Long walk of the invisible people

By HH Mohrmen

There are many images from the COVID – 19 pandemic which will be imprinted in the psyche of the common Indian like the doctors, nurses in their full PPEs performing their duties to save the lives of many victims of corona virus. There is the police trying to enforce lockdown orders; the empty spaces of otherwise busy streets. The picture of wild animals venturing to urban spaces where there are human settlements, the clear blue sky and the disappearance of waste from the streets. But the most poignant of them all (at least in India) will be the different images of the migrant labourers walking from different locations in India to their respective homes.

The tragic incident is being compared by many with the post independence migration when hundreds and thousands of people moved from one country to another carrying whatever belongings they had with them. The migration then was the birth pang of two new nations, but the migration labourers’ march during the lockdown across the country is the movement of people of a free country; the country that is supposed to protect them.

The video of a family walking and a young girl crying and limping while she follows her parents; the video clip of a child sleeping on the suitcase while the mother pulls it all the way are all shocking images. The most touching of all is the image of scattered belongings and few pieces of roti on the rail track, which is what is left of the migrant labourers who were run over by the speeding goods train.  Then there is this image of two children crying because their parents were killed in an accident while they were walking home. The two are orphan now. There was this photo of a young man who belongs to another religion and refused to leave his dear Hindu friend after they have been abandoned by the trucks which carried them. Then there is an image of a young mother who was wailing because she had just lost her baby to the ordeal and the scorching heat.

The story of a young girl who cycled about 1200 kilometres to take her ailing father home because they could not afford to pay the fares charged by the transporters is another tale that will remain in the minds of the people for many years. The 15-year old Jyoti Kumari cycled from Gurugram where her father worked as an auto rickshaw driver to Bihar in 7 days with her ailing father as a pillion rider on the back of her cycle. In one of the many interviews she gave, she was asked if she is not afraid of cycling only with her father. She said she is not afraid because there are hundreds of migrant labourers walking all along the road.

This is a long walk because people have to walk hundreds if not thousands of miles home on the very road they help built. Circumstances compelled them to do so, because they have nothing to eat and they cannot go to work so the only alternative is to go home. One labour said during the interview that at least water is freely available in the village.

This is the faceless population because the Government does not even have an approximate numbers of the migrant labourers in the country. In some reports it was said that there are about 80 lakh migrant labourers in the entire country and still in another report it was estimated that they are 1.30 crore strong. How can the government both the state and the central not be aware of their presence and have a proper plan to rescue them even before the lockdown was declared?

The question is how do we reach out to them when we don’t even have their statistics? Or how can the government make any policy for the migrant labourers when it does not know their numbers?  The government has only recently started mapping the migrant labourers despite there being a law in place to register and help formalise employment of migrant labourers for more than forty years now.

It is only recently and that too during the lockdown due to the pandemic that the government is trying to collect some information about the migrant labourers. In some state like Karnataka names and bank details of the migrant labours were collected by the Labour Department of this state but the question is how accurate can this be?

Why have the migrant labourers failed to figure in minds of the middle class population in the country and the policy makers in particular? Why have they continued to be the faceless population of the country when the fact is that these are the people who build India; they build our houses, make our roads and bridges. They help turn the wheels of progress of this country and yet they remain a neglected lot.

The other pertinent question is why did migrant labourers move to the cities? Anybody who moves to different locations does so under constraints to look for greener pastures. It offered them hope, and indeed everything was fine till the lockdown was imposed. The truth is they moved from the villages to the cities because there is nothing for them in the villages. The lockdown has compelled them to return to their native places and to the same village which had nothing to offer them in the first place.

The lockdown has exposed the rot that is there is the labour system in India, where the employers, mainly the contractors have no responsibility whatsoever for their labourers and treat them like tools which they discard when they are of no use to them. This is exactly what has happened in this lockdown. The contractors, their employers have given up on them and even the government is not rendering any support to them because they are faceless.

It is shocking that even the migrant labourers who work in industries have no job security and were left to fend for themselves during the lockdown. What kind of contract system did the labourers have with their employer which does not even give them assurance to provide basic necessities  during times of emergency? The respective governments too are at fault. They have all along taken the migrant labourers for granted and both the government and the opposition have failed the migrant labourers. The need of the hour is to have stringent labour laws where employers are duty bound to at least provide them food and shelter during emergencies because it is their basic human right and they at least deserve this much.

What is heartbreaking is that migrant workers became a political football which the politicians use for their own selfish interests. Not to say that they have never been used by political parties during election, but this in the time of emergency one would expect the government to at least treat them with dignity. The same buses and trucks that refused to ferry them back home or charged an exorbitant amount of money to do so, will be use by the politicians of all dispensations to take them to election rallies and campaigns, during election. Can it be more ironic than this?

Some years ago I asked a Bihari carpenter working in Jowai, how come there are Biharis all over the country? With a sense of pride in his face the man said, “Wherever there are human settlements and a way to reach the place, there would be at least one Bihari in that place.” He also added, if there is somehow a way to connect the earth and the moon and they need some work done on the moon, Biharis will reach the moon too. The migrant labourers too have some sense of pride in them and the work that they are doing, but sadly, the lockdown has damaged even this semblance of dignity in them. The migrant labourers who built the airports, the shopping malls, the conference centres do not figure in the government’s scheme of things. In fact they did not expect that the government would do everything for them, but to at least treat them with the dignity they deserve.

Sad to say that it is only when millions of invisible migrant labourers started marching home that  we began noticing their existence. The way we have treated the migrant labourers and the fact that they remain faceless should put us all to shame because we have neglected the very people that make life easy for us.