Hyderabad: Maid servants continue to bear the brunt as apartments shut doors on them

Hyderabad: It's been a mixed scene for the domestic helpers who swarm into the many homes and apartments in the city over the past few weeks. While the in-house help providers have been retained despite their reluctance in a few cases to continue without breaks, the others who come once or twice to attend to household chores from outside are finding it difficult.

With the lockdown getting extended, the patience of the inmates in residential flats is wearing thin, despite each sharing the tasks like sweeping, cleaning, clearing the garbage and running errands. The increased prevalence of the pandemic has made housewives even more panicky as they are not keen on allowing outsiders into the homes.

'The condition is nothing short of a double trouble for us. We are increasingly getting worked up doing the housekeeping work, while the maids are not even being allowed inside our complexes' laments young *Nitin (name changed) who has had to multitask throughout the three weeks he has been stuck at home. Said R V Ramana, the Secretary of a Resident Welfare Association in Himayatnagar: 'We are now being asked to relax our stiff conditions for letting in the maid servants, by asking them to sanitise themselves before coming in to work in our apartments. This is because the residents are not keen anymore to be model inmates of homes, sharing domestic work and also working from home'.

While in-house watchmen and their families are keeping the common area clean and taking care of other amenities like running the motor for water and looking after other things, apartments are still unsure about accepting the servants and assessing their risk- prone status. 'We are not in red zones, but the police keep asking us to stay at home and not move around.

It's getting difficult to manage without our regular salaries, which we have been forced to give up till now' said Kalavathi, a domestic help and mother of two. She was lucky as her employer gave her the salary for March and has assured her of partial payment for April, even if she is not able to make it to her workplace. For others, however, it's still unsure whether they can sustain themselves for any more days after April.