THE NEGLECTED ARMY
The suffering of migrant workers during lockdown has been a national shame
Shortly after the nationwide lockdown to arrest the spread of COVID-19 was announced, distressing images of countless migrant workers across India setting out to trudge thousands of kilometres to their hometowns started doing the rounds. The workers, who had travelled to cities in search of work and livelihood, suddenly found themselves unable to sustain themselves as the nation shut down around them. Men with backpacks, women with bundles on their heads, children and the elderly in arms or in tow, they inched towards the only certainty they knew—home.
The exodus continued throughout April and well into May. Special train services to get migrant workers home were finally started from May 1. On May 12, having run 468 specials, ferrying over 500,000 migrants, the Indian Railways stepped up the pace from an average 42 trains a day to a 100 daily. Other migrants with some resources, like their own rickshaws, hired cars or secondhand bikes bought hurriedly, made their own way home, taking circuitous routes around check posts to dodge the authorities, hoping to escape the rush on trains. Some even taking dangerous steps in their desperation to reach home. On May 2, 18 migrant workers were found hiding inside a concrete mixer on a highway in Madhya Pradesh. In another incident, 42 migrants in Chennai from traditional fishing families together bought a boat for Rs 1.8 lakh and set sail for Ganjam, Odisha, on May 6 with no navigating equipment. They reached their destination on May 11 and were promptly put under quarantine by district authorities.
A vast majority, with little or no money, walked on. Several lost their lives in accidents—16 migrants died after being run over by a goods train near Aurangabad. Some, unable to face the harsh reality of a life with no income, committed suicide. As a result, what was a public health crisis swiftly became a humanitarian one.
Amid this exodus, Telangana saw some return for work. The first Shramik Special train that went
from Hyderabad to Jharkhand, made a pit stop in Bihar on its way back, bringing along workers from Bihar employed in Telangana’s rice mills, which rely on more than 30,000 migrant workers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh post harvest season. Telangana had sent a list to the Bihar government of those who had consented to come back to work if provided travel facilities. The first batch was greeted at the station with a rose each before being dispatched on special buses to the mills in different districts.
NO NOTICE
Many, though, are left grappling with loss of income and stranded. State authorities are being vigilant and paramedical staff at the village level has been asked to keep a tab on the returnees. “They should have been given a hint about impending restrictions and a week to move before imposing the lockdown,” says migration expert Prof. S. Irudaya Rajan of the Centre for Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram. “Instead of allowing them to travel in the initial days, when there were only 500 positive cases in the country, we waited till there were about 40,000.” A member of the NITI Aayog even argued that the panic movement of migrants must not be encouraged as the economy was poised for a pick up.
Krishnavatar Sharma, co-founder and programming director of Aajeevi
MIGRANTS HAVE LARGELY RELIED ON CIVIL SOCIETY AND NGOs DURING THIS CRISIS
ka, an NGO that works with migrant communities, says: “While international travellers were given weeks of advance notice, internal migrant workers were given only four hours before being confined to their worksites, cramped rooms and open space settlements.” But he also acknowledges that “providing additional notice could not have minimised the catastrophe since there is no way to predict how many migrant workers would have successfully been able to travel in the notice period”.
Despite it being an issue of national concern, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made no mention of the migrant exodus in his televised address to the nation on May 12, his fifth since the Covid outbreak. Sensing apathy, former finance minister P. Chidambaram, in a series of tweets, said he would count every additional rupee the government infuses into the economy and “the first thing we will look for is what the poor, hungry and devastated migrant workers can expect after they have walked hundreds of kilometres to their home states”.
On May 14, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced a slew of relief measures for migrant workers, who, till now have largely relied on civil society and NGOs during the lockdown. States like Kerala, Telangana and Delhi have handled the crisis by providing rations via temporary ration cards and direct cash disbursements. Jharkhand, Bihar and Odisha, too, provided direct cash transfers, but with a few caveats—workers must have their accounts registered with a bank from their home state, for example. As a result, many workers reported not receiving assistance at all.
“The internal migrant crisis is being handled poorly. Migrant workmen and women have been deprived of their dignity,” says Varun Aggarwal, founder, India Migration Now, a migration research policy and advocacy organisation. “The government is apathetic and has a poor understanding of migration itself. Mass inter-state return migration was always going to be an infection risk. Italy and China were parables for that.”
