The child survivors of India’s third Covid wave who have fallen through the cracks

India’s death toll due to Covid is among the highest in the world — but even among those who survived the pandemic has brought trauma on a scale that is only just being realised. Arpan Rai meets rights workers and a scarred generation of children in Delhi

File: Children from a slum stand in queues to get free food after the government eased a nationwide lockdown against Covid-19 in Delhi (AFP via Getty Images)

On April 1, tens of thousands of schoolchildren in Delhi woke up to a familiar routine that had become strange: they put on their uniforms, ate breakfast and boarded buses to go to school. Many did so with giddy excitement − after two years of a devastating pandemic, they had prayed for this day to come.

But while the return to normalcy this month has been a blessing for so many children and their families, for others it brings a painful reminder of what has been lost. This morning routine will never again belong to Rahul, 13, who has replaced his mother in the role of caring for his all-male family of six.

Rahul and his mother, 36, used to sell vegetables together on a pushcart in the lanes of west Delhi’s Ramesh Nagar neighbourhood until December when, as the Omicron wave reached India and cases started to rise dramatically, she died suddenly overnight.