The long walk home: India’s migrant labor, livelihood, and lockdown amid COVID-19

ABSTRACT

Covid-19-induced curbs on movement and social distancing, imposed by governments around the world brought transportation and the economy to a standstill in many nations. In India, with its billion-plus population, it severely exposed the problems of the poor, especially millions of internal migrant workers working primarily in unorganised sectors as daily wagers (Umanath, 2020) with little or no culture of savings. When the Indian government announced its first lockdown on March 24, 2020 – factories, construction sites, offices, institutions, organisations and the sort immediately suspended all activities indefinitely, nullifying the migrant labour force’s ability to earn a living and pay bills as they were forced indoors. Then began India’s biggest migration since partition (Ellis-Petersen & Chaurasia, 2020), when millions of these migrant workers based in India’s big cities began their march home to distant villages. This manuscript reflects on this sudden reverse labour migration, demystifying the reasons for this exodus .

KEYWORDS:

• India
• migrant labor movement
• COVID-19
• coronavirus lockdown
• livelihood loss

Introduction: the exodus

I saw their faces through the frame of my car window – sunburnt, sad and tired. Many carried their belongings stuffed in woven plastic sacks on their shoulders and on top of their heads – men, women and children – families, hundreds of them – a river of humanity flowing on the road. As I had to get medicines for my diabetic father, I had managed to acquire a ‘Lockdown Pass’ to travel to the city from the outskirts where I lived. One of the police personnel at the check post, his face covered in a N95 mask walked up to me, checked my ID and the pass. He beckoned me to move on. I asked him if I can give a lift to some of these laborers walking home. He shook his head.

I zig-zagged my way past the police barricades and drove slowly past the streak of people trudging on the road. The sun was almost overhead, burning the pitch on the road, creating a simmering mirage in the distance into which these people continued to walk. I continued at a slow pace, still affected by their plight. Many of them turned to look at me, as they walked – a young boy among them. Our gaze met. I stopped my car and stepped outside, calling out to the boy and his parents. I gestured to them to come closer and asked why they were walking in the heat of the day. The boy could get sunstroke. I took out my bottle from the car and offered it to the boy, who grabbed it and emptied the water into his parched throat. His mother, wrapped in a colorful cotton saree, her face covered by the tail-end of the saree, lowered the baby-girl she was carrying on one side of her body. She took a sip of water and made the baby-girl drink some. Soon, other walkers huddled around me asking for the liquid. The bottle was empty, with many unable to quench their thirst. I felt helpless. I asked them why they had to travel and not stay put somewhere until the lockdown was over. They said they had little money with them. They were daily wagers. They had no savings. No money to buy food for the uncertain lockdown period. If they don’t get back to work again, they cannot survive. After all, they were migrant workers – outsiders to this place, who now had no jobs and thus no money to pay for their food, house rent and bills. Their landlords were abusing them, asking them to leave. And, the only place they could return, when they had nowhere to go, was their homes.¹ At least, they had a roof over their heads – a place from where they wouldn’t be asked to leave.

For most of these migrant laborers, walking back home seemed the only feasible solution to survive this unimagined crisis brought about by Coronavirus (though, I did see few of them bicycling, carrying their families along). Yet, the homes of these workers lay hundreds of miles away from their present location. Still they believed they would reach home, safe and healthy, by continuing to walk under the merciless glare of the sun, eating what they could get and sleeping wherever they could lie down.

I waved at the boy, as he tagged along with his family, turning repeatedly to look at me. As I sped away from these cordons of people, not failing to notice their sweat-bathed shirts, I couldn’t help but glance around at the empty seats of my Volkswagen and its posh interiors. We were sharing the same road, but our journeys were so different. We were not even breathing the same air; the windows of the sedan rolled up, I was engulfed in the air-conditioned breeze hissing from the vents – never have I felt so guilty for my possessions. The disparity weighed down on me. Why was this so? Just because I had an education, and a better job and life as a result, I had the right to live a superior life? And, I wasn’t even allowed to help them.

Later that day, as I drove back home on the near empty road, I caught sight of the sun sinking towards the horizon in the distance. There was hardly a soul to be found. Mother Nature, albeit briefly, had rid itself of the two-legged animals swarming over her body for years. The tired face of the boy I offered water to in the morning still danced in my thoughts, as I parked my car in the parking lot. What had he eaten? Where was he sleeping? Will he be able to make the long walk back to his home?

