Before the coronavirus pandemic, Mohammad Aamir was one of tens of thousands of people making a living in the Indian capital as a taxi driver. Now his days are spent transporting corpses from the hospital to cremation pyres and cemeteries
Mohammad Aamir Khan, an ambulance driver, wears his personal protective equipment at a mortuary, before transporting bodies of people who died of the coronavirus disease , to a graveyard in New Delhi, India, June 8, 2020. REUTERS/Danish SiddiquiBefore the novel coronavirus brought its pandemic to New Delhi, Aamir was one of tens of thousands of people making a living in the Indian capital as a taxi driver.
Sometimes he is alone in his ambulance and must rely on the relatives of the dead to help him lift the body from the back of the vehicle. Sometimes he has to lift them himself. Unlike in many other countries badly hit by the virus, ambulance drivers and other vital health workers in India are poorly paid, have minimum training, no health insurance and long working hours. Cases in India are surging, with nearly 323,000 infected, four times that of China’s official infections. The peak is still weeks, if not months, away, experts say, even as the government eased almost all curbs on movement on June 8.
Sometimes, he was able to save as much as 1,000 Indian rupees per day after expenses – enough for him and his wife, Rubi, to enroll their 7-year-old daughter, Hamda, at a local private school. “They still think I am unemployed,” said Aamir, who doesn’t even have the comfort of his wife and child during this time of global troubles. They left to visit the family’s ancestral village days before the lockdown and haven’t been able to return.
Over the last month, a patch of waste ground outside the main cemetery has filled with the bodies of coronavirus victims. Broken bits of slate and twigs mark the graves. Others are unmarked altogether. Half of the electric ovens were broken, and men in vests heaved firewood up to the open pits where the bodies of coronavirus victims are now cremated.
“There is no dignity. It is like a dustbin,” said Devinder Sharma, a neighbor who had come to help Singh’s sons.
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