CHENNAI — During the COVID-19 pandemic, frontline workers are keeping the country running, putting their own health and safety at risk. And yet, despite the sacrifice — and the public recognition they have received for their work – their struggles for fair pay continue.
Grave diggers haven’t received the pandemic hazard pay they were promised. Sanitation workers are facing arbitrary pay cuts and unpaid time off to make up for lack of revenue. Doctors haven’t received their full salaries. And for farmers, the economic fallout has been staggering.
Nasir Khan, 38, leaves home at 5 a.m. to reach Bhopal’s Jhada Kabristan, where he wields his shovel and keeps digging graves until the familiar hearse van of the Bhopal Municipal Corporation (BMC) can be seen at a distance. At that point, Nasir starts donning a PPE kit. Once the van has arrived, the next two hours are charted out for Nasir, who has been a grave digger since the age of 10. Since the lockdown, Nasir and five other grave diggers have done the final rites of 90 bodies but have been paid for only four.
Earlier, they would receive Rs 1,700 inclusive ($22.70) of the cost of materials required for a funeral from family members of the deceased, and this amount would be divided among them. But with COVID-19, this source of income had been wiped out. Following the first phase of lockdown, the BMC had announced that graveyard workers would be paid Rs 5,000 ($66.80) for every dealing with coronavirus-infected corpses.
Nasir lives walking distance from the cemetery with his parents, wife and four children, but on most nights, the grave digger just sleeps in the burial ground, located in Jahangirabad, a COVID-19 hotspot in the city.
Each day, the workers race against time as every grave takes at least four to five hours to be dug. On May 6, the graveyard received six corpses at a time. Since then, the cemetery workers have kept at least 10 graves ready in advance. As per World Health Organization guidelines, graves for coronavirus victims have to be dug 6 feet deep, at the minimum.
“We don’t know the COVID-19 status as the bodies come in airtight double plastic packing. We do the namaz and try to swiftly carry out the final rites and issue a certificate to the BMC worker or the family member of the deceased,” says Rehan Ahmad, chairman of the cemetery’s management committee.
On June 12, Nasir buried Gaffar Bhai, a fellow grave digger, who had gone home the previous night, developed chest pain and died on the way to the hospital. “To dig a grave for one among us had been gut wrenching,” Nasir says. “We will never know whether he had coronavirus, but his family didn’t receive any help from the government.”
