Migrant Workers In India- A Story of endless sufferings
While walking on highway to home, many stranded migrant workers met with an accident and lost their lives. Whenever we listen or watch this sort of news on media we filled up with sympathy for them that very soon vanishes. The Government as a ritual announces compensation amounts for deceased and injured. With this it is assumed that the cost of lives has been paid and the matter comes to the end. We seldom care to contemplate the circumstances that caused such grief to them. The economic development in a country mostly led by a capitalistic perspective does not consider labor classes of people as a center point for any economic planning. They are out of the purview. Plans, whatever are prepared mostly allot a meager amount for them make grants either through subsidy or grant of food grains as if they are a social liability for whom we are supposed to make some charity.
The very fact is forgotten, that the skyscrapers in glooming cities, factories, industries, highway, railway tracks on which we boast on as they are the outcome of our sleek financial planning cannot be achieved without hard work of these laborers. The migrant workers stranded in big cities during the coronavirus pandemic outbreak tell and exposes the dark realities of our system. While a large chunk of middle class enjoyed the month-long lockdown, the migrant workers are grappling with situation threatening their survival. With the loss of income, they had nothing to eat, feed their children, and afford fares to come back home and many more. In the circumstances of total despair, they were compelled to take very hazardous decision to march on the road on foot back to home thousands K.M away to reunite with their families. They bore all the sufferings on the way, many of them lost their lives, but they were determined to leave the cities which promised them a livelihood. A sense of betrayal prevailed in them.
To contain the outbreak of coronavirus pandemic, lockdown across the country was all of sudden announced unilaterally by the Government giving no time to these stranded migrant workers to be prepared. They had a number of difficulties already haunting them. The sudden lockdown took all their means of livelihood. The challenges bigger than coronavirus were before them….to fight with hunger and to keep alive their dependents. Though the government tried to provide a free meal to all stranded workers the real problem was that the government had no exact data of migrant workers, so plan, prepared in haste to provide free meals to them was bound to fail. This is evident by the admission made by a number of stranded workers, that they were starved and were not provided any food. The worst thing was that the workers who earned their means by hard work and honestly came down to the level of the beggar. The lockdown took away everything from them. For them not coronavirus pandemic but the lockdown was a disaster.
An effective measure to contain coronavirus outbreak was certainly a countrywide lockdown, the effectiveness of which was seen in some western countries and China. But could the measure adopted in those countries also be applied to a country like India where a major chunk of the population earns their livelihood on a daily basis and work as a migrant laborer far away from their home. Does a similar condition prevail in this country too to announce lockdown suddenly?
The fact is that the government had miscalculated the consequences of lockdown by not taking into account the matter of stranded migrant workers. There were certain shortcomings in the planning. The system failed to manage the case of migrant workers before taking such a strict action to contain the outbreak of a pandemic. Neither the stranded workers were provided with food properly, nor were they given time or transported to their home in the beginning. The capitalistic approach came to play again, as the measure like lockdown was appropriate for upper and middle-class people to whom these migrant workers provide their services.
Marching millions of hungry and shattered people on the road back home is a disaster not caused by nature but by the failure of the system.
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