Lost generation: Covid-19 pushes millions of kids out of school, into work

Children may be seen as a stop-gap measure to fill jobs left vacant by migrant labourers who fled cities for their rural homes during the lockdown

The coronavirus pandemic is forcing India’s children out of school and into farms and factories to work, worsening a child-labour problem that was already one of the most dire in the world.

Sixteen-year-old Maheshwari Munkalapally and her 15-year-old sister stopped attending lessons when virtually the entire economy was brought to a halt during the world’s biggest lockdown. Munkalapally’s mother and older sister lost their jobs as housemaids in Hyderabad, the capital of the southern Indian state of Telangana. The younger girls, who had been living with their grandmother in a nearby village, were forced to become farmhands along with their mother,