'How do I earn, what do I eat?'

“Nobody was ready to employ me. I took all the precautions, but they wouldn’t let me enter their homes,” says Jehedabi Sayed, 68, a domestic worker in Maharashtra’s Latur city. "I never took off this kapada [cloth mask], and followed all the rules like maintaining distance.”  

In April 2020, during the Covid-19 lockdown, four out of five families that Jehedabi had been working for told her to leave. “I was left with only one and they overburdened me with work.” 

Jehedabi has been a domestic worker for more than 30 years – many of them spent doing dishes and cleaning floors in the homes that closed their doors to her last year. She believes that her employers were influenced by the controversy surrounding the Tablighi Jamaat religious congregation at a Delhi mosque in March 2020, which had become a Covid-19 hotspot. “The whispers telling people to stay away from Muslims travelled like fire,” she remembers. “My son-in-law said I lost the jobs because of the Jamaat. But how am I related to it?” 

From earning Rs. 5,000 a month, Jehedabi’s income fell to Rs. 1,000 then. “Will the families who asked me to leave never call me back?" she asks. "I worked for them for many years and then, all of a sudden, they abandoned me and hired other women.” 

Her situation has hardly changed in year. “It has become even more bekaar [miserable],” says Jehedabi. In March 2021, she was working in three homes and earning Rs. 3,000 a month. But two of her employers let her go in April, when the second wave of Covid-19 started spreading across Maharashtra. “They said that I live in a slum and we don’t follow the rules [safety protocols] there.” 

So now, she’ll earn only Rs. 700 a month from her sole employer until she finds more work.

Making ends meet is tough for Gausiya even now. “I don’t have enough sewing work – just one customer in two weeks. Women are not coming to get anything stitched because of Covid. This is like a nightmare again,” she says. “Are we going to be trapped in this fear of corona and unemployment forever?”

In April 2020, Azubi Ladaph’s in-laws evicted her with her four children from their home. It happened a day after her husband, Imam Ladaph, died. “We lived in Umarga in a joint family with Imam’s parents and elder brother’s family,” she says. 

Imam, a daily wage earner, had been ill for a few months before his death. His kidneys were damaged from his alcohol addiction. So in February last year, Azubi, 38, left him behind in Umarga town and took her children with her to Pune to look for work.

She found work as a domestic helper, earning Rs. 5,000 a month. But when the Covid-19 lockdown began, she decided to leave the city with her children, of ages 10 to 14, and go to Naldurg village in Tuljapur taluk, where her parents live. She hoped to find some work there. “We started walking from Pune on March 27 last year and walked for nearly 12 days to reach Naldurg,” says Azubi. The distance is about 300 kilometres. “We barely ate a proper meal on the journey.” 

But when they reached Naldurg, they found out that Imam was critically ill. So Azubi and her children left immediately and started walking to Umarga, 40 kilometres from Naldurg. “Imam died that evening, after we reached,” she says. 

On April 12, with the help of their neighbours, Imam’s parents and brother forced Azubi and her children to leave. Her in-laws claimed that they were a health risk because they had come from Pune. “We took refuge in a local dargah that night and then went back to Naldurg,” says Azubi.

Her parents were in no position to look after Azubi and the children. Nazbunabi Dawalsab, Azubi’s mother, says, “Her father and I are daily wage labourers. We hardly find any work. The money we earn is not even sufficient for the two of us. We were helpless.” 

“I couldn’t trouble my parents with the burden of the five of us,” says Azubi. So she moved back to Umarga town in November. “I rented a room that costs me 700 rupees a month. I do dishes and wash clothes now, and earn Rs. 3,000 per month.” 

After her in-laws forced her out, local newspapers covered Azubi’s story. “I was not in a condition to speak. I can’t describe how traumatising it was,” she says. “Government officials and political leaders came to meet me at my mother’s place in Naldurg and promised financial help. But I still haven’t received any help.”

Neither Azubi nor Gausiya or Jehedabi have ration cards. They also don't have a bank account under the Jan Dhan scheme, the central government’s financial inclusion programme. Through a Jan Dhan bank account, they would have received Rs. 500 per month in the first three months of the lockdown (April-June 2020). “I can’t go to the bank and spend so much time there,” says Jehedabi, adding that she doesn't feel confident of receiving help there. The bank is three kilometres away from her house. 

Gausiya is eligible for Maharashtra government’s Sanjay Gandhi Niradhar Pension Scheme, through which widows, single women and orphans receive financial assistance. She gets Rs. 900 per month as pension, but only when it comes – she didn't receive it from January to August 2020. “It would have reduced my burden during the lockdown,” she says. She's been getting it off and on since then – in September and November 2020, then in February 2021. 

Social exclusion and the lack of financial support make survival a challenge for single women like Jehedabai and the others. “They are deprived of land and a house, and funding their children’s education is another cost burden. They have no savings. Unemployment during the lockdown led to starvation in such families,” says Dr. Shashikant Ahankari, chairperson of HALO Medical Foundation, based in Andur, Osmanabad district. The organisation works to strengthen rural healthcare and provides vocational training to single women in Marathwada.

The new wave of Covid-19 is intensifying the women's struggles. “Ever since I got married, everyday was a struggle to earn and feed children. The pandemic has been the worst time of my life,” says Jehedabi. And the lockdown makes it worse, says Gausiya. “Not this illness, but our everyday struggle during lockdown will kill us.”

This story is part of a series of 25 articles on livelihoods under lockdown, supported by the Business and Community Foundation.