Arun Kumar speaks to Firstpost on why it is imperative to bring in the urban poor especially women into the social security net. India’s millions of migrant workers share a common predicament: they lack a political voice. The disenfranchisement of many of India’s urban poor has been a means of keeping labour vulnerable and cheap.
This Scroll article talks about how the virus is not the biggest fear for a vast section of India’s population. For informal workers and the urban poor, the scariest part of this second wave is the possibility of another lockdown.
Apnalaya CEO, Arun Kumar, and Diskha Shriyan write for Scroll, where they talk about how the Covid-19 lockdown wiped out incomes in Mumbai’s Shivaji Nagar slums, bringing greater debt and food insecurity for the urban poor.
Arun Kumar speaks about how daily wagers have no savings because they went through a lockdown last year, as the pandemic set off a wave of unemployment and hunger. He also mentions of how NGOs have exhausted their funds as most donations went towards the health infrastructure.
Arun Kumar talks to Mumbai Mirror about how the urban poor, who have worked in Mumbai for years, do not have the means to buy food for their family even for a week. “Then, there is something seriously wrong with the kind of society we have formed and the economy we run.”
Arun Kumar and Poornima Nair speak to The Wire about the impact of the Covid-19 lockdown on the residents of the city’s M East ward: from forcing expecting mothers to give birth at homes to the shuttering of immunisation services and more.
Arun Kumar and Raghunandan Hegde in conversation with Hindustan Times talk about the Apnalaya study, which found that of 619 people, around 12% of the respondents had to borrow money to buy water, and 42% needed a loan to buy rations.
