Orphaned by the pandemic, let down by government

In late 2019, 30-year-old Kumod Mandal travelled from Bihar’s Araria district to Jammu and Kashmir to work at a construction site. For a year, he earned Rs 12,000 per month and sent most of the income home to his wife Babitadevi, three children and parents.

When the first wave of Covid-19 struck India in 2020 and a punishing lockdown was imposed, he could not return home. “The roads were closed,” said Babitadevi. “He died there.”

After her husband’s death, Babitadevi began to work as a daily-wage labourer, earning Rs 150 to Rs 200 a day, which is her source of livelihood even now.

Her three children study at a government school, where they get one free meal a day, thanks to the government mid-day meal programme.

“If Papa was alive, we could think of a private school,” said Mandal’s eldest son, who is 10 years old. “Now we will have to make do with a government school.”

In 2021, a year after Mandal died, the Bihar government announced a monthly aid of Rs 1,500 for children who lost both parents or an earning parent to Covid-19. The central government also announced an ex gratia compensation of Rs 50,000 to the kin of those who died of the virus through the State Disaster Response Fund.

But in the five years since, Babita Devi’s family has received no assistance from either the state or the central government.

Jaynarayan Paswan, an activist with Jan Jagran Shakti Sangathan in Laxmipur village where Babitadevi stays, said the family applied for the aid. “We don’t know why they have not started receiving benefits,” he told Scroll.

Babitadevi said she is unlettered and does not know how to pursue government officials. But she is intent on not letting her children drop out of school. “Mein nahi chahti mere bachhe itni choti umar me kaam kare.” I don’t want my children to start working at this young age.

So, she goes out every day, looking for wage work.

Babita Devi and her children are not alone.

In June 2020, Ghulam Siddiqui, who ran a tiny utensils store in Mumbai’s Nagpada, was admitted to a hospital with a complaint of a fever. A day later, he succumbed to Covid-19. He left behind a seven-month-pregnant wife and an eight-year-old son.

The children are eligible for aid under the Maharashtra government’s Bal Sangopan Yojana. But five years on, the two children are yet to receive any financial assistance.

Six years after the Covid-19 epidemic, several children who lost a parent to Covid-19 continue to struggle for aid and education.

Scroll found that the implementation of schemes announced five years ago to support children is patchy and erratic. In some cases, eligible children received no aid, and in most cases the money is being transferred after a delay of several months. “The schemes took off smoothly in the early years,” said Partha Gupta Das, senior manager with Child Rights and You’s Uttar Pradesh unit. “But now, in most states like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi and Rajasthan, children get the monthly aid after a delay of a few months.”

Out of the safety net

Data uploaded by child protection officers under India’s Women and Child Development Department shows that 1.95 lakh children lost both or one of their parents to Covid-19 since 2020. Scroll accessed the figures from the annual reports of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, or NCPCR. According to this data, while 12,242 lost both parents during the pandemic, 1.85 lakh children lost a single parent. An additional 487 children were abandoned.

In May 2021, the Narendra Modi government introduced the PM Cares for Children scheme for children orphaned by the pandemic.

The Women and Child Development Department was tasked with implementing the scheme, which promises free education, an annual scholarship of Rs 20,000, free health insurance, help for higher education and a fixed deposit of Rs 10 lakh.

According to the PM Cares for Children portal, however, only 4,543 orphans have been approved for the central aid since then.

An email was sent to the Women and Child Development department asking why two-thirds of orphans were out of the scheme’s net. The story will be updated when the department responds.

Scroll contacted 25 children across Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar, Jharkhand and Delhi, who had lost a parent or been orphaned by the pandemic.

Five of them said they had never received any aid from the governments, while the assistance stopped for some children when they turned 18. Of the 12 who are currently receiving aid either from the state or the Centre, 11 said the money is often delayed, by a few months at least.

The majority of the children – 18 of 25 – and their families admitted that they have had to compromise on the quality of education or drop out of school or college due to the inadequate financial support. Only four children were satisfied with the aid they received. Almost all the children said the end of financial aid as soon as they turned 18 or finished Class 12 left them in a lurch.

When the money stops

Yash Kumar Verma was 14 when his father, a firefighter, and mother, a teacher, died of Covid-19 in Bhopal. His grandparents took him in.

