The worst-hit in the lockdown

The worst-hit in the lockdown
Desperation among daily-wage migrants was deep enough to make them decide to walk to their native villages, hundreds of kilometres away

Two days ago, a house contractor based in Kushalnagara in Coorg district told me that fifteen construction workers who work with him are desperate to return to their village in Jharkhand. They had told him, “It doesn’t matter even if it costs 50,000 rupees. We want to go back.” Since all work activities had stopped here, they would like to be with their families and work on their own small farms. They didn’t expect the lockdown to end by mid-April and the everyday expense would add up over time. Any chance of finding local van owners willing to travel the long distance, the contractor explained, was remote. The uncertainty in being able to cross state-borders along the way was another factor. But he has let the workers continue to live in the large shed inside the building complex for free, a fate that seems a fortunate one in relation to the total abandonment of migrant workers by their contractors seen frequently since the lockdown.

The lockdown has simply worsened the misery of the poor in the country, especially the migrant workers. According to the 2011 census, there were 1.34 crore inter-state migrant workers, most of whom were men. This figure, which will be much higher today, doesn’t include migrants from within the state.

Why did the lockdown bring the most hardship to the migrant workers in cities, forcing them to return to their villages in such large numbers? The answer is not complex. The stoppage of work means a lack of income for the daily wage earners without which paying the rent and buying essentials become near-impossible. The government’s offer of free or subsidised food rations means nothing to the migrant workers whose ration cards, if they have them at all, can only be used in their home states. Besides, who would look after them if they were unlucky enough to get the coronavirus? The health infrastructure in the cities doesn’t hold out any guarantees to the poor.

The desperation among the daily wage urban migrants was deep enough to make lakhs of them decide to walk to their native villages, which were often hundreds of kilometres away, since the bus and rail services were suspended completely. Twenty-four migrant workers, including women and children, have died so far from exhaustion, hunger or accidents on their way home. The police abuse that often meets the migrant workers along the way has deepened the tragedy.

The hit faced by agriculture, a large informal sector, is yet to make itself visible in the imagination of social suffering during the lockdown. Many farmers who had harvested capsicum, watermelon, tomatoes, sapota and grapes, to name a few, from across hundreds of acres of land are known to have dumped them or given them away at a loss or for free. Unharvested crops are being left to rot in the fields either because farm labour isn’t available or because harvesting costs are more than any profits that can be got from their sale.

The sight of workers walking back to their villages along with their children is haunting testimony to the uncaring governance in the country.

Whatever the compulsion for making a sudden lockdown announcement, doing something so severely impacting for the majority of Indians, who are still very poor, reconfirms that a middle-class imagination is running the government. The work-from-home requests and the stay-at-home requests are good evidence here. If the poor had been present in the minds of the decision makers at the top, they wouldn’t have brought in a lock down without putting some basic measures with the daily wage earners and small farmers in mind such as a guarantee of food supplies to even those without formal documentation or issuing clear instructions to the police and the bureaucracy to be sensitive to the vulnerable. It didn’t need a mass exodus of migrant workers to suggest the idea of offering free bus services from Delhi to take them to their home state.

The value of independent media and civil society organizations for ongoing democracy has become amply clear yet again. Their sharp criticisms of the lockdown measures have pushed the government to respond. The bureaucrats and police officers have apologized at times. The state Home Minister’s declaration yesterday that wedding halls in Bengaluru and other district headquarters in the state would be used to offer temporary shelter to migrant workers probably owes to the media focus on their sad plight too.

The urban middle classes have usually tended to be indifferent to the plight of the poorer classes. Might the collective experience of overcoming the new threat in our midst alter this social detail in any way?
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