JAIPUR / GADAG / ADILABAD / MAHABUBNAGAR / NAGAPATTINAM / RANCHI: Ramavatar Singh, 35, stands out as the odd one out among the 100-plus labourers working on a well under an unrelenting summer sun in Jobner, 70 km from Jaipur. While the other labourers comprising mainly women and a handful of men appear rustic, under-fed, sporting rubber slippers and lungis, Singh is tall, well built, clad in a shirt and trouser and clearly not village-bred.
Singh led a rather comfortable life, earning Rs 15,000 a month as a private school teacher in Jobner. That is, until Covid-19 struck and a lockdown was ordered on March 25. A postgraduate in political science, he was sacked from his job and has been unpaid since. At first, Singh managed with the meagre savings he had, but when the cash dried up and there was no one to borrow money from, he enrolled himself as a worker under the MGNREGA.
“After the lockdown, the school authorities refused to pay salary and dismissed me. With all factories and markets closed, I had no choice but to work under the MGNREGA to earn money,” he said.Singh is not the only qualified worker forced into manual labour to make both ends meet. From Rajasthan and Jharkhand to Karnataka and Telangana, there are many like Singh toiling as labourers constructing roads, bridges, check dams and tilling land. Lumping their pride, they have no qualms about doing manual work to feed their hungry families.
As the MGNREGA guarantees everyone holding a job card 100 days of work, the rural job scheme has come as a godsend for the newly-unemployed. Workers are paid Rs 202 a day, up from Rs 182 before the Covid19 lockdown.
Giving Singh company is Sita Verma, a 30-year-old arts graduate whose postgraduate husband Shanker Lal was a school teacher. Lal lost his job and the desperate couple had no income. Sita finally turned to MGNREGA on May 16 to feed her little children.
“I am doing such manual labour for the first time in my life, that too in this heat. As my husband has not been paid since March, I had no choice but to get a job card made,” she said.
A few kilometres away at Aasalpur village is Sakaram Jat, 36, a double MA. He used to teach school students up to Class X but has been not been since March. He, too, has been reduced to becoming a manual labourer at an MGNREGA site.
“I have no other source of income as the school where I worked has not paid me a penny for three months,” he said.
Sadanand Mukkannavar in Karnataka’s Gadag district was a maintenance engineer in Bengaluru, earning Rs 50,000 a month. When the virus struck, his company showed him the door, asking him to return only after the disease abates.
Sadanand now works at a farm in the Kadadi gram panchayat limits under the MGNREGA. “I cannot sit idle so I started working on a daily wage basis. It may take 4-5 months to rejoin duty so something is better than nothing,” he said.
S Thangapandiyan, 40, in Tamil Nadu’s Nagapattinam district was a sales representative-cum-supervisor at a popular textile shop in Tiruvarur. He was laid off when the shop closed on March 25. With a wife and two children to feed, he has turned to MGNREGA work to keep the home fires burning.
“I am educated up to Class X. I worked in a textile shop for over 20 years. My company terminated me recently citing loss of business due to the lockdown. I have a wife and two children to take care of so I have come for wages under the MGNREGA,” he said.
S Thangapandiyan, 40, in Tamil Nadu’s Nagapattinam district was a sales representative-cum-supervisor at a popular textile shop in Tiruvarur. He was laid off when the shop closed on March 25. With a wife and two children to feed, he has turned to MGNREGA work to keep the home fires burning.
“I am educated up to Class X. I worked in a textile shop for over 20 years. My company terminated me recently citing loss of business due to the lockdown. I have a wife and two children to take care of so I have come for wages under the MGNREGA,” he said.
Sirigiri Ravi of Adilabad in Telangana is a trained videographer. Wedding shoots used to keep him busy in the summer months and he would earn up to Rs 2 lakh. But not this season as the lockdown has led to many weddings being cancelled or postponed.
He now ekes out a living doing odd jobs under the rural job scheme. “My bad luck was that just before the lockdown, I purchased a new video camera worth Rs 1.5 lakh. I have not used it once, it has become a dead investment,” he said.
Hanumanthu in Mahabubnagar district has also been working as a labourer since the lockdown. He was a lecturer at a private college, earning Rs 10,000 monthly. But with the college shut, he found refuge in MGNREGA to survive. “I came back to my native village as my college shut down. I could not get a job so I am doing manual work. I get Rs 202 per day but anything is better than nothing,” he said.
Santosh Kumar Ray, 30, of Jharkhand’s Giridih district finds himself in the same boat. Until the lockdown, he used to be a cook at Chennai’s Dialogue in the Dark, a multi-city chain of restaurants. With the restaurant shut he returned to his village and is now working as a labourer. “I used to earn Rs 20,000 a month, besides getting free food and lodging in Chennai. I had to return home after the restaurant was closed. After remaining jobless for around a month, I had no option but to take up a job under the MGNREGA in my village,” Rai said.
No official data is available on the current rate of unemployment. But the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy, a private think-tank, has estimated it to be as high as 23.5% in May.