Now 19, and pursuing a Bachelor’s in Technology, Verma said he aspired to become a historian but gave up that dream after his parents died. “Getting a job quickly and earning well is more important now,” he reasoned. “If my parents were alive, I would have done so much better academically.”

Kumar was enrolled in the PM Cares for Children scheme and received an annual scholarship of Rs 20,000 till Class 12.

That year, his grandmother passed away and his grandfather moved out of Bhopal to live with his aunt.

Since then, Verma has been living alone. “I have exhausted my parent’s provident fund. My college fees is Rs 1.17 lakh per year,” he said. Now he reaches out to relatives to pool funds for fees.

Under PM Cares for Children, the government also created a fixed deposit of Rs 10 lakh for him. But Verma can access it only after he turns 23, as per the scheme’s rule.

The 19-year-old receives interest on the fixed deposit every month but he claims it hardly pays monthly bills.

“The government should have thought about our higher education, about what we will do once we pass Class 12,” he said. “It is a struggle.”

But Kumar could at least pursue his education. Amaan Ali had to drop out altogether.

Ali had turned 19 when his mother Noorjahan Ali, an anganwadi worker in Bhopal, died of Covid-19 in 2021. His father died several years ago.

He only had an elder sister, 21. “We were all alone,” Ali told Scroll. He was in a private college then. The next year, the Madhya Pradesh government rolled out the Mukhyamantri Covid-19 Bal Sewa Yojana which offered monthly aid to young adults till the age of 21. This was an exception, as most state schemes end financial assistance after the child is 18 years.

Initially, Ali received the monthly aid of Rs 5,000 per month regularly, but delays began to creep up. When he was 21, the aid stopped.

The siblings could no longer afford the double burden of college fees and running the home. “So I dropped out,” he said.

He got a job at a store in DB City mall, Bhopal’s largest shopping centre, which pays Rs 12,000 per month. “If the government had provided free higher education, I would have finished college,” Ali said.

Undercount

For those like Mandal, however, the struggle to get any assistance is an impossible one because of the lack of documents.

Lata Kumari, a district legal service authority official in Jharkhand, is not surprised. “A large number of children do not have death certificates to prove that their parents died of the Covid virus,” she said. “That is why they have not been included in these schemes.”

While the official death toll due to Covid-19 for 2020 and 2021 is nearly 5 lakh in India, several experts believe that is an undercount. The figures of the civil registration system of births and deaths, for instance, show that India recorded 37.4 lakh excess deaths in the two years of the pandemic, compared to the years before.

Gender bias

For many girls, the death of parents shrunk their opportunities further.

Mansi Patil was 16 years old when her father, a security guard, and mother, a homemaker died in May 2021 of Covid-19, two days apart. Patil and her two younger siblings moved to live with their father’s younger brother in Bhiwandi, a satellite town in the northern fringes of Mumbai.

The three children were eligible for Maharashtra government’s Bal Sangopan Yojana, which gave each a monthly aid of Rs 2,250. They continue to receive this aid after a delay of five to six months, Mansi said. They are also enrolled for the PM Cares for Children, the central government scheme.

The financial assistance is not enough for three children, Mansi told Scroll. It is the daughters who have had to make adjustments.

Her uncle, Ganesh Patil, an auto rickshaw driver, said he struggles to save enough money to educate the three children. “The youngest is a boy. My brother wanted him to be well educated,” he said. “So we put him in a private school. But his sisters are in a government school. We can’t afford private education for all three.”

Single parents

The worst hit, perhaps, are single mothers who have had to struggle to support their children’s education.

In Hathia, Jharkhand, Chandrawati Thakur lost her husband Omprakash in April 2021. He worked as a clerk in local court. “My daughter was 11 years old,” she said.

Thakur had no qualification or work experience. So she began a tiffin service. “But I only have five customers. The income from tiffin service hardly helps in running the house,” she said.

Her daughter receives Rs 2,000 per month after a delay of three months from the Jharkhand government. An NGO provides Rs 6,000 annually as aid.

But Thakur said she wants help beyond this. “The state government’s help is hardly enough for school fees and food. We cannot survive on that,” she said.

She was forced to move her daughter from a private school, where the fees was Rs 2,500 a month, to one which charged Rs 1,400.

Harish Bhaskar, her uncle, told Scroll that while the government feels “it is fulfilling its duty by providing some aid, nobody is actually checking whether that aid is helping the family survive”.