DUTTA NAGAR, India (Reuters) – Until the end of March, Ashish Kumar helped make plastic chocolate boxes with Ferrero Rocher praline and plastic spoons with Kinder Joy eggs to remove milky caramel cream.
With a diploma in plastic mould technology, the 20-year-old had a foot on his chosen career ladder. His younger brother Aditya chose law, but Ashish had his sights set on plastic.
“I need to start my own business,” he said, explaining how he needs to recycle plastic to make products in his own factory.
The blockade of the coronavirus in India has ruined those plans. Educated but unemployed, Ashish Kumar is one of countless people around the world whose social progress has been halted by the new coronavirus that has inflamed more than two million people in India itself and turned the economy upside down. With it, the aspirations of millions of people fade.
For years, others in rural India have grown in prosperity and joined what economists call a growing average consumer elegance: those who earn more than $10 a day, according to some definitions. This organization has been the cornerstone of economic progression plans at the most populous moment in the world. In the COVID-19 pandemic, India’s economy is expected to contract by 4.5% this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. At least 400 million Indian workers are at risk of falling into poverty, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO).
Kumar is one of 131,000 people who, according to local authorities, have returned from paintings in India in Gonda, the northern state district of Uttar Pradesh that he left last June. Across the country, about 10 million people made a lot of time. and complicated trips back to the rural villages they had left behind. Some have returned to the cities, but many of those who returned the budget remain stuck in the countryside.
Working in a factory in Baramati, in the western state of Maharashtra, Kumar earned Rs 13,000 ($173) a month, more than double his father’s salary for a task at a cereal market near the village of Kumar in Uttar Pradesh, a giant agrarian state.Of this amount, the young man sent home about 9,000 rupees a month, much of which helped fund the education of his younger brother.
Not anymore. Once he was the caregiver of his family, he now has a monetary burden.
Kumar spends his time at his home in the village of Dutta Nagar, joking with his friends in the muddy backyard – they jokingly call it his “office” – in front of the ramshackle number one school where he studied.In Uttar Pradesh, some 60 million others people with more than 20 million people live in poverty, according to the World Bank.
He said it had been implemented for various jobs in plastics factories in western Gujarat and other parts of northern India, but had discovered work.
“Anyway,” he said, sitting near his parents’ single-storey house, surrounded by green jade rice paddies, “I want a job.”
As a schoolboy, Kumar became obsessed with plastics.
A possible verbal exchange with a cousin who had studied plastic engineering made him addicted, Kumar said, and began researching. In Dutta Nagar, where there was no internet connection, this meant asking one of the few locals with a smartphone on Google for opportunities.
Kumar’s ambitions were a world that got rid of his father Ashok’s early years. The 47-year-old, worried about weighing and putting a price on cereal crops, remembers when the family circle did not have enough food or proper clothing.
A slight man with a weather-beaten face, he never finished high school.
“I don’t think young people fall into our routine.They push the front,” he said.
Kumar, who claims that he has never tried a Praline by Ferrero Rocher, graduated from Gujarat last June and took advantage of the exercise to start running as a technician in an Italian factory 1,500 km from his home.
The plant used by it is managed through Dream Plast India, a subsidiary of Gruppo Sunino SpA, an Italian plastics manufacturer with 10 factories worldwide. “The first-class factory, ” said Kumar. His contract included a monthly contribution from the company to a pension fund and a bonus. The workers received one meal a day, the supervisors were friendly and paid on time, he said.
Six days a week, his task was to regularly supervise two machines and two contractors. At the end of the day, I would do it with a badminton game or watch the fight on YouTube.
His source of income from the previous year helped his parents build an authentic four-piece brick house, after decades of living in a dust hut where the roof let in heavy monsoon rains. He helped pay his brother’s registration fees at Bahraich Law School, an hour and a half’ drive from his village.
Then COVID-19 struck.
Kumar first heard about coronavirus in early March. When the closure of India forced Dream Plast India to close its Baramati plant on March 21, it had enough cash to wait for it in the city.
As the pandemic spread across India, a survey of some 5,000 employees in April and May found that 66% of participants had lost their jobs and 77% of families ate fewer food than before. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has announced 20 trillion rupees. pack that promises loose rice, wheat and legumes for millions more people and a rural task creation program.
Even for those who work, industry unions and labour experts say the situation is deteriorating, especially for migrants.
In May, India’s state governments issued health and safety guidelines for factories as they re-opened after lockdown, which included compulsory face masks, thermal screening, social distancing and frequent sanitisation. Union leaders allege many companies did not follow all protocols and cut corners, but they have not identified Kumar’s.
Indian states, which added Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat, said in May that they were trying to roll back workers’ rights, adding debilitating regulations on wages and hours of operation to the industry. The proposal generated complaints from workers’ unions and the ILO. The amendments have only entered into force in some states.
The Kumar plant, which reopened in early May, did not respond to a query about the measures taken in that country, however, Dream Plast India’s executive leader, Nitin Gupta, said in an email that “the corporation takes every precaution to comply with the legislation.” at all times.” He refused to give additional details.
Even so, Kumar and another worker Reuters spoke to said they didn’t feel safe to return.
Ferrero SpA, the Italian pastry chef, said he had audited the factory where Kumar was working in March 2020 and did not discover any irregularities, but would review in the following months.
Reuters was unable to independently determine what safety measures the factory took.
By early June, Kumar’s budget had run out.Even buying food is hard.
His parents were worried. “No matter how ineffective he had here in the bank, I sent him a little so he could eat,” his father, Ashok, said. “At the time, I was very frightened. The biggest challenge for him was to move home.
The Indian rail network reopened in early May. On June 3, Kumar borrowed cash to pay for a 48-hour house by train, bus and shared taxi.He then went into quarantine for 14 days.
On June 25, Dream Plast India sent him an email, which he noticed through Reuters, asking him to show up for paintings within 4 days or face dismissal. Instead, he resigned on July 20.
His parents feared that he would leave the space again, saying they understood that without the income of his eldest son, his younger brother could not finish his law school.
Kumar is not in a position to leave his plastics factory.
“I will, ” he said. “Whatever it takes, I’ll make my dream come true.”
Reporting through Saurabh Sharma and Devjyot Ghoshal; Edited through Sara Ledwith
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