According to Aajeevika’s Sharma, none of the states had an idea of the sheer number of migrants travelling for work. “With no prior preparation, implementation of any relief measures to guarantee even the bare minimum sustenance was bound to fail. Moreover, even if orders were made at the state level, implementation by local authorities was arbitrary. Some nodal officers [appointed to facilitate movement of migrant workers] refused to receive calls and relied on scattered efforts by NGOs, abdicating all responsibility,” says Sharma.
LACK OF ACCOUNTABILITY
According to the Economic Survey, 2016-17, India’s interstate migration doubled between 2001 and 2011 compared to the previous decade, growing 4.5 per cent a year. Annual interstate migration is now estimated to be at nine million migrants a year. According to the World Economic Forum’s report, ‘Migration and its impact on cities’, in 2017, ‘Internal migration flows in India are driven by the states’s important economic inequities.’ A new methodology, the Cohort-based Migration Metric, reveals that less affluent states like Bihar and UP see more out-migration, while more affluent ones like Delhi, Maharashtra and Goa see in-migration.
The Interstate Migrant Workmen Act, 1979, is inadequate as it recognises only those in the contractor system, excluding workers who migrate on their own. In fact, according to the law, the central government may be legally required to ensure free travel home during the lockdown since it is arguably responsible for the termination of work. “Migrants are the only group of people who have been included in India’s concurrent list. As long as accountability and power remain ambiguously distributed between the Centre and states, there will be confusion. Without clear accountability, advance planning, arrangements for their welfare can’t be made,” says Trilochan Sastry, founder trustee, Association for Democratic Reforms. Aggarwal feels the registration measures under the Interstate Migrant Workmen Act could have been operationalised through proper incentives for contractors and their paymasters. “The proposed labour code, now before Parliament, when enacted, will protect the basic rights of the migrants,” declared Sitharaman in her May 14 briefing
WILL THEY RETURN?
The present plight of the migrants is the culmination of the failure of the central and state governments to draw up a holistic policy safeguarding the interests of migrants. The official apathy is due to the lack of interstate arrangements and allowing employers and labour contractors to make informal arrangements. India’s informal economy also witnesses wage thefts every year worth crores of rupees, particularly from workers in construction, small manufacturing, head loading and other activities with no formalised terms of employment. Even under ordinary circumstances, neither labour departments nor the police are equipped to deal with cases involving informal labour. State governments and urban local bodies in particular, did not pre-empt the large volume of labour violation cases during the lockdown. Ideally, redressal mechanisms should have been set up at the ward and block levels, so that workers could have been paid their dues for earlier months.
Under such circumstances, the early return of migrant labour after the lockdown is eased or lifted remains uncertain. “Mobility, once their strength, is now a weakness. They will no longer want to move as far as they did even though they need the money badly,” says Rajan. “They might continue to do jobs they view as dirty, dangerous and demeaning outside their native states, albeit under better terms, but there will be a decline in the flow to metros and cities.” Bihar is conducting a skill survey of the returning migrants and Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has spoken about providing them permanent employment at home.
The Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations (PM-CARES) Fund has allocated Rs 1,000 crore for migrant workers and said that each state will get a minimum of 10 per cent of the sum allocated, with the additional grant to be decided on the basis of a state’s population (50 per cent weightage) and the number of Covid cases (40 per cent weightage) it has. Experts, however, argue that funds will be spread too thin and are unlikely to make a difference unless the states pitch in with much more than what they get from the Centre.
What will be the emerging post-Covid scenario? “New migration networks and corridors will form. And the push for a ‘One Nation, One Ration Card’ scheme should come through urgently,” says Chinmay Tumbe, assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and author of India Moving: A History of Migration. “The time for discussion on portability of social security is over; it simply needs to happen.” If the concerns of the stranded and returning migrants are not addressed, they may hesitate to return to the cities when normalcy returns, triggering scarcity of labour and long-term negative effects on the urban economy and economic growth. With migrants, invisible till now, in the limelight, their welfare, healthcare, housing and education for their children are likely to emerge as preconditions for any jobs they take up. Both the sending and receiving states of migrants may have to reach a memorandum of understanding to protect their people. The role of the central government is limited as it is not a beneficiary, but, experts say, it can play the role of a watchdog. Only then, as Rajan believes, they may have a brighter and better 2021.