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Anniversary Issue

The bigger picture

Stop Predicting, Revisit Life presents an all-encompassing in-depth analysis of the pandemic, resultant lockdowns and the insurmountable odds faced by the people. Excerpts:

The bigger picture
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When this chapter was initiated, migrant labourers across the country were walking back in droves to their villages from cities thousands of kilometres away due to the pandemic-induced lockdown. The situation was completely out of control. There was no SOP that could be followed to mitigate the hunger of a grossly estimated (no one knows the exact number even today) eight crore migrant population whose livelihoods had been suddenly snatched away. The government response was debatable and the media questioned it relentlessly. After the first wave of the pandemic, the home ministry apprised the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs (Report No. 229 on 'Management of COVID-19 Pandemic and Related Issues', presented to the chairman, Rajya Sabha, on 21 December 2020) that 'India adopted a proactive, pre-emptive and graded response to deal with the unprecedented global crisis declared as a "pandemic" by the World Health Organization'. But the second wave that started in India in mid-February 2021 washed away all these 'pro-active, pre-emptive and graded responses.' Since the end of the first week of May 2021, the second wave is declining, although the scary Delta+ variant and Omicron variant of the virus are looming large and black fungus or Mucormycosis has already been declared as an epidemic in Tamil Nadu, Odisha, Gujarat and UT of Chandigarh under the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897. Despite the lessons learnt, the experiences acquired in this period regarding migration have shaken the written memory of an epidemic in India.

Jyoti Kumari, a 15-year-old daughter of a migrant worker from the Sirhulli village in Bihar's Darbhanga district, hit the headlines for the way she helped her father during the lockdown. Her father, a migrant e-rickshaw puller, broke a leg due to an accident in Gurugram, Haryana. Jyoti travelled from the village to look after her father and be with him in January 2020. After the extended lockdown was declared to contain the spread of the coronavirus, Jyoti and her father lost their source of income. After being told by their landlord to vacate their rented room, Jyoti cycled more than 1,200 kilometres in seven days to take her injured father back to their village in Bihar. (Unfortunately, he passed away after a cardiac arrest on 31 May 2021.) Watching the news on television, the then US President Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump, who was also his senior advisor, tweeted encouraging words about Jyoti's 'beautiful feat of endurance and love'. Jyoti's is just one of the many stories of the suffering of millions of migrant labourers, who were almost invisible to the bhadraloks of India before the lockdown was declared throughout India at just four hours' notice.

From 26 March 2020, various journals, blogs on human rights, websites and news media channels began to publish reports of the plight of the stranded and out-of-work interstate migrant labourers, many of whom died due to train or road accidents or simply out of hunger on their long journey back home. In some cases, they travelled a distance of 1,500 kilometres.

A pregnant migrant labourer was walking back from Nashik, Maharashtra, to her village in Satna, Madhya Pradesh, 1,100 kilometres away. On the way back, she gave birth, rested for just two hours and then resumed the walk for another 150 kilometres to reach Satna. It was only after reaching there that she was taken to a hospital by the local authorities.

On 21 May 2020, journalist Shagun Kapil reported in Down to Earth, an online news journal, that a land and forest rights organisation Ekta Parishad had interviewed 31,423 migrants (till 20 May 2020) to know whether they wanted to return home or stay back at their places of work. They found that 95 per cent of migrant workers preferred to return home despite the threat of financial insecurity and unemployment thereafter.

The narrative had many different versions. Some states made arrangements for those who were coming back home. Quarantine centres would provide meals and essential items, such as mosquito nets and/or sanitisers, but in most parts of the country, migrant labourers were seen as carriers of COVID and were not even allowed to enter their villages. On 29 May 2020, Hindustan Times reported the story of an agricultural worker who rode almost 900 kilometres in a motorcycle from Delhi to his home, only to be denied entry into his village.

In another such story, seven migrant labourers from the Bhangidih village of Purulia in West Bengal were left with no choice but to stay for a week on trees to protect themselves from the attack of wild elephants. The labourers had returned from Chennai, but there were no quarantine centres for them in the village and their families lived in a single-room kuccha hut in the village. So they couldn't stay in isolation at home either.

Then, from the first week of June 2020 as the unlocking began, some migrants began another journey to return to their workplaces. This time, too, there were no train services available, as the railway ministry had decided to keep services suspended.

Moved by all the suffering that India's poorest were going through, lyricist Gulzar penned an emotional poem in Hindi that reflected the ultimate wishes of the migrant labourers. It said: 'If I have to die, I will die going there, where there is life.'

Between 24 June 2020 and 8 July 2020, a survey was conducted by the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (India) in association with some other non-government organisations, titled 'How is the Hinterland Unlocking?' The survey covered 4,835 households in 48 districts of 11 states. It was found that almost one-third of the migrants who had walked home to their villages were now back in the cities. Half of them who were still in villages wanted to return.

Then the second wave started in mid-February 2021. On 4 April 2021, the number of COVID infections surpassed the previous peak. On 14 April 2021, it rose above 2 lakh. That day, Maharashtra declared a lockdown once again, but not as stringent as the national lockdown of 2020. Delhi, too, declared lockdown on 19 April. Gradually other states also followed suit. The situation for the migrant workers went back to what it was in 2020. On 13 May 2021, the Supreme Court of India made a query to the central government as well as the Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana governments regarding their plans on delivering relief to the migrant workers who remained stranded in those states due to the lockdown. The Supreme Court directed the authorities to deliver ration to migrants on self-declaration and not insist on an identity card. However, this did not help the migrants much since they still had no jobs and their savings had already been exhausted.

This begs the question: Why did the migrants then bear such hardship to return to their villages in the first place? Why did they endure the chaos and the gross violation of human rights? Then why did they come back to their places of work again? Should society and the people, who are reaping benefits of migrant labour, allocate a permanent place for them to dwell in the cities?

(Excerpted with permission from 'Stop Predicting, Revisit Life'; published by Bloomsbury)

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