Forty-year-old Shamsher Ahmad has spent all his life in Husainpur Hamir, a hamlet adjacent to “Brass City” Moradabad in Uttar Pradesh, but never has he witnessed a downturn as severe and prolonged as this one.

       Ahmad, who has worked as a tool operator in the city’s brass utensil manufacturing units for over 25 years, did not get any salary in six out of the 15 months since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns. And even though the micro-scale unit where he works is operational once again, payments to workers are much less than that in the ...