New Delhi's teachers are being sent to the Covid frontlines, some without training, PPE or even pay

 

 

(CNN)Every morning, teacher Vikas Kumar texts video lessons to his students before going to his second job as an untrained, frontline coronavirus worker.

The 27-year-old normally teaches physical education but, like thousands of other government teachers in New Delhi, he was deployed to the pandemic frontline when the virus started spreading in India last March.

Since June, Kumar has filled a number of roles alongside his teaching duties. First, he said he distributed ration kits to the poor, then he was assigned to conduct door-to-door surveys of neighbors of confirmed Covid cases. In that role, which involved taking residents' temperatures, Kumar says he contracted the virus and was ill in July for 17 days.

In 2020, at least 28,000 teachers were deployed to Covid-19 roles, according to two teachers' associations in New Delhi. At least 35 teachers have died from Covid-19 during the pandemic, and hundreds more fell ill, they said. CNN reached out to the Delhi Ministry of Health to verify these numbers and received no response.

Several teachers in the Indian capital told CNN they were given no training and are juggling their coronavirus duties with their normal teaching roles. Those working for the municipal corporations, which are the local-level governing civic bodies in Delhi, say they haven't been given enough personal protective equipment (PPE) to shield them from the virus. Others say they haven't been paid their normal salaries for months.

Indian government school teachers conducted surveys of residential neighborhoods in New Delhi, as part of their coronavirus duties during the pandemic.

"The central government is telling the nation to take health and safety precautions but here, the Delhi Municipal Corporations (DMCs) are telling us to expose ourselves to the virus every day," said Vibha Singh, the senior vice president of Nagar Nigam Shikshak Sangh (NNSS), a union representing about 20,000 teachers in DMC schools.

Teachers who do not report for their assignments can be threatened with action under the Delhi Disaster Management Act, according to Sant Ram, an elected member of the Government School Teachers' Association (GSTA). The first orders under the act were made in March as coronavirus spread throughout the country.

Since then, more than 10,000 people have died in New Delhi, of more than 150,000 deaths nationwide. India is second only to the United States with more than 10.4 million confirmed cases, according to the global tally by John Hopkins University.