Exodus over as is lockdown, but many migrants struggle to get life back in order

About this time last year, when people all over India locked down in their homes, they undertook epic journeys back to their villages – some clambering on trains and buses and others walking and cycling many hundred miles as they fled the big cities that could no longer promise two meals a day.

One year later, the lockdown that had caught them by surprise is over and many migrants who had lost their jobs have made it back to towns and cities but life is akin to the proverbial square peg in a round hole. An uneasy fit.

Avinash Yadav is among them, one of the millions of men, women and even children who traversed the country in a migrant exodus that is perhaps the largest movement of people since Partition.

The 22-year-old from Raigarh in Chhattisgarh worked as a construction worker at a Delhi school when the lockdown was announced on the evening of March 24. The next morning, as much of the country was pushed inside their homes, Yadav found himself staring at both homelessness and unemployment.

His wife was seven months pregnant at the time. After waiting for several weeks for trains to resume, the couple, along with few others, decided to walk home. The risk of contracting Covid-19 was ever present but there was little option.

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It took them 10 days to complete the more than 1,000-km journey, but that he said was only the beginning of their struggle.

With no source of income in the village, the couple and their baby survived five months by borrowing money from local lenders at an exorbitant interest rate of 5 per cent per month. “At this point, I have a loan of Rs 1 lakh,” he said.

He returned to his job in Delhi but soon had to look out for alternatives due to non-payment of wages.

Yadav is now in Chandigarh, working at another school. While there is a salary, he said it is barely enough to feed his family, let alone replay the loan.

The nationwide lockdown that was first imposed on March 25 last year, was extended in five phases continuing for three months till June 30, after which different states continued or lifted the restrictions depending on the number of Covid-19 positive cases.

The total number of migrant workers who returned to their home states was 1,04,66,152 (10.44 million, 1.04 crore), Santosh Kumar Gangwar, minister of state of labour and employment, said in a parliamentary response in September last year,

One year later, the vaccine is here, and life is slowly resuming to its pre-corona form, but those who were part of the catastrophic human tragedy that was the migration crisis are still recovering from the scars.

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Many people lost their loved ones in the perilous journeys undertaken, some succumbing to heat and hunger and some caught in accidents. In May last year, 16 migrants sleeping on the tracks were run over by a train in Maharashtra.

The tragedy took on myriad forms and still continues.

An International Labour Organisation assessment predicted in April last year that 40 crore informal sector workers in India could be pushed deeper into poverty due to the lockdown.

It is true the lockdown was a necessary step taken to control the spread of the virus, said labour rights activist Nirmal Agni. However, it was the “insensitive” manner in which the measure was implemented that resulted in the human tragedy, he added.

“The government did not even give these workers a full day worth of warning. The prime minister simply announced that a 21-day lockdown would begin in the next four hours… The decision was clearly made without taking this population who earn their living one day at a time into consideration.

“It is important to understand that for these workers, protection against Covid-19 wasn’t a priority. Their biggest worry was survival and managing two meals a day, the scope for which the lockdown completely took away, and without any warning,” Agni, who is the general secretary of the Bandhua Mukti Morcha, said.

Biren, 26, who worked as a daily wage labourer in Delhi was one of those caught off guard. He was forced to take a trip back to his village Vilaspur in Chhattisgarh, where he spent nine months before returning to the city for work.

“I waited for one month after the lockdown hoping that we would get our jobs back, but when nothing happened and getting the bare minimum to eat was becoming a struggle, my wife and I hopped on to a tractor that was going towards our state.

“In the village, we survived somehow. We grew some vegetables on our own, and just about managed,” he said.

Biren is back in Delhi but hasn’t got his old job back. He has instead settled for a lower paying job to continue to survive.

While the problem of irregular wages is not new in the informal sector, it magnified manifold during the lockdown with disappearing work avenues and pay cuts.

To address wage-related grievances, the government set up 20 control rooms to address wage-related grievances.

Gangwar, in another parliament response, had noted that during the lockdown over 15,000 complaints of workers were resolved through these control rooms.

“Due to the intervention of the Ministry more than two lakh workers were paid their due wages amounting to about Rs 295 crore,” he said.

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However, Himanshu Upadhyay, assistant professor at Azim Premji University, is disappointed at how the authorities managed the crisis.

“Even after this crisis, things have not changed in terms of labour welfare thinking.

“Some of us who are researching this were hoping that Covid-19 would provide a moment of soul searching for the bureaucracy, and the welfare boards, but I am sad to reflect that that has not happened,” Upadhyay, who writes on public finance, told PTI.

In his view, the government had not done much In terms of bringing a new policy or a new law that addresses the crisis of migrant labour, and added that implementation of the existing laws is the need of the hour.

Among the first few steps to start providing relief to the migrant workers, he said, would be to recognise the workers of the informal sector under the Building and Other Construction Workers (BOCW) welfare board.

Educating the workers about their rights should be the next step forward.

“Doing a bit more investment in terms of public education — what are the workers’ rights, what are the different welfare schemes that they can avail, what does the board offer in terms of educational assistance for their children…these are the first few steps that are the minimum where we should start from,” he said.