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On March 31, the Center informed the Supreme Court that there were no migrant workers on the roads given the measures that governments had taken to shelter and feed them in various states. This presentation was made after the petitions were filed asking the Center to act to prevent a humanitarian crisis, as workers began to walk hundreds of miles to return to their native towns and villages.
On Tuesday, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the nation to announce an economic stimulus of Rs 20 lakh crore, workers were still taking to the roads in large numbers trying to return home.
There can be no doubt about the fact that the migrant worker crisis is the result of government apathy. Despite the fact that nearly two months have passed since the immigration crisis began with the sudden application of the national blockade on March 25 to reduce the spread of Covid-19, the Center has not found it necessary to establish a working group to help migrants to reach their homes.
Vande Bharat
Meanwhile, the Center has shown speed in helping the most prosperous. In early May, he decided to mount a massive mission titled Vande Bharat to bring stranded people back to other countries due to the global situation of Covid-19.
There have been sporadic protests by workers in cities like Mumbai and Surat, but the magnitude of these protests was nothing compared to the magnitude of the crisis. Fearing that the law will act against them if they meet to assert their rights, workers have silently endured unimaginable difficulties. With no money on hand and even scarce food, many walked miles with nothing but cookies and snacks for a solitary meal a day.
But this situation has failed to adequately move the state. While special trains were launched to take migrants back to their homes on May 1, the trains were far away and few in number given the large number of migrants trapped outside their home states. To make matters worse, as the blockade comes to an end next week, governments, pressured by an industry that is worried about restarting production and services, are treating workers as commodities.
On May 5, the Karnataka government decided to cancel the special trains after pressure from the builders. A public protest forced the state government to change this position a day later. Last week, the Uttar Pradesh government passed an ordinance that effectively suspended 35 of the state’s 38 current labor laws to boost investment.
national calamity
This has led to great tragedies. In Aurangabad, Maharashtra, 16 workers were run over last week. Elsewhere, migrants who walked back were hit or killed when overturned vehicles overturned.
Activists and unions have harshly criticized these failed attempts to bring workers back home. The groups said Tuesday that the government has issued four migrant travel orders since April 29. According to them, the first three were “confusing and conflicting,” while the order issued Monday was “incomplete and vague,” and travel protocols established by various states have many loopholes. The organizations added that a second exodus of migrant workers to their places of origin has begun.
It is true that industries will need workers to restart their production and, in turn, the economy. But this cannot be a reason to violate the most fundamental right that exists in the Constitution: the right to life and subsistence.
Work force
A more compassionate government would have already taken up the cause of war-torn migrants, establishing a task force equivalent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs team that is organizing Indians from around the world to return home as part of the Vande Bharat mission. Instead, the Center left it to the states and moved on.
Migrant workers have always been invisible to Indian policy makers, so the current crisis erupted as it is. By once again ignoring the concerns of migrants and treating them as expendable, the Center perpetuates this disastrous mistake.
In the same way that he sees the Covid-19 crisis as an economic opportunity to reshape Indian industry, why can’t the government take the crisis from immigrants, and indeed the images of hundreds of desperate people walking home , as an opportunity to correct your approach? this vulnerable population? In fact, he needs a Vande Bharat mission for internal migrants trying to get home, one that takes into account the likelihood that these citizens will want to return to the states where they work when they feel safer.
And if industries and governments want workers to return to factories and offices, this must be done through incentives and not by force. The option to return should be that of the workers and not the whims of the industry. Anything else would be inhumane treatment of workers.
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