Across India, meanwhile, critically ill virus patients are being turned away from public and private hospitals for lack of beds, staff and equipment, as healthcare systems buckle under the pressure of the escalating pandemic.

Bachchan's treatment threw into sharp relief India's stark wealth divide -- which the coronavirus pandemic has at times made a matter of life or death.

While more than 270 million people across India were able to climb out of poverty between 2006 and 2016, the country remains one of the world's most unequal, with the top 10% of the population holding 77% of the total national wealth -- and that gap only continues to widen, according to Oxfam.

India is on course to reach 1 million confirmed Covid-19 cases in the coming days and it is the country's most marginalized who are suffering the most from the devastating economic toll of lockdowns and job losses.

As well as unequal access to healthcare, for those who live shoulder to shoulder in overcrowded urban slums -- about 74 million people -- social distancing is impossible. There is little running water or sanitation, putting them at greater risk of contacting the virus.

While India's rich can buy better healthcare and isolate more easily, with the country's borders closed and international flights mostly canceled, they too have to stay and face the crisis.

As the pandemic holds up a mirror up to society, experts say India's rich need to evaluate how the country depends on and treats informal laborers who make up the majority of the country's workforce.

Everything from employment rights, access to good education and health care and welfare is suddenly under the microscope.

About 60% of India's 1.3 billion people are considered poor, with about 21% surviving on $2 a day. They often work as unskilled or daily-wage laborers in various industries such as farming or construction. In major cities, they make up a workforce of rickshaw pullers, street and drain cleaners, vegetable sellers, delivery boys, and domestic workers.

"Nine out of ten people are in informal work and it's not that we don't see them," said Harsh Mander, an Indian human rights activist and author. "They're everywhere and yet we never look at them as human beings, we look them as labor that is available at cheap and affordable prices to make our lives comfortable."

When the help stops

Because of the lockdown, for the first time many middle and upper class Indians, who rely on an army of maids, cooks, cleaners, drivers and gardeners, are having to cook their own food, clean their own houses, and take out their own trash.

"Our reliance is huge, every household, even a middle class household, has a maid coming to clean utensils, or to wash clothes, every single day of the year," said Sayli Udas-Mankikar, senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in Mumbai. "You can ask any Indian today and they will say I'm struggling with housework because you have never done that."

Some say the lockdown has give

Wakanda News Details

Pandemic-hit restaurants must also battle no-shows

You may also like

Random Facts

Business Facts

Sports Facts