From debt to depression, the pandemic has hit India’s sex workers hard

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. Now, however, Sunita, whose sex work supports 11 members of her family back home in Bihar, has no other choice. With lodges closed and all local transport shut down over the past four months, she has been forced to bring home the only two clients she could retain. “My neighbours stare at me every time I step out,” she says, but her bigger fear is that the landlord might ask her to vacate. Sunita is one of nine lakh female sex workers in India, according to the National AIDS Control Organisation, a division of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Of the 62,137 transgender persons in 17 States, 62% also engage in sex work. Sex work has almost come to a standstill since March 2020; the pandemic has hit the community hard and in multiple ways. Everything from debt and depression to the risk of contracting COVID-19 plagues sex workers in the country.