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Sex workers from across the country recount how they have been ignored, overcharged and ill treated, particularly by government hospital doctors and staff.
Durbar, a project started to protect sex workers in 1992, by being physically and spatially rooted in the Sonagachi brothel space, is a movement where the gaze is that of an insider, and a testament to lived realities.
From debt to depression, the pandemic has hit India’s sex workers hard
Updated:
Updated:
July 03, 2021 12:16 IST
Since the pandemic broke, India’s roughly nine lakh female sex workers are out of work, steeped in debt, and at risk from the virus
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A sex worker receives a COVID-19 vaccine at Wadia Hospital in Mumbai.
| Photo Credit: PTI
Since the pandemic broke, India’s roughly nine lakh female sex workers are out of work, steeped in debt, and at risk from the virus
Sunita lives with her husband and son in a tiny room in a crowded Mumbai slum. Tin sheets make up the walls. A thin bedsheet, tightly tied across the room, acts as a partition between the kitchen and the rest of the house. Outside, a few yards away, is a common bathroom, which more than 200 people in the slum use. “Living here makes me anonymous. Mostly, I like that,” she says. Sunita has never invited her clients home.
“What is a worker supposed to do when he or she is told, after hours of queuing in an overcrowded bank, ‘your account has been closed from the back-end, now move on please’,” asks Jean Dreze who has spent decades working with India’s poorest people