A little over a year ago, the world was hit by the coronavirus pandemic. A nationwide lockdown was imposed in India on March 24, 2020. With...
A little over a year ago, the world was hit by the coronavirus pandemic. A nationwide lockdown was imposed in India on March 24, 2020. Within weeks, millions of urban poor left the cities to return to their homes, using any available means of transport. Many of them walked hundreds of miles. Many couldn’t survive the journey.
Even today, the first images that India associates with Covid-19 are not ventilators or ICUs, but labourers trudging back to their villages with little or no money, lugging their belongings. It is estimated that in the first wave, almost 10 million people returned to their villages, half a million of them walking or bicycling.
The lockdown resulted in tremendous loss of jobs and incomes. The extent of loss of livelihoods in urban areas was witnessed in the latest round of the Periodic Labour Force Survey wherein the urban unemployment rate for the population above the age of 15 stood at 20.8%. Findings of Pew research show that about 13.2 million people have fallen off the middle class bracket and the number of poor in India has increased by 75 million. Given the rate at which people are migrating to cities, what is in store for the crores of workers...
