Although the coronavirus pandemic's toll has been much lower,
there are grim parallels.
When the bubonic
plague arrived on ships in 1896, death and fear emptied half of Mumbai. Ensuing
labour shortages devastated the city’s cotton mills, the mainstay of the
contemporary economy.
Although the coronavirus pandemic’s toll has been much lower, there are grim parallels. Almost a million workers who built Mumbai’s skyline — from the Trump Tower to skyscrapers owned by global firms such as Blackstone Group LP on erstwhile mill land — have fled to their native villages, short of money after a stringent government lockdown brought the economy to a standstill.
A plague-era law
is being used to draft doctors into the coronavirus fight, and calls are
increasing to decongest infection hotspots including Asia’s most crowded slum.
A megapolis of
about 20 million, few cities face the reckoning around labor and life that Mumbai
must now contend with. When authorities resumed some public transport on
Monday, television channels showed dozens of people rushing to board a bus, a
sign of how desperate residents are to return to their livelihoods even as the
city remains India’s Covid-19 epicenter.
Six Mumbaikars,
as the city’s residents are known, share how the virus has changed their lives
and workspaces:
The Union
Leader:
J R Bhosale, 79,
has seen a lot during his six decades with Mumbai’s railways. A labor strike in
1974 — the world’s largest recorded industrial action — suspended services for
20 days and terrorist bombs in 2006 kept trains quiet for 24 hours.
Yet, under the
lockdown, passenger services have been halted for more than two months.
Authorities are concerned about the risk of contagion because on a typical day
trains run so crowded that latecomers would hang out of doorways.
