Sudhir Paswan, 29, is back to square one--in his village in Bihar's Muzaffarpur district, counting his losses. It has been more than a week since he returned, after failing to secure a job in Delhi. A labourer who loaded and unloaded goods in Delhi's Okhla Industrial Area, he would earn between Rs 200 and Rs 700 a day. "Since the lockdown, there was no work and access to food and essentials became difficult. I had to leave the city," he said. Over 800,000 migrants left India's capital, for instance, for their hometowns in 2021. Paswan is just one of them.
Jobs have been hit harder since the lockdowns of 2021, put in place to control the second wave of Covid-19. May has shown double-digit unemployment figures, said Mahesh Vyas, chief executive officer of Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), a think-tank. "More than 97% of India's population became poorer compared to where they were in terms of income," he said. Its effect on the informal sector, which had barely recovered from the effect of the first lockdown in 2020, has been debilitating.