Glenn C. Kharkongor
The unfolding tragedy of poor migrant workers is a blot on the conscience of the nation. The tableau of human misery is still unfurling. The government is reduced to a few mumbles of sympathy and doles of questionable certainty. TV and newspapers carry vivid stories of daily accidents, deaths from exhaustion, and penniless hunger. As the toll mounts, no one talks of flattening the curve of collateral deaths.
After Partition, this is the largest exodus of people of Independent India.But this is modern India, with national highways, railway networks, and private carriers of every kind of conveyance. The long lines of migrants, walking hundreds of kilometres with their meagre bundles and small children gives us an unspeakable numbness.
The measures of our government seem perfunctory, insincere and woefully inadequate. They have washed their hands. The Supreme Court refused to intervene, after the Centre claimed that arrangements had been made. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta callously told the bench, “but some don’t want to wait and start walking on foot.Migrants must have patience to wait for their turn”.
Wait their turn for what?
Money? According to SEWA (Self Employed Women’s Association), over 70% had not received the promised cash payments into their Jan Dhan accounts. Having not received wages for two months, migrant travellers had to pay for truck rides, fourfold for bus tickets, premium for train fares. According to Stranded Workers Action Network, 64% of migrant labourers had less than Rs 100 with them.
Transport? Trains were cancelled, leaving thousands stranded in Karnataka, buses turned back at state borders. The waiting centre in Ramlila Maidan in Delhi was littered with garbage and cow dung, where anxious would-be travellers stayed for days. Thousands chose to sleep on pavements. At various checkpoints they were forciblyherded into quarantine centres, disinfected by chemical sprays. Most decided to walk through forests and byways to avoid detection and harassment.
Food? Only 18% have received the promised rations. In Mangaluru, bags of rotten, mouldy rice were distributed. There werescuffles for food at railway stations. Anganwadi centres, the source of one good meal a day for poor preschool children have been closed since March 6.
To reach home? it’s impossible to hold back the tide of the homecoming impulse. The yearning for home, never mind how humble, is a theme for poets, filmmakers and songwriters. Every psychologist or sociologist learns Maslow’s Theory: food, shelter, safety, love and belonging are the most basic of human instincts. Home is the ultimate social safety net.
Many were bewildered, unable to comprehend this jolt to their already precarious lives. In a survey by Local Circles, more than 75% of respondents polled across 277 districts did not understand what the circulars meant – a fact borne out by frequent clarifications from the Ministry of Home Affairs. In the first lockdown, they were given just four hours to shut down their lives.
Driven deeper into poverty
In April alone, 60 million jobs were lost in the organised sector. Add 40 million labourers and the number swells. These workers lived in the worst conditions, sleeping and eating in hovels, labouring inthe sweat factories of Make in India. To heap further torment, Gujarat increased work hours to 12, Karnataka to 10, undermining existing laws and specifying that overtime wages will not be paid. UP and MP have suspended al labour laws for 3 years. No one speaks of higher wages, better living conditions for workers.
The almost daily pronouncements of largesse for the poor is mostly repackaging of existing budgetary allocations and schemes. Disdaining euphemisms like, ‘old wine in new bottles’, the Deccan Herald described these doles as ‘frankenstein’.
Middle class mindset
There are diseases that mainly afflict the poor: malnutrition, TB, malaria. The middle class is mostly insulated from these diseases, so we don’t give them much attention. Social distancing is already in place.But when a disease strikes the well-off, we move into high gear. Health precautions become ritualized and sacrosanct.Infringements become punishable by force of law, backed by social sanction. The middle classvoice is always heard. We have become hoarse with condemnation of rule breakers, demanding fines, incarceration, and heaping of more indignities.
When our well-being is under threat, the welfare of others is secondary, expendable. We find a moral high ground, assuage our guilt by quoting the kind acts of a few tender hearts. We are pleased with our own little sphere of importance and content in our cocoon of comfort. The class divide pits an affluent professional class able to stay cosily at home indefinitely, against a working class who must risk limb and life to survive.
Physical distancing is a fantasy
Social distancing, based on caste, has been practiced in the villages of India for millennia. But in urban slums, we now demand physical distancing. It’s impossible. According to a survey by Down to Earth, in the slums there are 1.5 persons per room, in West Bengal 2.5 persons. Half of them share a common drinking water source, 40% do not have bathrooms.
Pictures of crowding from all over the country show the futility of distancing. In the rush for food, travel, and passes, people swarm together. India does not have the wherewithal to keep its huge population separate from each other.
Distancing measures on the London Underground has caused lines up to three kilometres long and waiting periods of several hours. Then imagine the chaos in India. There are 140 million daily commuters and 23 million daily train passengers. Is physical distancing possible when passengers sit on the floor, ride on the roof?
“Who gives a shit?”
Is the blunt retort from P. Sainath, author of “Everybody Loves a Good Drought”, and the spokesperson of rural poverty in India. He was talking about the “16 workers from Madhya Pradesh, eight of them Gond Adivasis”, crushed by a goods train.Nobel Laureate Abhijit Banerjee said of the vulnerable street children,”Their existence is not even acknowledged”. Two small children were found on a road, their migrant parents run over by a passing vehicle.
There are very few spokespersons for tribals. Brinda Karat began an article in The Hindu by narrating the story of JamloMakdam, 12, a migrant Adivasi girl who died of hunger and dehydration just a few kilometres from her home in Chhattisgarh, while walking home from Telangana. Denied their traditional habitats and landless, the proportion of migrant households among STs are higher than all other communities. STs are the single largest group among female migrant workers.
Mothers and children are dying
According to a UNICEF report, 20.1 million babies will be born in India in the period Mar 11-Dec 16, 2020. How will they all get to hospital?Several have given birth on trains. A migrant worker delivered on the road on May 16 after walking 250 km. She left the baby at the gate of a rural hospital that would not admit her because she did not have a Covid negative certificate. The full story is in Down To Earth magazine.
Johns Hopkins School of Public Health has predicted that child mortality rates could rise by 45%, most of them soon after birth, and maternal deaths by 39%mostly in labour and childbirth,Worldwide, there will be 1.2 million deaths in the next six months among children under five years of age. The largest number will be in India, 1400 child deaths a day in the high estimate, and by the low estimate350 deaths a day. So far Covid has caused 50 deaths a day. India never fails to find new causes to die from.
The dimensions of the silent toll of mental illnessis incalculable. A youth from Odisha, unable to get home, hanged himself in Haryana. So many more will die such deaths, the reasons not known or denied. Untold numbers will suffer from anxiety and depression. Other groups in silent distress are commercial sex workers, the handicapped and the LGBT community. Unconscionable scenes and stories paint bleak scenes of despair. A picture in the Shillong Times showed Khasi women breaking stones in Sohra for Rs 187 per day. In another picture street children were sweeping up grains of dal on the road in Shillong, fallen from a truck. MGNREGA jobs are down to 1% of normal.
Shakespeare lived his entire life in the shadow of the bubonic plague. One-fifth of the population of Stratford-upon-Avon died of the plague. References to the pestilence appear often in his plays.From Macbeth are these lines, written in despair, “Alas, poor country, almost afraid to know itself. It cannot be called our mother, but our grave”.