Name: India migrant workers paid heaviest price for Covid crisis - BBC News
Uploaded: 2020-12-29T18:50:04.000Z
Duration: 3 min 34 s
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The men who keep India running laborers who do everything from constructing buildings to cleaning soon's.

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 right again hum cackle.

Should we steal money so we don't starve My now I often get work just one day a week, and I get paid less for it.

The fear of Contracting Cove, it 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 on.

Back in March, when the national lock down was announced with barely four ours notice, these people found themselves left rudderless without any support.

And so even as the Corona virus 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 it left daily wage workers in millions of them were left stranded with no jobs, money or food.

As weeks of locked down rolled into months, many were forced to walk hundreds of miles to their villages.

Oh, Sheela, Raja were was one of those who made the difficult journey back home.

Little there Waas on went to bed hungry on many days, so we went back to our village.

She has been forced to return to Mumbai onto 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 on basic supplies to the needy.

Arun Kumar, the head of a local NGO, told me.

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 our medical crisis became a humanitarian crisis tells us a lot about the kind off 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.