I rang the doorbell. My wife opened the door. My three-year-old son ran towards me. I gestured them to wait. I rushed to the bathroom, where I put all my clothes in a soapy bucket of water, had a shower and put on fresh clothes. All of these were the Coronavirus cleaning protocol. I sat with my family to eat. I watched as my wife stuffed a spoonful of rice into my son’s mouth. He continued to watch Spiderman fight Hulk on YouTube as he gulped down the food. For him, the virus and the subsequent quarantine was simply a change of routine – a license to consume gigabytes of cartoons and entertaining media on my wife’s smartphone, because he was not allowed outside and had no outdoor activity to do.

Yet, for the likes of the migrant boy and his family, Covid-19 was a curse, which deprived them of their livelihood and forced them to walk towards an uncertain future.

I walked to the apartment balcony and stared into the darkness of the space outside. I knew there was a road there somewhere, but it wasn’t visible in the absence of light.

The labor migration and what we learnt from it – possible implications

In times of crisis problems that have not been solved are magnified and become unmanageable. For decades employment opportunities in Indian metropolitan cities have attracted labor force from rural areas. These rural migrant workers contributed significantly to the burgeoning informal labor sector in these urban areas. There’s very little documentation of their presence and nature of work in these cities. They came in huge numbers, lived in inhospitable conditions in the slums and other illegal constructions and left for their villages at regular intervals. Previous governments never attempted a cohesive, structured and purposeful attempt to regularize the informal labor sector and keep track of transitory internal migration happening inside the country. Even the 2011 Census, the last time an authorized documentation of internal migrants of the country was done at a large scale, has been dismissed by experts as improperly done, leaving many loopholes (Narain, 2020). As a result of this lack of adequate documentation, the authorities from the center to the states in many ways were clueless about the statistics regarding employment and flow of migrant laborers from the villages to the cities and vice versa.

Only when the threat of Covid-19’s spread forced the Indian government to shut down the nation did this problem of labor migration become visible. Thus, the sudden declaration and implementation of the nation-wide lockdown and the shutting down of the transportation network, especially the railways, ‘the backbone of India’s transportation system’ (Slater & Masih, 2020) were the immediate reasons for the labor exodus from the cities. This didn’t allow the hapless migrants to return home appropriately through public transportation and they were forced to walk back home en masse.

Some scholars believe the lack of ‘any kind of advanced relief plan’ before the lockdown was imposed (International Growth Centre, 2020), was a factor. Additionally, loss of jobs, worries about living expenses, the overall uncertainly of these new developments and the psychological need to be with their loved ones in their native places, were some of the other motives, which panicked the migrant workers and resulted in their decision to leave the cities for their villages.

In defence of the migrants it can be said, they were not given the chance to return home as the government first suspended the railways for a week from March 22 to 31, during the Janata Curfew (pre-lockdown testing) and then declared the lockdown two days later on March 24, extending that suspension of railways for another 21 days until April 14 (Prasad, 2020). All of these decisions clearly showed, as leading Economist, John Dreze says, how -‘the privileged class of people’- at the helm were ‘far more afraid about contracting the infection themselves’ than they were concerned ‘about the consequences of lockdown to poor people’ (The New Indian Express Videos, 2020). He believes the lockdown ‘was not necessarily wrong, but the way it was implemented with so little concern for poor people and the consequences for them, and doing so little for them during the crisis’ reflected ‘the class bias in the framing of the public policy’ (Vasu, 2020).

From the government viewpoint, even if the entire focus was on controlling the spread of the virus, the desperation of the millions of migrant laborers to return home haphazardly – on foot, on bicycles and hitchhiking, didn’t help the situation as many carried the virus home to places where the cases were few or non-existent. Ganjam, a district in the state of Odisha, having a culture of sending male migrants workers to the state of Gujarat, became the epicenter of Covid-19 in Odisha after tens of thousands of these workers returned during subsequent lockdowns when the rail and road services partially resumed (Saikia, 2020).

