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Sunday, December 20, 2020

Mental Health of India’s Corona Warriors: An often overlooked aspect of the pandemic

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Raya Tripathi
Raya Tripathi
South Asia

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Raya Tripathi

Article Title

Mental Health of India’s Corona Warriors: An often overlooked aspect of the pandemic

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Global Views 360

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December 20, 2020

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Mental Health Representative Image

Mental Health Representative Image | Source: rawpixel.com via Freepik

It’s been almost a year since the Covid 19 first started spreading in Wuhan, China and spread to all parts of the world, turning into a pandemic. This has brought along with it an unusual situation for everyone around the world—people were locked up inside their homes and everything was shut. Only the doctors,  healthcare workers and other emergency service workers were working long hours, often going without proper sleep and food. Working day and night, like robots, is not natural for human beings, and therefore, has its consequences.

Mental health in India

Mental health of people is deteriorating globally, and the worst impact can be seen for the corona warriors.

Many people in India do not care about mental health and rubbish it off due to lack of awareness about the problem. They don’t consider it as a health problem just like any other illness, these are not much discussions or consultations with the experts, even when there is a clear sign of a person suffering from it. This state of affir is one of the major contributing factor for the high suicide rates in India.

The taboo associated with discussing mental health, dissuades the person who is suffering or their family members to discuss and take the help from experts as they fear that any revelation of mental health issues can tarnish their image in the society. There are still instances that people seeking professional help are labelled mentally weak or simply ‘‘mad’. Due to superstition still persisting in society, many believe mentally ill people to be 'possessed' by some evil spirit. This forces a large number of people to visit some Godmen or Exorcists to get it cured, rather than going to a professional.

This pandemic and the subsequent lockdown has exacerbated the mental stress and resulted in a spike in the instances of anxiety and depression among the population all over the world. The healthcare workers, fighting the pandemic in the frontline as Corona Warrier, are more exposed to the dangers associated with it. Although the frontline healthcare workers are now sufficiently protected from the direct impact of the virus, their deteriorating mental health still remains an unforeseen challenge.

What are the problems faced by corona warriors in India?

Healthcare workers are responding quickly and moving in vans in many places for testing the Covid patients. They are working hard to take care of everything from regular check- up to specialised testing for the ailing people. But, what about the physical and mental health of these health workers who are serving the patients with highly contagious disease, day and night, despite feeling homesick and tired.According to a report in Indian express, Dr. Kinjal Nadia, a doctor in Gujarat's Jamnagar, said, “Spending eight hours in a PPE suit is the toughest thing to do. One can’t even drink a glass of water though has to speak loudly to be heard by patients and assistants”.

There are incidents of suicide among thejunior doctors from AIIMS Delhi and RG Kar Medical College, Kolkata, which in itself describe the mental status of doctors and healthcare workers. Furthermore, around 80% of the doctors, especially younger ones, are at a very high risk of burning out due to constant pressure by the people, press and the administration to manage the extraordinary workload of testing, diagnosing, treating and curing  the patients, successfully.

In order to manage the huge influx of patients, at many places, doctors and healthcare workers are being hired temporarily, which acts as a catalyst for stress which they are already facing. This has also led to protests by the healthcare workers, including the nurses of AIIMS Patna, for making their employment permanent.

There had been a lack of PPE kits and proper protection against the virus for the healthcare professionals in many places, which increased the danger of exposing them to the virus and putting their lives in danger. There have been many incidents narrated by the doctors and the patients about dirty floors and filthy bathrooms in government hospitals of India.

A report on Firstpost mentioned about the usage of unhygienic food and dirty bed-sheets at government-run Kasturba hospital in Mumbai. An online petition against this situation had garnered over 100,000 signatures.

A news article from the New Indian Express tells that in Bengaluru, Dr. Manohar KN, with his colleagues, conducted a survey to assess the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the mental well being of the healthcare workers. Over two thousand doctors, nurses and technical staff, aged between 20 and 65 years, participated in this survey, which was conducted in 26 states and union territories of India. This incidentally was the largest survey of its kind in the world.

The most shocking finding of the survey was that the healthcare workers were mostly in a sad mood, and the most optimistic ones (around 70%) were also becoming pessimistic. Even after wearing heavy PPE kits, masks, gloves, face shields all day long, which in itself is exhausting, they were constantly afraid of catching the virus.

Even the families of these corona warriors are worried. Many of them have succumbed to the coronavirus while saving people from it. They don’t get to meet their families while working during the pandemic, and sometimes end up never meeting again.

Are there any mental health services in India?

India, at the moment doesn’t have adequate infrastructure to diagnose and treat the people suffering with mental health issues. also there are not enough organisations or programs which can help in raising the awareness and mitigating misinformation regarding mental health issues. The availability of psychologists in India is grossly inadequate to take care of the mental health of a population of more than 130 crores.

However, the wide adoption of online meetings during the pandemic has come as a big boost to increasing the reach of online psychological counselling through video conferencing. This has enabled the patients to consult the doctors and counsellors  remotely through video links, which reduced the chances of spreading the virus. But not everyone has access to such facilities.

What is the government doing about it?

The government issued a guide in April 2020 for general medical and specialised mental health care settings to be followed during Covid 19 pandemic and also launched a helpline for mental health issues during lockdown. However, when it comes to regular mental health care, India is behind most of the countries. If a country does not even have basic health care for each and every of its citizens, how can it provide them with ‘world class' mental health services?

