- Tuesday, March 04, 2025
By: Pramod Kumar
RASHEEDA JALEEL lives in fear that she may not be able to feed her seven children as millions of Indian families are forced into poverty by a devastating new coronavirus wave.
The 40-year-old, her husband Abdul Jaleel, 65, and the children already survive on just one meal a day.
“When we are hungry and thirsty, I feel very helpless and worry, ‘How am I going to survive like this?'” Jaleel told AFP as she made roti — flatbread — for the solitary meal in their tiny New Delhi flat.
“We manage with whatever my husband is able to earn. If it’s not enough, I stay hungry so I can feed my children.”
The coronavirus has killed 160,000 in eight weeks, overwhelmed hospitals and shut many businesses in India. Experts warn that another crisis is looming, with rising levels of hunger among poor Indians already reeling from a first lockdown last year.
“It’s a double crisis that the poor in the country are facing –- there is the health crisis and there is also an income economic crisis,” Anjali Bhardwaj from the Right to Food Campaign told AFP.
About 230 million Indians fell into poverty — defined as living on less than Rs 375 ($5) per day — in the first year of the pandemic, according to a study by Bangalore’s Azim Premji University.
Millions of jobs lost
More than 7.3 million jobs were lost in April alone, according to the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy. That means more pain in a country where 90 per cent of the workforce is in the informal sector with no social safety net, and where millions do not qualify for emergency government rations.
“A lot of people went into poverty last year, they went into debt, and… they had to cut back on food consumption,” Associate Professor Amit Basole, one of the university study’s authors, told AFP.
Abdul Jaleel turned to peddling a rickshaw to feed his family after his construction work dried up during a fresh Delhi lockdown.
Previously up to Rs 500 ($7) a day, his income is now as little as Rs 100.
“And on some days, I don’t make anything. As parents, we will have to make ends meet somehow, whether we beg, borrow or steal. We have no choice,” he said.
In last year’s lockdown, about 100 million people lost their jobs in India. After restrictions were lifted, around 15 per cent failed to find employment by the end of 2020 — including 47 per cent of female workers, the Azim Premji University study found.
Many who returned to work had to settle for lower pay, leaving them more vulnerable when the second wave hit.
Meanwhile an estimated 100 million Indians, including the Jaleels, have no ration cards to give them access to government food aid, Bhardwaj said.
Bhupinder Singh, a micro-financier who has distributed food to the needy during the two lockdowns, has seen desperation rise among hundreds of unemployed men sleeping rough beside a busy Delhi highway.
When he arrives with food packets, a cry of excitement goes up and men run to the back of his car and form a long queue.
“People are stuck here out of helplessness. If they come with food, we get to eat… If they don’t come, we’ll stay hungry,” Sunil Thakur, 50, who lost his job as a hotel waiter during the lockdown, told AFP.
