When Narendra Modi imposed a lockdown on March 24 last year to prevent the spread of Covid-19, it had a brutal impact on millions of India’...
When Narendra Modi imposed a lockdown on March 24 last year to prevent the spread of Covid-19, it had a brutal impact on millions of India’s informal workers. Left overnight without the daily-wage jobs that sustained them, many of them did not have the documents necessary to access social security benefits – most notably, subsidised food through the public distribution system.
Among them was Madhumita, a migrant worker from Uttar Pradesh’s Sultanpur, who lives in Ahmedabad. “We had to mortgage our jewellery,” she said.”We have not yet recovered it six months on. Work is not regularly available and buying food and other daily essentials is becoming expensive. We even have to buy drinking water.’
A year later, a survey of 120 people in Ahmedabad by the Aajeevika Bureau, which works with migrant workers, reiterated that the public distribution system could play a key role in improving access to food for India’s poor – especially in times of crisis.
The study found that migrant workers, who were unable to access the public distribution system because their documents were not valid in the city in which they had found temporary work, are the most severely vulnerable in the age of Covid-19.
Staying put
While the Covid-19 second wave has resulted in the Gujarat government...
