With this article I proudly join the ranks of those “Prophets of Doom” and naysayers that our Honourable Solicitor General Tushar Mehta loathes. The Prophets of Doom have called out the affectations of the Modi Government on the migrant labour crisis. Our loquacious Prime Minister has chosen to stay mute on the whole issue though. But that is understandable because his war-hordes have done all the talking so far. I am the son of a migrant labourer myself and because my own career choice lets me earn only in fits and starts, I believe I am in the position to share my two cents on the plight of the migrant labourers.
Back in 1962 my hometown Durgapur—which is now a city—was an unequal marriage between a 250 year old village and a township hastily carved out of the surrounding forestland. All this was done to accommodate the sprawling state owned Durgapur Steel Plant, a bastion of now derided Nehruvian rapid industrialisation dogma. It was in the same year that a lanky young man in his early twenties set foot in the red soil, having come all the way from Kolkata or Calcutta, as it was known then. This young man joined the swelling workforce of the plant as a skilled labourer by the dint of his college degree and soon carved a niche for himself as a solid foreman. He rose through the ranks over a span of thirty six years, and by the time he hung up his gloves he was already a departmental head. This man was my father and he knew a thing or two about the life and struggles of the average migrant labourer.
I grew up listening to the tales of hordes of migrant labourers pooling into Durgapur from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and even as far south as Kerala. Kerala incidentally is one of the major employers of migrant labour now. In that odd melange of characters the Bengali folk pooling in from different regions inside West Bengal played the role of a positive catalyst. It was this cocktail that floated the DSP to dizzying heights and turned it into a bona fide behemoth. The current breed of DSP employees—a dwindling percentage in the whole workforce—seems to loathe the migrant labourers. These men are all second generation employees and they do not want to reminisce on their own migrant lineage. What can be a greater irony! But this is all quite natural. The National Human Rights Commission joined the ranks of the Prophets of Doom (in SG Tushar Mehta’s parlance) by calling out the “barbarism” of the Indian Railways in their treatment of the migrant labourers. With home-faring migrants dying of thirst in the scalding heat inside tatty railway coaches, the Indian Railways have succeeded in re-enacting a morbid scene eighty years since it defiled the planet—the transportation of Jews to Auschwitz!
But all this should not be surprising at all. In a country drugged with the Aryan supremacy theory, where people still want to believe that they share their genes with the white Europeans, all this is certainly not out of place. This theory that a master race probably invaded the sub-continent with their horses and superior culture and bestowed upon us their good books and philosophy is innately vile. It strives to quash the achievements of the Indus Valley Civilization inhabitants and portray the ethnic tribes of the subcontinent as little more than monkeys. This is nothing but rooting for colonialism. Whether a horde of fair skinned tribesmen actually migrated to these lands en masse and whether they called themselves Aryans are things which are as inconsequential now as a shuttle to the Mars. Yet this forms the basis for the caste system in India. Do not have misgivings on this. The caste based segregation is still the devil at large, albeit less discrete in the urban jungles. The Hitler and Trump worshippers in our country—and there is quite a large number of them—will have you believe that the Brahman Devata is supreme. The ubiquitous caste matching before marriages is proof of the fact that we cherish segregation in our society. I can go on and on with what has sadly become a trope to sell movie tickets—the caste wars. And this makes us loathe the migrant labourers and brand them as purveyors of the COVID 19. Such apathy!
Everywhere I go in my hometown I hear the same words—“these migrant pests are bringing in the virus!” Part of my daily errand in my city involves helping my wife deliver home cooked food to households and offices. The service is akin to what the Dabbawallahs deliver in Mumbai, albeit in a much smaller scale. A few days back, when we were delivering food to a high ranking IRS official in the city at night, his security guard puked the same words. I was aware that this high ranking official and his deputy were both men from other parts of the country. So I asked this obstinate security guard if he would consider his bosses as migrants. He was dumbfounded. Then he proceeded on to lament how his own son had lost his job in the lockdown and was looking to migrate to another state. He was morose about not having secured his son a Government Job even as an Orderly. So, I asked whether he was aware that this might not be the last of the pandemics we get to see. He nodded in affirmation. I finished off with a final blow—“How would you react if your son were stuck far away from home with a disease like the COVID 19?” He is still searching for an answer. The general apathy towards migrant labourers stems from the ingrained hatred towards anyone perceived as a “lower class” in India. Sights as macabre as a hungry home-bound migrant gorging on dead dog-meat, a toddler trying to wake up his deceased migrant mother on a railway station, dismembered corpses of migrants strewn across a railway track along with a few bloodstained rotis, all seem to be re-enactments of the partition of India. The scale is no less than its precursor. This was a tragedy in the making. The long marches of weary humans along sun-parched roads are potential flashpoints. Only the ignorant would turn a deaf ear to the clarion call. King Louis XVI of France learnt the hard way.
