This is a time of strange juxtapositions: life vs livelihood, unemployment vs forced labour, health vs economic health, lockdown and containment zones vs reverse migration. Even a quick look will tell you that these are not absolute opposites that are juxtaposed as opposing goods. Ideally, one would wish for life and livelihood, but we find ourselves at a cusp where both are imperilled. Employment should, in any conceivable modern sense, come with dignity of labour. But the sight of unorganised migrant labour, in their long march from one kind of oblivion to another, tells us that they have been stripped of both.
This is the nature of this pandemic. It has thrown us off gear at all levels of existence—and exposed every wart in the body politic that was hitherto ignored and invisibilised. Out of sight, out of mind. It’s sometimes surprising that a modern nation with such an obsession with history—which is always trying to find itself through both its developmental goals and its spiritual-reformist underpinning—has so little social institutional memory. It’s a land that carries many, many scars in its psyche for the manner its very skilled labour has been treated, through the centuries, whether bonded and enslaved to old feudatories or indentured to colonial plantations in faraway lands.
A new image, one that conforms to our present aspirations to power and prestige, cannot be built on amnesia. We cannot forget how caste kept humans bonded to forms of labour—with no sign of the idea of free will. We cannot lose to the mists of history the marvels that Indian hands wrought—our unparalleled magic in creating everything from textile, the finest silk and muslin, to ships. The next time someone mentions the word ‘construction’, maybe it will be apt to remember everything from the Brihadeeswara to the Taj and start respecting the work that human hands do.
Here’s where the paradox hit. To save lives, we allowed Covid-19 to hit our livelihoods. Entire economies ground to halt. It became zero balance in everyone’s account—state, industry, individual. But that would finally imperil everyone even more—fiscal health is related to physical health long-term—so it’s clear that economic activity needs to be kick-started. But by the time that hour struck, the migrant caravans had already clocked miles and miles on foot. Labour, numbering some 3.75 lakh, across states, were walking, or waiting to get on trains and buses.
Internally, inter- and intra-state migrant labour could add up to 37% of the Indian population. A more conservative figure: They are 20% of the workforce (Economic Survey 2016). Last year, Azim Premji Institute estimated 29% of any Indian city’s force are daily-wagers, earning as low as Rs 2,000 a month or a max of Rs 20,000. Most live in 10x10 feet houses, four-six people crammed into each such unit, with basic civic amenities either absent or stolen or improvised. Can you, in India, think of any place that offers decent living quarters with regular amenities to migrant labour—those who build our expressways, our malls, our Koramangalas and Cyber Hubs? The thought hasn’t even occurred
to you.
It is when this ad-hocism that passes off as living quarters evaporated—when their landlords wanted the rent but work had dried up, when they had to queue up for one or two square meals a day—that’s when the exodus began. “Beggars choosers?” you’d ask in scorn, when they couldn’t stomach alien food. Pardon the family from Bahraich or Purnea or Behrampur if they weren’t cosmopolitan enough to hoard up cheese and pasta and spend the lockdown checking YouTube cooking videos, or savouring the nostalgia of long-lost grandma recipes. ... They just had to reach, no matter what, those villages they had once emerged out of for the long journey to the big city.
If governments could not plan and foresee and budget for such a black swan event as the Covid-19 pandemic, if India’s biggest industries whose captains find their names listed in the world’s catalogues of dollar billionaires couldn’t do it and have now to hand out pink slips or halve the salaries of their employees, how do you expect the migrant labour to have a buffer for this day? How would they have known that an unknown virus would disrupt their lives, even if it did not destroy their bodies? How are they to be expected to hang loose for a quarter of a year, demanding no food or shelter, but be available at the drop of a hat the moment the captains decide the game is on? What would they live on? Slogans? Or fresh air? Reverse migration on a scale that India had not seen in centuries was only to be expected.
Why? Because as we dreamt our ‘first world’ dreams, and watched the GDP and Sensex with as much care as our BP and blood sugar, we forgot that the pyramid stands on its base—and that base is imprisoned in medieval terms and conditions. What structure would stand if the base withers away? Or just walks away? As a migrant worker said, “I can turn out any dish, Mughlai or continental, but the restaurant has shut, and I have neither roti nor makan!” The next time we try to build a modern India, maybe we should think of making the foundation strong.
Santwana Bhattacharya
Resident Editor,Karnataka
(Email ID: santwana@newindianexpress.com)