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    PHOTOS: The precarious lives of India's COVID widows

    No matter how the pandemic proceeds, women who lost a husband — and sole family breadwinner — will lead irrevocably altered lives in the patriarchal society that is India.
    by Text and photos by Ruhani Kaur Mar 11, 2022 6 minutes
    <em>Radha Devi buys vegetables on her way back from the private educational institute where she has worked as an aide since November 2021. Devi, her husband and their three children all came down with COVID-19 in April of that year. She and the kids recovered; her husband died. Says Devi: "I knew I had to stand up. I had to change myself for the kids, or they too would get left behind."</em>

    When her husband was alive, 24-year-old Shweta would only leave her house in Delhi to pick up her daughter from school. That changed after the field worker died during the first wave of COVID-19 in 2020. Now Shweta is always out searching for work opportunities and trying to track down the COVID compensation she believes she should have gotten from the government months ago.

    For a year after her husband's death, she had to send her 8-year-old to live with her father as she could only afford salt and roti (flat bread) and didn't have a phone line necessary for the child's online studies.

    "I had forgotten what vegetables and pulses looked like," says Shweta, who says she fainted from hunger several times in 2020.

    Shweta, who asked that only her first name be used to protect her privacy, says her six brothers refused to offer any help. She says Indian households treat their daughters as "," which loosely

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