Explained: How Covid-19 pandemic upended 20 million lives in Mumbai

When the bubonic plague arrived on ships in 1896, death and fear emptied half of Mumbai. Ensuing labour shortages devastated the city’s cotton mills, the mainstay of the contemporary economy.
 

Although the coronavirus pandemic’s toll has been much lower, there are grim parallels. Almost a million workers who built Mumbai’s skyline — from the Trump Tower to skyscrapers owned by global firms such as Blackstone Group LP on erstwhile mill land — have fled to their native villages, short of money after a stringent government lockdown brought the economy to a standstill.
 

A plague-era law is being used to draft