According to WHO, India ranks second among countries with the greatest burden of disease for mental and behavioral disorders. Most of the mental health disorders go unreported, as people never let others know about it, because in India, this becomes a matter of shame and losing their pride.

Clearly, the healthcare professionals seem tough from the outside, and fight bravely, but on the inside, they’re struggling with their own issues which need to be attended.

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February 4, 2021 5:07 PM

India’s New Education Policy (NEP) 2020: What it proposes for Schools

On 30th July 2020, the Indian government’s Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) was renamed the Ministry of Education as it announced the new National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.

The National Education Policy is an in-depth framework outlining the future and development of education in India. It’s recommendations guide what the priorities and goals of educational institutions should be in the coming years. The first NEP was passed in 1968; while it gets revised occasionally, a new NEP has only been passed two times since then, in 1986 and now in 2020.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s and the government was hailed by RSS-affiliated educational organisations for the NEP as a step to connect the education with the roots of India. They reportedly had quite an influence during the drafting of NEP, even going as far as to say that “60-70 percent” of their demands have been met.

On the other hand, NEP received criticism from the opposition parties like Congress, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and political figures in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu. The criticism was primarily for bypassing Parliamentary discussion, and its ill-fittedness in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ever-growing digital divide left in its wake in the education sector.

The NEP’s ambitious claims and propositions are divided into two broad categories: school, and higher education.

NEP at School Level

At school level, perhaps the biggest change is the move away from the 10+2 structure to a 5+3+3+4 one, signifying four stages of school education across ages 3-8 years (Foundational), 8-11 years (Preparatory), 11-14 years (Middle) and 14-18 years (Secondary). This new structure claims to be based greatly on the cognitive development of children and prioritising areas of focus through these ages.

The new structure also talks about the Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE), which aims to include pre-schools and aanganwadis (government sponsored rural child care centres in India) in an effort to impart play and activity focused learning, and train aanganwadi workers to achieve the same.

However, the treatment of the aanganwadi program is already under question from the governance and child right watchdogs and activists . This program is poorly funded and workers are poorly paid which makes the promise of training the workers for implementing the NEP goals seem quite wishful. This means rural students are likely to continue to be many steps behind urban students from the ECCE i.e ‘Foundational’ stage itself.

National Assessment Centre

NEP proposes the establishment of a National Assessment Centre, PARAKH, to set norms and guidelines for evaluations across all school boards. Report-cards are also to be redesigned and include self, teacher and peer assessment. However, the details of what will entail in these, especially peer assessment, are vague and do not take into cognizance the rampant prejudice and bullying experienced by students at the hands of peers as well as teachers on bases of weight, religion, gender, caste, class, sexuality and more. Such discriminatory practices will hurt the students from marginalised communities in both disguised and explicit ways.

The 3 Language Formula

A more controversial change comes with the 3-Language Policy, which essentially asks that “wherever possible,” the regional language or mother tongue of a student be adopted as the medium of instruction “until at least Class 5, but preferably till Class 8 and beyond.”

All schools will teach three languages, of which at least two must be native to India. The draft NEP, in fact, mandated that one of these languages be Hindi; after protests against this ‘Hindi imposition’ such as by the southern state of Tamil Nadu, this provision was removed and it has supposedly been left to the state, school and student to decide which languages would be taught.

The so-called flexibility of the policy comes at the cost of uniformity. Since the colonial era, English education has served as a means of upward social mobility for castes and tribes that had historically been denied education under Brahmanical hegemony, this progress is threatened by making English ‘optional’ in any form.

There are also unaddressed and obvious scenarios of parents who migrate or get transferred to different states, parents who speak another language at home than the regional language, and children who grow up in multilingual homes, all of which are commonplace across India. How likely is it that every student in a classroom speaks the same mother tongue or is from the same region?

Promotion of Sanskrit

The NEP desires that the rich ancient languages of India be brought back to the forefront and be given more focus as languages that can be taken up by students. In this regard it shines a spotlight on Sanskrit, a classical language rooted in Hinduism which was for centuries only accessible to Brahmins and some other upper castes. The pedestal upon which Sanskrit has been placed is being seen as discriminatory towards the large population of India who either do not have historic ties to Sanskrit or were denied access to it.

While the NEP does mention other languages that have had a strong foothold in India for a long time, such as Persian and Prakrit, it notably omits mention of Urdu and seems especially driven to ‘promote’ Sanskrit.

Vocational Education

The NEP points out that a very small portion of the Indian workforce in the age group 19-24 is exposed to vocational education, and therefore recommends that it be integrated in schools and higher education in a phased manner over the next 10 years.

A focus on vocational education starting from ages as young as 14 is also questionable, since non-formal education, often valued less than degrees, might hinder the education of poor children. This may contribute to deepening the class divide in India since receiving Undergraduate or Postgraduate degrees often guarantees poverty alleviation for such students.

Additionally, vocational education will likely form a vicious cycle with the entrenched caste system in India, reinforcing each other and the inequalities therin.

It has been repeatedly asserted by experts, citizens and politicians alike that the NEP caters more to the corporate interests over the needs of underprivileged students, and has brought much uncertainty around the question of language.

It becomes vague at key points, falling back on the argument that it is only a ‘guiding document,’ which only makes its stances seem weaker, in both theory and practice.

Whether the NEP as a whole manages to turn the tide of education in favour of those who need it the most, and is able to mobilise it as a tool for progress, presently seems more fantastical than plausible.

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