the men who keep
india running labourers who do
everything
from constructing buildings to cleaning
sewers
they come to cities from rural india in
search of work every morning
they wait at street corners for
contractors
who might have a job for them but the
pandemic
has struck a hard blue
do we put in our stomachs
we're going hungry there's no work
available
should we steal money so we don't starve
now i often get work just one day a week
and i get paid less for it
another man said the fear of contracting
kovid
is eclipsed by the battle for survival
here in one of mumbai's poorest areas
it's in urban slums like these that the
people who build
the cities live and back in march when
the national lockdown was announced
with barely four hours notice
these people found themselves left
rudderless without
any support and so even as the
coronavirus spread rapidly through the
country
for many of us the enduring image of
what the pandemic did to india
will be of the plight that had left
daily wage workers in
millions of them were left stranded
with no jobs money or food
as weeks of lockdown rolled into months
many were forced to walk hundreds of
miles to their villages
some even died along the way
sheila rajwar was one of those who made
the difficult journey back home
i feed my children whatever little there
was and went to bed hungry on many days
so we went back to our village but even
there we could barely manage
she's been forced to return to mumbai
and to this job
where she shreds old clothes for a
recycling factory
worried about where her family's next
meal will come from
in the first few months of the pandemic
hundreds of organizations stepped in
to distribute food and basic supplies to
the needy
that's now dried up arun kumar
the head of a local ngo told me there
isn't money
there is no business so there is no
saving where are people going to get
money to kind of share it with others
the fact that a medical crisis
became a humanitarian crisis tells us a
lot about the kind of institutions
that we have with a large population
it could take years for india to get a
grip on the virus a long wait
for return to normal life and
livelihoods
yogurt bbc news mumbai
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