Durbar Mahila Samanway Committee, the country’s oldest collective of sex workers, has approached the Supreme Court for support amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The collective said sex workers were entitled to live with dignity with access to food, shelter and social protection. The pandemic had ravaged their lives and livelihoods and left the community impoverished.
The collective is a party to proceedings in which a panel was set up to improve the living conditions of the community. One of the recommendations, which won the court’s approval was to provide them with ration cards, voter ID and bank accounts.
“In Kolkata, more than 50% of the sex workers do not have a ration card. As a result, most have been left out of the public distribution system, ” Bharti Dey, mentor of the Committee, said in a statement.
However, the statement said these documents have not been issued to them in compliance with the 2011 recommendation.
With no government ID documents and no earnings, the lockdown had been especially tough on the community.
