Coronavirus: Have you thought about your maid’s plight?

When the heartrending scenes of migrant labourers fleeing big cities -- either walking on foot or crowding into buses to take them back to their villages -- broke on news channels and newspapers, it was the most chilling turn to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The exodus included daily-wage earners and contract labour, like rickshaw-pullers, ragpickers, construction workers, factory workers, unskilled and semi-skilled workers and housemaids. With businesses downing their shutters, migrant workers had no source of income and no money to pay rent or buy food. According to the Census of 2011, there were more than 60 million migrant workers in our cities, including Bengaluru.

The government’s 21-day lockdown, now extended till May 3, imposed in the country to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, appeared almost futile as tens of thousands of panic-stricken migrant workers and their families poured out of the cities in an attempt to leave for their distant villages. Braving the risk of catching the virus in such close quarters, the migrant population laid all social distancing norms by the wayside.

On March 31, the Supreme Court heard a Public Interest Litigation on the plight of migrant workers. The petition sought relief for tens of thousands of migrant workers and directions to the government to ensure basic amenities like food, water, shelter and medical help to these jobless and homeless migrant workers, fleeing the cities during the lockdown.

Although the PIL also included housemaids in its petition, when issues concerning migrant labour is addressed, it’s usually the maids, cooks, drivers and other house help who fall through the cracks. As per the National Sample Survey (NSSO Statistics 2011-2012, 68th round) there were an estimated 3.9 million people employed as domestic workers by private households, of which 2.6 million are female domestic workers. Early last year, the Ministry of Labour & Employment was considering formulating a National Policy for Domestic Workers. This policy, still in its draft stage, was to guarantee them, among other things, minimum wages and social security.

Unlike daily wage labourers, or contract labour, who move their entire families where their work takes them, maids and other house help have to lay roots in the cities they work in. They live with their families in clusters around housing societies where they are employed.

In Bengaluru, on an average, maids work in three or four houses, dusting, sweeping, mopping, washing dishes and sometimes chopping vegetables or walking the dogs. In Mumbai, maids are known to work in eight to ten houses. While most maids are usually women, the cooks are from both genders. Cooks often work in anywhere between five to ten houses. With the flourishing of the IT industry and start-ups in Bengaluru, cooks are in high demand with young working people. Maids make around ₹12,000 to ₹15,000 a month and cooks sometimes work in five to eight houses and make nearly ₹18,000 to ₹25,000 a month. Then, there are the drivers, gardeners, ironing families, security staff etc., who are part of the well-oiled machinery behind our comfortable middle-class lives.

Many maids are the sole breadwinners for their families, raising their children alone and managing alcoholic husbands. They often have huge borrowings and local chit funds to service every month, for however hard they work, it’s never enough. For instance, in the tech city of Bengaluru, rents can range from ₹4,500 to ₹8,000 or more for a one-room tenement. Food and other essentials take up the rest of their monthly earnings. They are aspirational, as they should be, and have dreams for their children. So, they send their children to private English-medium schools. And these English-medium schools don’t come cheap -- fees, books, uniforms -- cost a lot of money. They usually borrow during the beginning of the school year to manage these expenses and end up in a vicious cycle of borrowing in the years after. For other exigencies like weddings and yearly festivals, there’s always the local, unorganised chit funds. It’s only in recent years that maids have opened bank accounts and have learnt to use e-wallets. Otherwise, most of them spend their cash before the month is out.

Sadly, given the above scenario, health comes last in their list of priorities. They have no contingency funds for any medical emergencies, including Covid-19.

As the lockdown creeps into early May, uncertainty faces the tens of thousands of housemaids and other house-staff employed in India’s middle-class homes. They not only stand to lose their livelihoods but are also at the risk of catching the coronavirus. They are vulnerable in more ways than one –- social distancing is a luxury in crowded one-tenement colonies. Add to that, little or no access to clean water, low hygiene and low immunity. Medical experts are already worried about the local spread of the virus, where millions of people live in dense urban neighbourhoods.

When the lockdown began on March 25, many housing societies took the call to send house-keeping staff home. Most employers covered their maids’ pay for the month of March. But, with the lockdown continuing through April, will their employers, be able to continue to cover their pay, if they are unable to return to their jobs? For, their employers might soon be staring at lay-offs themselves. Economists have already said the world is going into a recession, and no one knows how the Covid-19 pandemic is likely to pan out in the next few months, or how long these conditions will last.

(The writer is a journalist, storyteller and author)