Adithya Ram

MPP-20-0218

When the nation-wide lockdown was announced towards the end of March by Prime Minister
Narendra Modi, it was done without much warning, without a lot of time for people to process it
and prepare accordingly. While the affluent retreated to the comfort of their homes and could afford
to insulate themselves from much of what was going on, the hardest hit were the urban workers and
the daily wage labourers.

They were forced to return, a good majority of them on foot, to the relative safety and comfort of
their villages. On the face of it, the migrants chose to leave because they had lost trust in the urban
system to provide for their essentials. The fundamental problem was a loss of livelihood and income,
exacerbated by a welfare system that seemed to a large extent absent or inadequate.

A major problem that quickly became apparent was the lack of foresight shown by the government.
It seemed taken completely by surprise at the exodus that followed the announcement of the
lockdown

It exposed the lack of a system to support and track migrants. The major law in existence in India to
safeguard the interests of the migrants, particularly in the urban space, is the Inter-State Migrant
Workmen Act, 1979. The law mandates that every institution that hires migrants keep records of
them and have a contractor assigned to them. The contractor is obliged to make sure that the
workers get daily wages and other allowances. The allowances under the law include a displacement
allowance, shelter, free basic healthcare and other amenities.

However, according to many experts, this law is untenable since it’s simply too expensive to
implement. No state has implemented this law in letter and spirit since it disincentivises reportage
by contractors of the workers that they have hired. This means that two different kinds of labour is
generated – formal and informal. The migrants who form the informal labour segment thus get no
benefits, unlike their rural counterparts, who have some sort of social support in the form of
MGNREGA and free food transfers. Even in the absence of benefits, if the law merely ensured
formalisation of the labourers in the form of a database to track them, the government would have
been much better placed to anticipate the scale of the problem and plan policy accordingly. The
government could look at relaxing some of the conditions set out in the law to at least ensure
formalisation and not lose out on that in the search of lofty goals that may not be practical.

Another body that was formed with the goal of ensuring social security for migrants is the
Construction Workers’ Welfare Board (CWWB). However, recent data has shown that only around
21% of the funds allocated to this body was utilised, again highlighting either lack of data or simply
the will to act.

The authorities have also displayed an inability to divert resources to tackle the problem. It should
have been fairly straightforward for a country that’s self-sufficient in food grains to guarantee food
safety to the migrants. Public Distribution System (PDS) data showed that, in April, the buffer
reserves were close to 78 million tonnes of food grain, three times the minimum requirement.
Although the government did move to transfer some of this ration through to those in need, a lot of
them still weren’t covered. Making a strong statement at the very beginning about assured food
supply surely was a low hanging fruit for the government and would have gone a long way in
restoring some confidence in the minds of the labourers to stay on in their regions of work and work
with the rest of the country in fighting the pandemic.

The government has since acknowledged some challenges that taking this route would have
presented, namely that the average migrant has very little in the way of food safety outside their
own state. Towards this, the government then announced the One Nation-One Ration Card
programme to ease the hassle of free food transfer in the case of nation-wide emergency such as
this one. However, for this pandemic, it may have come a little too late.

Instead, the mass migrations have now jeopardised the very point of the lockdown, which was to
contain the virus. It is likely that a good number of the people who made the long journey are
carriers and may have taken the virus to our villages. They could kick off a new wave of the
pandemic. However, it’s difficult to not be sympathetic to their plight. When faced with very little
choice, they did what they thought was the only thing they could do.

The industries in the cities would want to restart production as soon as possible to kick-start the
economy once again. But the question needs to be asked, at what cost? It is a worrying trend that
many state governments are looking at exploitative labour laws violating basic rights of the workers
as the solution to restarting a slow economy. It seems more and more likely that the people who
went through the very worst of this crisis would now also have to shoulder the responsibility of
seeing the nation through it.