What Happened to the Migrant Worker In India’s Corona-Pandemic Lockdown?
In this episode of Ekalavya Chaudhuri's blog...
When the nation-wide lockdown happened in India following the Covid-19 (coronavirus) pandemic, every day, there were long lines of migrant labourers walking barefoot towards their homes. Often, they were doing this with their whole families. They were essentially attempting to traverse on foot distances of hundreds of kilometres. Some managed to reach their destination. A great many died.
Migrant workers travel miles from their villages for work, often living in makeshift slums along the way and on-site. They eat at local stalls. They do not usually have stable structures as residence. Their homes are in hamlets very far from the cities where they go for work.
This means a number of things.
Repercussions
It means that rather often, the hygiene conditions of labourers may be considered negligible. It means clean or even functional canteens or places to have food, or restrooms, need not be thought necessities that need supplying. Or, for the matter of that, creches where there are female labourers.
When something like the COVID-19 pandemic happens, they have nowhere to go but back. And when the pandemic caused public transport to shut down indefinitely, they had to perform that long trudge, on barefoot, because, well, for them at that point that was the only way back.
In India, then, the lockdown imposed due to the coronavirus suddenly made a figure visible– this walking figure of the migrant labourer. Even if one did not see them as the most vulnerable but anxiously imagined their bodies as the most infectious, there was no getting around it: they were suddenly visible now.
Everyone could see them, did see them.
Even the eye of those sections of the media whose particular proclivities lay more towards covering the pyrotechnics which were the morale-boosting exercises citizens of India were sporadically engaging in, occasionally swiveled around to fix on them.
This visibility, which could have been expected to have beneficial consequences, did not in point of fact really have them, however. In fact, at the same time as this suddenly explosive visibility of the people themselves, there seemed to exist a curiously paradoxical invisibility of concern about their futures that skirted close to apathy. The trend of certain local measures (most in reaction to the economic trouble the pandemic caused) that would closely affect their future lives seemed to give cause for alarm.
The Madhya Pradesh government decided to pass a measure allowing factories to resume operations without many of the necessary requirements listed in India’s Factories Act. Daily working hours went up to twelve per day, from eight. And weekly duty went up to seventy-two hours.
Uttar Pradesh issued an ordinance scrapping almost all labour laws with the exception of a very few, for three years. Murmurs all over the country suggested many other state governments may eventually follow suit on these beginnings in terms of local measures.
This basically means factories and workplaces at this point in time can if they choose operate without obeying the requirement of providing first aid boxes, drinking water, or decent protective equipment. It means qualities such as adequate lighting and ventilation can be considered immaterial for some time now until such time as economic activity can be got back on track.
On the pro side, hearteningly, there were signs that local measures were being taken to address the problems of the barefoot journeys of the migrant labourers. Uttar Pradesh itself took steps, for example. On the evening of May 7th 2020, a group of one hundred and seventy-two workers trying to perform the walk home to Uttar Pradesh from Delhi and Noida–many of them on bare feet–were stopped by the Uttar Pradesh police on a highway in western UP’s Bulandshahr.
These people were given food, and moved to a college in the area. Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yoga Adityanath’s state government then said it would arrange buses to take them home. Yogi Adityanath himself then went on record to say that not one single migrant should be walking back home on foot from big cities like Delhi.
Welcome steps. But the question was and is, was and is it possible to say the same of what the labourers travelled back home to?
When something like the COVID-19 pandemic happens, they have nowhere to go but back. And when the pandemic caused public transport to shut down indefinitely, they had to perform that long trudge, on barefoot, because, well, for them at that point that was the only way back.
In India, then, the lockdown imposed due to the coronavirus suddenly made a figure visible– this walking figure of the migrant labourer. Even if one did not see them as the most vulnerable but anxiously imagined their bodies as the most infectious, there was no getting around it: they were suddenly visible now.
Everyone could see them, did see them.
Even the eye of those sections of the media whose particular proclivities lay more towards covering the pyrotechnics which were the morale-boosting exercises citizens of India were sporadically engaging in, occasionally swiveled around to fix on them.
This visibility, which could have been expected to have beneficial consequences, did not in point of fact really have them, however. In fact, at the same time as this suddenly explosive visibility of the people themselves, there seemed to exist a curiously paradoxical invisibility of concern about their futures that skirted close to apathy. The trend of certain local measures (most in reaction to the economic trouble the pandemic caused) that would closely affect their future lives seemed to give cause for alarm.
The Madhya Pradesh government decided to pass a measure allowing factories to resume operations without many of the necessary requirements listed in India’s Factories Act. Daily working hours went up to twelve per day, from eight. And weekly duty went up to seventy-two hours.
Uttar Pradesh issued an ordinance scrapping almost all labour laws with the exception of a very few, for three years. Murmurs all over the country suggested many other state governments may eventually follow suit on these beginnings in terms of local measures.
This basically means factories and workplaces at this point in time can if they choose operate without obeying the requirement of providing first aid boxes, drinking water, or decent protective equipment. It means qualities such as adequate lighting and ventilation can be considered immaterial for some time now until such time as economic activity can be got back on track.
On the pro side, hearteningly, there were signs that local measures were being taken to address the problems of the barefoot journeys of the migrant labourers. Uttar Pradesh itself took steps, for example. On the evening of May 7th 2020, a group of one hundred and seventy-two workers trying to perform the walk home to Uttar Pradesh from Delhi and Noida–many of them on bare feet–were stopped by the Uttar Pradesh police on a highway in western UP’s Bulandshahr.
These people were given food, and moved to a college in the area. Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yoga Adityanath’s state government then said it would arrange buses to take them home. Yogi Adityanath himself then went on record to say that not one single migrant should be walking back home on foot from big cities like Delhi.
Welcome steps. But the question was and is, was and is it possible to say the same of what the labourers travelled back home to?