India's Migrant Workers and the Pandemic by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000507201
Goodreads: 59140413
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

Between Homes; Without Homes

Migration, Circularity and Domesticity

Samita Sen

An unconscious consumer of migrant labour every day and in many forms, our urban middle classes woke up to their presence in the last week of March 2020, when something new called ‘lockdown’ unlocked the doors of shanty homes to release tens of thousands of people onto the streets. After a 14-hour voluntary public curfew on 22 March, followed by enforcement of a series of regulations in the country’s Covid-19-affected regions, on 24 March 2020, the Government of India ordered a nationwide lockdown for 21 days, on a few hours’ notice, shutting down the public transport system. The lockdown was extended in phases till 31 May. The measure that was meant to immobilise the population indoors in their homes seems to have achieved its opposite effect. It decanted men, women and children – workers in the city’s homes, restaurants, offices, factories, workshops, construction sites – onto the streets. There had to be mobility first before immobility. These teeming millions were desperately seeking transport to return ‘home’ to their villages, sometimes thousands of miles away, in order that they may be ‘locked down’. Those who did not find transport found ramshackle cycles or improvised forms of transportation for the aged and children, and walked, mile upon mile, starving and exhausted. The desperation of migrant workers unfolded before our unbelieving eyes and struck our mediascape with something of a thunderclap, reaching a crescendo on 8 May, when 16 workers were mowed down by a train, leaving behind dry rotis scattered on the railway track. The mainstream media, usually so resistant to stories of labour, focused on this extraordinary movement of urban workers, documenting in rich and vivid detail accounts of distress and destitution but also of deaths. The wide circulation of these horrifying images suddenly made visible labouring bodies in our city. We came to know (or remembered again) that most of our workers and service-providers in the city are but its temporary denizens. At first, the central government was inclined to dismiss concerns. Announcing an assistance package on 26 March, they took the line that unreasoning panic had been created by ‘fake news’. In their estimate, this ‘barefoot migration’ was a numerically small proportion – just over one per cent of the migrant population.1 They asked state governments to continue to immobilise migrants within destination states.2 There was no clarity in the first few weeks as to how this was to be achieved. When workers protested, as they did in large numbers and with no regard for ‘social distancing’, they were treated as a threat to law and order. As it is, the lockdown in India was one of the most draconian in the world, enforced by lathi-wielding police. The workers wanting to go home were beaten by the police ‘for their own good’. In the face of unremitting crisis, however, the government gave way. On 29 April, a government order allowed ‘stranded migrants’ to return to their origin states. At this time, one

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.