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Rajesh Ramachandran
They were sleeping on the railroad track out of exhaustion, obviously, because that was the only safe place to sleep for those 20 men, women, and children. According to initial reports, they were walking along the same track, hiding from the often cruel law enforcement men on the roads, to reach a railway station 150 km away, hoping to board a train to Madhya Pradesh. . Ironically, an empty train arrived and shot down 16 of them with their body parts, footwear, handbags, and rotis scattered everywhere, reminding the rest of us of their miserable life and its inevitable end. They are martyrs for Covid, or worse, martyrs for apathy at the time of an epidemic.
Previously, 18 men were caught traveling in a cement mixer, on a similar route in one of the warmest regions of the country. They could have succumbed to suffocation or worse. It is a miracle that they all came out alive from the bowels of the cement mixer. But how many of those tragedies would make the Center and state governments understand that they have been callous in treating the most vulnerable section of the country’s workforce? From Kottayam in Kerala to Ludhiana in Punjab, migrant workers have been protesting on the streets, desperately wanting to return home, not because they are homesick, because desperately poor people cannot afford to be homesick.
The raison d’être of migration is sustenance and a dream of prosperity. The latter often remains just that, a dream. But without livelihoods, there is no reason for any migrant to stay away from home. If they are going to starve, he or she would rather starve at home with the family than in an alien land that treats them with indifference at best and suspicious violence at worst. Many of the migrant workers were not paid in April, even in micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). This was witnessed by the representatives of the promoters’ organization in industrial centers such as Noida and Ludhiana.
Most MSMEs had leaned back to pay the March salary despite the interruption of approximately 10 days in that month, but the complete closure of the industries broke their backs in April. In fact, those workers who had no hope of livelihood also started walking in early April. It will become an exodus when there is no news of the reopening of the units and the restoration of livelihoods. They have been walking knowing full well that it would take them weeks to reach their destination, that too if they remain alive. Many have walked and cycled and many have perished on the roads they hoped would lead them home.
Even the idea of arranging transportation for migrant workers probably occurred to the powers that be only after wealthy students at the Kota training center had to be brought in by various state governments. The priorities were very clear. Those who move the wheels of the Indian economy on subsistence wages did not matter; Only wealthy children who stayed away from their homes were imported to receive additional tuition for competitive exams. Even when the Center finally organized the trains to evacuate the workers, the Karnataka government had the temerity to cancel those trains. Despite the latter’s U-turn, hundreds of people were seen walking from Bangalore on NH-44 to Uttar Pradesh.
Worse still was charging the railroad fare from these struggling workers, which also when our politicians are allowed to travel virtually free year-round, and the entire government and government-supported sectors are offered travel concessions. Another issue is that the Opposition tried to make the most of this opportunity to put the government on the bench.
But Maharashtra is an opposition-ruled state, and the deaths of these 16 workers on the railway tracks near Jalna will not facilitate the task of the opposition. Neither the so-called progressive Kerala nor Maharashtra nor Punjab had an innovative solution to mitigate the misery of migrant workers. Kerala calls them guest workers, but still made them pay the train fare. All governments, whether in states governed by BJP or non-BJP, followed a policy of blockade, stigmatizing the sick and criminalizing unpaid workers who wanted to go home.
It remains a mystery why the Center did not start trains from the beginning. The Orissa High Court ordered on Thursday that all Odia migrants wishing to return home undergo a Covid test. Even in the beginning, governments may have allowed people to travel home after detection and testing, depending on the availability of the test kits. It stands to reason that healthy, virus-free citizens are locked up rather than containing and treating only affected patients. The responsibility for testing, identifying, and quarantining Covid positive patients rests with the government, it cannot lazily lock up those who desperately want to get home, making them walk or pedal thousands of miles, bypassing police checkpoints.
The idea of Shramik trains and flights from abroad should be replicated for all citizens in need. Only a limited number of people with very compelling reasons would want to travel in these circumstances, and should be allowed to do so with a negative Covid certificate from a recognized laboratory. Once the anxiety of being stranded or locked up without wages is removed, most of those who are desperate to travel may consider postponing their decision. About 25% of those who registered to travel from Ludhiana and Mohali in Punjab did not show up for their journey, probably because they had their livelihoods secured, but even more so because they realized they were no longer stranded.
In our cities and towns, in these times of pain, Gandhi’s talisman is reversing; The poorest and the weakest are asked what they would do for the almighty government. We have not yet reformed our policy, which was designed by the colonial masters to govern and not to serve. Otherwise, police officer Arun Kumar would not have had to knock on the doors of two Covid centers and two hospitals before dying without medical care in the heart of Delhi.
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