Thus, the idea of confining the migrants to the cities to curb the spread of the epidemic was never feasible (Chishti & Tumbe, 2020), and if the abrupt cancelation of transportation was a method, it further aggravated the workers’ problems as they took to the road on foot. This did prompt the Supreme Court of India to advise government officials to treat the migrants ‘in a humane manner.’ The government did announce aid for the poor in the immediate aftermath of the lockdown. But, it did little to stem the tide of labor migration. Possibly, the migrants had already panicked and simply didn’t have the patience to wait for the doles to roll out (Amid COVID-19).

However, all the above-mentioned reasons make it seem as if the labor migration from the cities was a knee-jerk reaction to the lockdown. Yet, more deeper reasons for the migration (see endnote 1) include the disorganized nature of the informal labor sector, the rural–urban–rural circular nature of inter-district and inter-state internal labor movement, and the lack of appropriate and accurate documentation of the internal migration statistics in India (Narain, 2020), which is again due to the dual factors of ‘informality of labour’ and sheer ‘population size’ that make an in-depth study of these internal migrants a real challenge and their exact contribution to the Indian economy still a mystery (Thachil & Singh, 2020). A fact reiterated by other scholars, who more than a decade earlier had expressed concern about this lack of comprehensive internal migration data leading to short-sighted public policies by the government, which negatively affected the circumstances of the migrant labour force (Deshingkar & Akter, 2009).²

Thus, it is human tendency to return to familiar surroundings, where one feels safe. For many people it is the comfort of their homes and native places – villages in the case of migrant laborers, no matter how primitive and devoid of basic facilities their home(s) might be. There were instances where in spite of the ‘assurances of food and shelter,’ thousands walked hundreds of miles home to be with their families, which is reason enough for the authorities and observers to take into perspective the viewpoint of the migrants, their societal needs and not just see them ‘through the lens of poverty’ (Nagpal & Srivastava, 2020). Therefore, it was quite natural for these migrants to want to return home amidst Covid-19 uncertainty and restrictions.

Conclusion

Therefore, similar crises in future can be avoided if the government focuses on reducing the size of this ‘informality’ of labor by trying to encourage employers to give these workers more and more formal contracts. In industries such as construction for example where many work as daily wagers, the employers can be asked to keep a list of the names and addresses of the workers they hire on a daily basis. In the case of migrant workers earning a living plying their trade on the streets and main thoroughfares of the cities, proper vending zones should be set up where these workers have to register to own them. Many Indian cities have developed vending zones for street vending, but the sizeable population and the unending demands at almost every nook and corner of these cities have led to mushrooming of hawkers and traders selling their wares, and this is where the challenge lies for the authorities.

But, that doesn’t mean, we should brush aside the whole tragedy of this mass migration as an accident. Looking at the bigger picture it can be said that the migrants had always been suffering but perhaps for the first time, due to the lockdown and widespread media coverage, their sufferings became quite apparent and the world was able to empathize with their plight, since they were the only ones on the move, and the invisible migrants missing from government documentation became visible (Narain, 2020). Some 500 million Indians are believed to be lacking the benefit of ration cards, a majority of them migrant workers, another reason which makes them invisible to the authorities, and now due to the crisis they have become ‘the visible face of the problem’ (The New Indian Express Videos, 2020).

Whether this visible suffering of the traveling migrant millions, so well covered by the media, will lead to policy rethink and new strategies at the government level in their favour remains to be seen.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Dutch sociologist Jan Bremen in ‘Footloose Labour Working In India’s Informal Economy,’ characterized India’s informal workers as predominantly rural migrants working in the urban areas without a contract (Roy, 1996). And, the situation hasn’t changed more than two decades later with more and more workers flocking back and forth from the rural hinterlands to the industrial urban areas for an opportunity to make a living, thus maintaining the traits of ‘circularity,’ ‘informality’ and ‘internal migration.

2 Statistics apart, the role of these migrant workers is crucial, as they do jobs that few in the cities are willing to do, from working as servants in households to toiling as the main labour force in the construction industry, factories, restaurants, hotels and ever so present on the streets as vendors, rickshaw pullers, transport workers – sectors so integral to the Indian economy. Yet, they are scarcely given the respect they deserve by urban elites, and instead are often subjected to harassment and ill-treatment by their ‘urban employers, middle-class shopkeepers, residents and local police.' (Thachil & Singh, 2020). The migrant labourers are believed to contribute at least 10% to India’s GDP (Deshingkar & Akter, 2009). Though, at present the figures could be much higher.