By Vaibhav Raghunandan Every Monday, at the break of dawn, Sneha’s husband leaves home to find work at a construction site in North Delhi. The walk, the queue, the competition means getting picked to work on a site for the week is a bit like buying into a lottery. Most Mondays, he wins, because he has fixed the game. The contractors and the foremen at most of the local sites
From debt to depression, the pandemic has hit India’s sex workers hard
Updated:
Updated:
July 03, 2021 12:16 IST
Since the pandemic broke, India’s roughly nine lakh female sex workers are out of work, steeped in debt, and at risk from the virus
Share Article
A sex worker receives a COVID-19 vaccine at Wadia Hospital in Mumbai.
| Photo Credit: PTI
Since the pandemic broke, India’s roughly nine lakh female sex workers are out of work, steeped in debt, and at risk from the virus
Sunita lives with her husband and son in a tiny room in a crowded Mumbai slum. Tin sheets make up the walls. A thin bedsheet, tightly tied across the room, acts as a partition between the kitchen and the rest of the house. Outside, a few yards away, is a common bathroom, which more than 200 people in the slum use. “Living here makes me anonymous. Mostly, I like that,” she says. Sunita has never invited her clients home.
January 22, 2021
In a nation roiled with socio-political anxieties, Covid-19 amplified our sense of impending doom: a quiet cough ringing alarm bells in our heads, while the morning news kept getting darker by the day. What is worse is that against a popular perception of the pandemic as a “great equaliser,” Covid-19 laid bare the differential vulnerabilities of the population.
Various gender and sexual minorities were among those that were exposed to precarity in ways that we often do not talk about. Many people have started asking how being locked in the spaces of domesticity might have impacted women, who often face abuse within those spaces. But there is little discourse on the impact these spaces have had on LGBTQIA individuals, many of whose lives are subject to increased supervision and regulation.