BENGALURU/BHUBANESWAR/KOCHI/VIJAYAWADA/HYDERABAD: “We are worried about money at the moment, not our health. The poor have no health to worry about,” Ravi Chourasiya, 30, a contract carpenter in Bengaluru’s Cox Town, says stoically.
“Back home in Bihar, I have to feed my aged parents, two sisters, wife, two children and a younger brother. There was no source of income, so I had to come back to Bengaluru, even in this dangerous time,” he says.
Chourasiya’s story is interchangeable with the majority of lakhs of Indian migrant workers, who without warning found themselves jobless at the end of March and stranded far from their homes.
During the lockdown, Chourasiya went to his home state, but the familiar dearth of suitable jobs there has now forced him to return to Bengaluru.
Across the South, migrant workers have begun trickling in back to the jobs they held before the Covid-19 lockdown. The workers say they have no choice but to return as government subsidies at their home states are not enough to sustain them any longer.
“I earned just Rs 828 from the MGNREGA work I did for a week and received Rs 2,000 as government incentive after two months. How can my family live on such a meagre sum?” asks Narendra, a migrant from Cuttack district in Odisha.
There are few jobs to be had in migrants’ native villages. Birendra Das from West Bengal says, “At my village, shops and restaurants restarted in June first week, but I could not find any job, not even as a cleaner. I tried for nearly a month, but in Vijayawada my boss was ready to hire me back. So though I wasn’t willing to, I returned on June 27,” says Das.
But travelling back to states where they had worked is not easy. Employers in Kerala say thousands in West Bengal, Assam, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are unable to return either due to a lack of trains or stringent travel restrictions in their home states.
“We are ready to meet the initial quarantine and food expenses of the returning workers. But, we are told their home states, especially West Bengal and Assam, are not ready to provide the sanction for travel,” says Shibin Jose, director, KLR Facility Management, a Kochi-based manpower supplier.
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The problem is more or less similar for another employer, Amjad Ali VA, who runs a plywood factory in Perumbavoor. “We used to run two shifts a day. Now, we are operating just one due to a decline in business and lack of labour,” said Ali. Some migrant workers are making every effort to return.
One tile-mason, Ramesh, rode his motorcycle 300 km every day for 10 days from his home in Uttar Pradesh to his workplace in Tiruchy, as there was no public transport.
Others such as Pooran Chand Yadav, 55, a supervisor for a contractor working with BPCL, had an easier time returning because they lived in green zone areas in the country.
As the southern states rely heavily on migrant workers to keep businesses running, their absence has stalled projects.
Srinivas Rao, Visakhapatnam secretary of the builders’ group Credai, says around 2,000 big and small projects have been affected, as nearly 70% of one lakh workers have not returned, though over a month has passed since Unlock 1.
Precise data is not available yet on how many migrant workers have returned, but authorities say the bulk of the workforce is still staying away.
In Andhra Pradesh’s Krishna district alone, only 72,000 have returned out of 4 lakh who left. The lack of labour combined with a collapse in demand has hit industrialists hard. In Coimbatore, up to 60% of units could not resume operations because of labour shortage.
“The migrants who went to their hometowns in special trains could not return here as the inter-state transport facility is frozen due to the pandemic.
We are facing a severe labour shortage,” says J James, district president of TN Association of Cottage and Tiny Enterprises.
Also, job orders have plunged by 60%, he says. Some migrant workers remain wary about the virus. Ajay Kumar and his family had left Vijayawada and returned to Brahmapur in Odisha during the lockdown.
“My boss called me and offered to pay some extra money than what he used to pay and said he would foot my train fare and house rent here till everything normalises. So I decided to come back. But this time I came alone as I did not want my family to suffer. I will bring them only when everything is back to normal.”
Others are set against returning because they had a rough time during the lockdown. Nabi Ul Sheikh from Malda in West Bengal faced a torrid time in Hyderabad along with 6,000 others when the lockdown was imposed.
They were restricted to a settlement, he alleges, and he and his group did not receive adequate food and accommodation. After the Shramik trains were announced, they hopped on without thinking, thanking their gods for the chance to return home. Sheikh has now found work as a mason in his hometown and says he will now never return.
“It’s fine that Covid-19 happened, nobody could have done anything about it. But we did not expect this treatment from our company.” Chandan Das, who stayed back near his workplace at Cherlapally industries cluster in the outskirts of Hyderabad, says the government is not providing adequate support.
“We are paid Rs 10,000 per month out of which Rs 3,500 goes to rent. Around Rs 5,000 is left for food, which is not enough to support my family of three.” In Odisha, workers have begun to leave for their former jobs.
The prime destination for those workers is Gujarat, particularly Surat, where lakhs of Odia workers are employed in powerlooms.
The absence of quarantine stipulation in Gujarat has encouraged the workers to return, says Sushant Rout of Prabasi Odia organisation. In Madurai, cases are still rising and officials say migrant workers have not yet returned to work as there is a strict lockdown.