In Ahmedabad’s upmarket Paldi area, 41-year-old Jaswant Parmar has been noticing a dip in the city’s sanitation workforce during his daily door-to-door waste collection rounds, which begins at 7am.
A huge proportion of the solid waste staff join work via a migration trail that traces back to Jhabua in Madhya Pradesh, roughly 250 km away. “They (sanitation workers) began leaving two days after the lockdown.
Now, some of the men are coming back, but the women aren’t," Parmar said. During the lockdown, local daily wage labourers and construction workers stepped in to clear the waste since the rest of the economy was shut and no work was available, said Meghna Malhotra of Urban Management Centre, which acts as a consultant to the Ahmedabad