The lives of the poor, in particular—many of whom depend on irregular, off-the-books employment paid in cash—have been upended.
Recently, after weeks of fruitless job-hunting near his Delhi slum, onetime factory worker Vijay Bhardwaj was contemplating riding out the crunch in his native farming village. Not that there is much money to be made there, either. “If there was work in the village, then I wouldn’t have come here,” he said.
In the gritty western city of Morbi, a major hub for makers of kitchen and bathroom tiles, production is down 30%, said Nilesh Jetpariya, president of the local ceramic-industry association. Short on cash to pay laborers and truckers, around a third of the city’s 650 tile factories are shut.
K.G. Kundariya has started paying employees at his three tile factories partly in groceries—rice, wheat, cooking oil—so they don’t go hungry. Local grocery stores don’t have enough cash to pay wholesalers, so ceramic companies have had to step in and offer guarantees just so supplies of staples like sugar and grain keep flowing.
