response would take months to deliver results. In the interim, our extreme cohabitation led to open conversations around pertinent topics such as mental health, domestic violence, food security, livelihood, upskilling, and more.

We decided to tackle two such topics and explored the state of children and mental health in India during the pandemic. Most Indian households are built around the idea of enabling their children to succeed and thrive, but COVID-19 has upended everything – education outreach, nutrition schemes, juvenile justice missions, healthcare delivery programs, and more. 

My conversation with Puja Marwaha, CEO of Child Rights and You, was illuminating because she could contextualize the immensity and interconnectedness of the problems children across the economic spectrum were facing. They had witnessed a huge spurt in child labor, child marriages, and domestic violence within a span of three months because of the information gaps that had emerged across the system. 

It’s critical to acknowledge that mental health has only recently become a part of the typical Indian lexicon. My conversation with Manoj Chandran, CEO of White Swan Foundation, highlighted the amount of support needed to overcome our Achilles heel. India only has 9000 psychiatrists to serve its 1.3 billion citizens, of which a massive 197·3 million had mental disorders in India in 2017. 

These numbers have only shot up since COVID-19 wreaked havoc here, and we have had to come to terms with the consequences of having an almost non-existent mental healthcare infrastructure. In our dialog, Manoj expressed hope that leaders from government, industry, and philanthropy would finally extend their wholehearted support to cultivate an ecosystem and develop innovative solutions such as virtual assistants and telepsychiatry to serve at scale and ensure no one is left behind.

2021 has brought us vaccines and the promise of imminent normalcy, but we must not forget the lessons of a difficult year. The coronavirus may have accelerated the digitization of industries by a decade. Still, the true impact of COVID-19 was felt very differently in many parts of India and the world based on a whole host of qualifiers such as gender, age, income, and geography. 2020 exposed deep-seated inequity at all levels.

Perhaps rebooting our community from the frontline involves deploying multiple systemic responses to this challenge first?

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