Most days, you can find Dayaram Kushwaha and his wife, Gyanvati, hauling bricks for stonemasons in a booming northern suburb of New Delhi. They bring their 5-year-old son, who plays in the dirt while they work.
FILE PHOTO: Dayaram Kushwaha, a migrant worker, carries his 5-year-old son, Shivam, on his shoulders as they walk along a road to return to their village, during a 21-day nationwide lockdown to limit the spreading of coronavirus, in New Delhi, India, March 26, 2020. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui
By dusk on the second day, Dayaram and around 50 others from his extended family had reached a deserted expressway running south out of the capital. Indian officials say the shutdown is necessary to beat coronavirus in the densely populated country of 1.3 billion people, with a health infrastructure that can ill afford a widespread outbreak.
Migrants are the backbone of the urban economy. Construction workers such as Dayaram are a necessity for India’s rapidly expanding cities. Others clean toilets, drive taxis and deliver takeout. They predominantly earn daily wages, with no prospect of job security, and live in dirty, densely populated slums, saving money to send back home.
After four days of walking and hitching lifts on a series of goods trucks, Dayaram, Gyanvati and Shivam reached their family’s two-room concrete hut in Jugyai, a farming village of 2,000 people. “It’s not that I love Delhi,” he said. “I need the money to survive. If we had it, we would have stayed here. This is home.”
It is early April, and even before the full onset of the fierce Indian summer, where temperatures climb toward 50 degrees Celsius, or 120 Fahrenheit, the air is already uncomfortably dry. Dayaram’s father, 58-year-old Takur Das, was the first in the family to set off for New Delhi in search for work when it became increasingly difficult to make a living off the parched land.
But after Shivam was born, they were faced with a choice: take Mangal, too, or leave him in the village. The family’s basket of lumpen potatoes would last a week. When that ran out, they would have to survive on bread alone.
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