Socio-economic linkages of COVID -19 Pandemic

Abstract

Despite being collective human tragedies on exceptional scales, the pandemics due to their long
recurrence periods generally remain marginalized in the mainstream discourse of human geography.
Throughout history, it has taken an overwhelming pandemic like COVID-19 or the Spanish u at the
beginning of the last century to bring the academic discussion on pandemics to the centre stage. Due to
compartmentalization of thought, the socioeconomic linkages of pandemic largely remain obscure to the
common people and even intellectuals engaged in other disciplines. The paper outlines how
overexploitation of the earth resources through commodity supply chains is responsible for the spread of
the COVID-19 pandemic all over the world. The reckless plunder of remotest countryside and forests by
the neoliberal economy essentially works at valorization of the capital by over exploiting both nature and
people in the global South, to siphon all the surplus-value to the global North through complex chains of
commodity circuits. The neoliberal socio-economic structure is even otherwise virtually free in principle
not to take any responsibility for either the health or employment of the majority of common people. Once
the world is overtaken by the pandemic this lack of responsibility becomes glaring. The suggestions for
creating an infrastructure for health services made shortly before the Indian independence that was
followed in the initial decades after 1947 have now been relegated to the background with the private
sector making ever more inroads in the health sector, further depriving the common man of the minimal
requisite medical facilities. As the COVID-19 pandemic has brought out the real face of the existing socioeconomic structure in its failure and refusal to assume any responsibility for the basic needs of the people
like food and shelter, the time is ripe to contemplate better alternative systems that could be more pro-people