2020: Migrants remember year of tears and toil

2020: Migrants remember year of tears and toil

Pankhuri.Yadav@timesgroup.com

New Delhi:  25.03.2021 

Rukmani Devi from Chhattisgarh had Rs 4,000 when the lockdown was announced a year ago. That money lasted two months. In May, she had no option but to pack her bag and walk to her village. It took her 10 days to reach home, all the while thinking she would find some dignity there. To her dismay, the people refused to let her enter the village. “Since there were no Covid cases there, the villagers were afraid of me being a carrier since I was coming from Delhi,” she recalled. “It took an entire day to convince my neighbours to let me go to my house. Eventually, I realised my condition in the village was worse than in Delhi, so I returned.”Devi could not get work as a household help even after months of trying. “It was much later that I got a job at a construction site at half the wages I earned as a domestic help,” she said. Like her, many have faced a bad, if not worse, situation after the lockdown.

Remembering the humiliations they suffered during the nationwide shutdown a year ago, hundreds of migrant workers gathered at Jantar Mantar on Tuesday for a candlelight march. Organised by Working People's Charter, the gathering was a cauldron of the bitter memories the workers had of the challenging months. “2020 will go down in world history as the most difficult year in recent times,” declared Kamal, a migrant labourer.

An organiser of the event said that March 24, 2020, would be remembered not only for marking the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown, but also for ushering in an unprecedented impact on the country’s 140 million migrant labour force. “Perhaps the most heart wrenching and shameful news was of 16 workers being killed by a train near Aurangabad on the way to their village,” said Chandan Kumar of Working People’s Charter. “The point that India’s migrant workers had to bear the severest brunt of the lockdowns needs no belabouring. Neither does the fact that the migrant crisis unfolded due to India’s longstanding and unaddressed labour problems.” Kumar added that urban employment guarantee, wage support, strong grievance redressal mechanisms, better facilitation of social security and entitlements and importantly, a long-term regulation of worksites, needed to be focused on in the government’s larger vision of a policy for migrant workers.

Hundreds of migrant workers gathered at Jantar Mantar on Tuesday for a candlelight march and remembered the humiliations they suffered during the lockdown