I am Pavitra Uikey, a 35-year-old migrant worker working in Bangalore, India’s financial hub. When the coronavirus scare engulfed our country in the middle of March, we had a foreboding that people like us, who work in the informal sector, would be worst hit.
I’m a carpenter in a furniture workshop. In early March, my employer said that the government might announce a lockdown soon. A stone’s throw from the workshop is the giant Mysore factory that employs hundreds of migrants. Every day, I watched dozens of them leaving to go home to their villages.
That was the wise thing to do. A lockdown would deprive us of our wages, and with little or no savings, we would be stranded without food or the means to get home. Our landlord might forcibly evict us if we failed to pay the rent.