Some statistics will serve as eye poppers. The Labour Force Participation Rate or LFPR is currently around 50% in India. It was at its best at 63.70% in 2005 when the mute Prime Minister was in power. To the uninitiated LFPR is calculated thus:
(Total number of people in the working age group who are employed or looking for work)
—————————————————————————————————————– x 100
(Total number of people in the working age group)
LFPR falls when there is recession and rises in times of Economic Boom. Now for some real number crunching!
The current population of India is estimated at being upwards of 138 crores. According to what Radhcika Kapoor—Fellow of the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER)—posited in 2019, around 65% of the Indian population is of working age. That gives us a figure upwards of 90 crores. So with an LFPR of 50% around 45 crore people are now either employed or seeking employment in India. Why the remaining people aren’t looking for work is anybody’s guess. I find it hard to believe that they have unearthed a treasure trove that lets them pass their time in leisure! But let’s assume that only 45 crore people are either employed or looking for work. Then how many are actually employed? The unemployment rate in India is extremely difficult to home in on quite simply because of the shambolic ways in which it is handled to suit political conveniences. The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) studies unemployment once every five years. They have no data sampled on a yearly, quarterly or monthly basis. Yet in 2017-18 a leaked report suggested that the rate of unemployment had spiked over 6%. The United Nations International Labour Organisation (ILO) with its “kinder” methodologies projected a 3.5% unemployment rate for India in 2018. But what about the 2020 data? For this we have to rely on the survey reports of a non-government organisation Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy Private Limited (CMIE). MD and CEO of CMIE, Mr. Mahesh Vyas—Management Guru with a hefty curriculum vitae—paints a more grim picture on the organisation’s website. From May 2019 to March 2020, right at the cusp of the lockdown, the unemployment rate has hovered around the 7% mark. I have discounted the April ’20 and May ’20 figures due to the economic slump brought about by the pandemic. Let’s be kind to the Modi Government, shall we? Let’s not give SG Tushar Mehta more reason for crying foul. Let’s consider the unemployment rate to be 6% based on the leaked NSSO report of 2018. For the record, it was rubbished by the GOI in a later statement—the curious case of calling one’s own hand a liar!
So we had 45 crore people employed or looking for employment on the first place. If 94% of them are generally employed, that takes the figure to 42.3 crore people. Now data suggests that 90% of these people belong to the blue collared unorganised or informal sector. These are the people who drive our cars, pave our roads, build our towns and cities, watch over our properties and do the dishes at our places while we worry about break-ups and Facebook fights. How does that look like in numbers? An astounding 38 crores! More than a fifth of the population of India is employed in a sector where there is nothing called monitoring of daily wages, working conditions or even something that remotely resembles a Trade Union. These are the ones on whose flesh and bones we set up our fine dining restaurants. The people that you see trudging along sun baked roads, sometimes carrying their kin on bicycles and rickshaws on thousand mile long arduous trips, belong to this unattended and forgotten class. These are a class of warriors without uniforms. But they don their Orderly’s livery with as much pride as a bona fide soldier.
The last survey on migration in India was done in 2011. This says a lot about the intentions of the men in power. No data means you can simply shrug your shoulders in a press conference and play the renouncing Buddha. However, the 2011 data estimates the total number of migrant labourers at 5.6 crores. The Finance Minister’s declaration of May 2020 alludes to an elevated figure and secret survey though. An estimated 8 crore migrant workers have been temporarily brought under the National Food Security Act (NFSA) 2013, thus providing them subsidised rice and pulses till June end. An appreciable gesture no doubt! But why is this data on migrant labourers not available on any Government website? Shouldn’t provisions for them be made permanent? Harking back to that 2011 census reveals some striking figures. UP, Assam and Bihar top the chart for sending the maximum number of people out to other states to seek work. Odisha, erstwhile Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan constitute the bottom part of the chart. The haste with which the lockdown was clamped down upon the nation left a sizeable chunk of these hapless migrants stranded and jobless in lands where they are looked down upon as subaltern creatures; mere cogs in a humongous machinery. Yet when the Shramik Special trains began to ferry a minuscule portion (around 3.5 million via upwards of 2500 trains since 1st May) of these stranded humans back to their hometowns what unfolded surpassed all levels heinousness.
Forget about how they were treated by the Indian Railways. Forget about the constant denial of the very existence of long road-faring human trains by the Government in Power. When these people were finally able to reach their homes, instead of letting them kiss the soil their neighbours decided to hound them. I strongly believe that by now it is as clear as broad daylight that we have to live with this virus. Nothing can impede its progress and wishful musings on a potential vaccine are far from being realised. Yet, I see people living in constant denial all around. Everywhere I see there is a heightened display of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. This—the OCD—seems to be the greater plague. Our fetish for class discrimination coupled with the mass OCD has unleashed the hounds from hell on the migrant labourers. Probably, like the post World War 2 Germans, we will atone for the sins committed against the Migrant Labourers of India.
I don’t pray because I have lost my faith. But I see their faces in nightmares and hang my head in shame. We failed them as a nation.