Till February, Zafar Ali, 22, thought he had the steering wheel of his career in his hands. He no longer does.

A container truck driver in Calcutta, he earned Rs 25,000 a month. As a returnee migrant worker back home at Nandanpur village in Kushmandi block of South Dinajpur, the youth is finding it hard to earn even Rs 150 a day, the daily wage that unskilled agricultural workers get.

The BJP government at the Centre may claim that it has done a lot for the migrant workers — Union home minister Amit Shah repeated those claims on Tuesday during his virtual rally for Bengal — but Zafar’s story captures how the lockdown forced lakhs of skilled labourers to scale down to unskilled farm jobs.

“I can’t get the job of a container driver as long as I am here… The only option is the farm,” Zafar, who reached his village on May 12, tested positive for Covid-19 and then recovered, told The Telegraph.

Anil Bhuimali, an economist and the vice-chancellor of Raiganj University, pointed out that it was common for rural residents to join the agricultural sector when they do not find any other option.

“This youth has specific skills but they won’t help him much in a village. It is a common trend in rural areas, labourers chucked out of the formal sector joining the pool of agricultural labourers,” said Bhuimali.

Son of a vegetable seller, Zafar learnt the skills to work his way up in the transport sector.

“Around four years back, I started working as a cleaner in a truck at Kushmandi. Later, I learnt driving, got a licence and started driving trucks. I was making Rs 10,000 in a month. About one-and-a-half years ago, a friend of mine told me about container trucks that carry medicines across the country from Calcutta. I went to Calcutta and joined a transport company,” he recounted. The move pushed his salary up to Rs 25,000 a month, plus extra pay for driving vehicles to far-off Patna and Guwahati.

Every month, he would send Rs 15,000 back home to his parents and younger brother. “My father is old and can no longer sell vegetables. I was running my family for past three years,” added Zafar.

He confessed he knew nothing of farming. “Like driving, that’s also a skill. That’s why my daily earnings are so poor now,” he said.