Kasaragod: At 4.30 am on Thursday, an orthopaedic surgeon from Nileshwar packed his family into their car and drove to Goa. By 10.30 am, he reached his destination -- far from the shuttered shops and silent streets back home.

Around the same time, nearly 50 employees of a supermarket in Kanhangad hired a bus to Mysuru for a day’s outing. Trains to Mangaluru carried not just regular office-goers and students, but also midweek leisure-seekers making the most of the shutdown.

“It is a Bharat Bandh, but it feels like an only-Kerala bandh,” said the manager of the supermarket chain whose employees left for Mysuru. “There is no shutdown anywhere else. The loss is only for businesses in Kerala and Kerala's workers.” His staff on the excursion would not receive wages for the day, he said. “No government has reversed labour laws because of a one-day token protest,” he said.

Central trade unions and major farmers’ organisations had called the nationwide bandh to protest the new labour codes and the India-US trade deal, arguing that both would hurt workers and farmers. In Kerala, however, the economic reverberations were immediate and measurable.

Industry bodies estimate that the State could lose around ₹2,600 crore in a single day. Explaining the numbers, A K Shyamprasad, Chairman of the North Malabar Chamber of Commerce, said, Kerala’s economy is estimated at ₹16 lakh crore annually. Spread across 365 days, that translates to roughly ₹4,300 crore worth of daily economic activity.

However, no hartal is total, not even in Kerala, he said. Essential services function. IT companies log in from home. Farmers hit the fields. Healthcare remains officially exempt. Consumers adjust by buying in advance or postponing discretionary spending. "We should assume about 40% of activity continues, and the effective disruption would be around 60% of daily output," said Shyamaprasad, who runs a civil construction business. That works out to approximately ₹2,600 crore. To put that number in perspective, the state borrows around ₹2,000 crore a month to meet its expenses.

The State's revenue losses include roughly ₹174 crore in tax revenue, ₹30 crore in lottery sales, and ₹52 crore in liquor sales. KSRTC reported revenue losses of about ₹6 crore.

But macro numbers conceal the worker's stories. Shyamprasad himself had scheduled a concrete pour involving 700 sacks of cement on Thursday. The work was postponed. About 40 workers lost ₹36,000 in wages for the day. “We can argue they will earn it tomorrow,” he said. “But that is tomorrow’s wage.”

Health sector is exempted. Really?
There is a widespread perception that healthcare is insulated from hartals. The reality is different. M K Sebastian, owner of KDC Labs with six diagnostic centres in and around Kanhangad, said he incurred a loss of around ₹3 lakh on Thursday.

“On a normal day, we see about 250 clients across our six centres by 10 am. On the hartal day, only 20 turned up, just 10 at our main lab in Kanhangad, where we would typically see around 100 by that time,” he said.

With fewer patients, the lab had to give leave to nearly half its staff. Yet fixed costs continued: salaries, rent, electricity, air-conditioning, and the constant hum of laboratory freezers storing samples and reagents.

“You cannot switch off the freezers,” he said. “Only the customers are missing.”

“Reagents account for 35% of our running costs — more than salaries or the power bill. Around 20% of the reagents opened on Wednesday will go unused because of the hartal and will expire by Friday. That will further increase our reagent costs,” he said. Sebastian's lab processes samples from 130 hospitals and small labs across Kasaragod district.

Healthcare may be categorised as “essential", but in accounting terms, diagnostic centres bleed on a shutdown day.

Rollercoaster retail
A supermarket chain operating in Kannur and Kasaragod districts said one of its outlets was incurring monthly losses of ₹2 lakh to ₹3 lakh.

“From outside, it looks glitzy. People assume we are minting money. But after Onam, sales have been sluggish,” said a store manager.

A typical Thursday sees around 600 customers; weekends see nearly 1,000. “So we effectively lost business from 600 customers,” he said. Retail in smaller towns now follows a festival-driven cycle, he added.

A textile chain manager with outlets in Kasaragod, Kannur and Palakkad said sales in tier III towns, unlike in big cities, spike only around major occasions -- weddings, Christmas, Onam, Eid.

“All textile shops have stocked up for Ramzan, which is starting February 17. Many customers prefer to shop before the fasting month begins. A hartal today hurts us more than on an ordinary day,” he said.

Some chains open branches in smaller towns as clearance centres, moving unsold inventory from bigger cities. "But people don't have much money in hand," he said.

Meanwhile, just across the border in Mangaluru, life appeared uninterrupted. Sebastian, who lives there, reported crowded malls and busy bars. Many customers, he said, were from Kasaragod. “People here do not even know there is a Bharat Bandh,” he said.

The supermarket manager said even though Karnataka is ruled by an opposition party, it does not shut down on a bandh day like in Kerala. “Malayalis just have to hear ‘ha’, and the party starts,” he said, only half in jest.

Shyamprasad agreed. Wednesday evening, he stopped at a chicken shop near his home at Maipady, about 7 km from Kasaragod town. “I didn’t get any,” he said. “It was over by the time I reached the shop.”