Originally published as part of Khabar Lahariya’s long-form series “Sound Fury & 4G“ ♦
Banda railway station on May 7 appeared to be a model of Covid-19 preparedness. Health workers wearing personal protective gear, some with face shields, roamed the platform. The policemen on duty wore masks – one even had his lathi wrapped in plastic for germ-free law enforcement. A trail of painted circles led the way out of the station, a hub for the Bundelkhand region, to a long tent with two rows of officials, sitting spaced apart in front of computers. Beyond them, a fleet of freshly sanitised buses waited to take people home.
It had taken the central and state governments a month-and-a-half to pull it off, but finally, a train carrying around 1,200 people from Surat, Gujarat pulled into the station. The passengers, many of them workers from around southern Uttar Pradesh and northern Madhya Pradesh, clapped and waved – indulging in a brief moment of relief before getting back into the tiring routine of joining yet another queue.
The scene was a stark contrast to the chaos predominating news about India’s migrant workers since the lockdown was implemented on March 25 with four hours notice. On Khabar Lahariya’s Facebook Live video, several comments attested to the fact that this special train was very little, and very late:
“We’re still stuck in Mumbai. Please help my voice reach Mardan Naka Police Chowki in Banda. I am very worried.”
“It’s very good people have reached their home villages. But we are still stuck in Kerala, please address our concerns.”
“How will the people still stuck in Surat get back?”
Gujarat’s circular migrants – workers who live in its cities for several months at a time before returning to their villages – have powered the state’s much-touted neoliberal development model. Surat in particular has the highest proportion of migrants to locals in the country, an estimated 58 percent of its population. Economic growth has been extremely uneven. Just three days before this train arrived, the city witnessed its fourth protest since the lockdown, with workers demanding to be sent home.
‘The blood of the villages is the cement with which the edifice of the cities is built,’ Gandhi wrote in 1946. In 2020, Modi assured Indians that “our supply chain will be scented with the fragrance of the soil and the perfume of the labourer’s sweat.” Much has changed between Gandhi’s admonishment and the sinister aroma of Modi’s vague promise. And yet the exploitation of rural workers to drive urban growth through an economy yoked to big business interests continues, extending beyond the home state of these two leaders. The morning after the Shramik Special from Surat arrived in Banda, another one, carrying goods this time, ran over and killed 16 people sleeping on the tracks on their way home from Maharashtra to Madhya Pradesh.
The lines of migration crisscrossing the map of India have emerged like invisible ink exposed to a flame. Since the lockdown began, Khabar Lahariya reporters have spoken to workers trapped in cities, counting down dwindling rations and the hours until the next donated meal. We’ve met workers walking home on highways and dirt roads, and interviewed their families in the villages – out of work and savings themselves, scrambling for sacks of wheat or rice, or a bank deposit of Rs. 500. We’ve been to quarantine centers where hunger, illness and depression add up to an image of hell’s deepest circle.
If that sounds hyperbolic, consider that India is probably the only country where the number of reported deaths attributed to lockdown measures (suicide, police brutality, hunger, exhaustion) was at one point higher than the number of deaths attributed to coronavirus infection. “We may survive corona, but we won’t survive this,” a quarantined worker told us.
At each step of the way, we’ve seen the state failing the 120 million migrant workers (this estimate varies widely) who form part of the estimated 400 million people in the informal economy. Eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar account for a large share of outbound migrant workers to cities, though intrastate migration between rural areas is even more widespread, comprising the poorest sections of society. Contributing more to the GDP (anywhere from two to ten percent) than the government spends on healthcare, migrant workers are at a crucial crossroads: in a terribly vulnerable position for the foreseeable future, yet more politically visible than ever before.
THE CITY: SHELTER IN (A HOPELESS) PLACE
Manoj Singh held out for about six weeks of lockdown in Surat, with no income or rations. He’d worked as a labourer there for two years, one of roughly 400 men from his locality in Banda district who are scattered around Surat, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Mumbai and Pune. His family in Bhujrakh village told him it was time to come home. Out of funds, Manoj tried to leave the city by foot but was forcibly stopped by the police, his family told us. When he didn’t answer his phone for a few days, a relative went to check on him but found his door locked. Forcing it open, they found him hanging from the ceiling.
Similar stories of despair are regularly reaching non-profit organisations and grassroots media like Khabar Lahariya from India’s bigger cities. From what we’ve heard, a majority of workers haven’t received wages due to them; and this is backed up by the findings of relief efforts like the Stranded Workers Action Network (SWAN). Without portable ration cards or significant savings, hunger and hopelessness define these workers’ accounts of lockdown.
In 1936, during the Great Depression in the USA, the city of Los Angeles set up ‘bum blockades’ to keep out thousands of Dust Bowl climate refugees in search of a better future. Police swept trains for hobos and turned landless farmers and workers away from the city’s entry points. In an inversion that looks a lot like slavery, Indian states have slashed labour laws, politicians have colluded with business lobbies to keep migrants from going home, and builders have literally locked labourers inside construction sites to prevent them from leaving.
Soon after the lockdown was imposed, groups of construction workers from around Banda district spoke to us over the phone from Mumbai. Prem Lal, a painter from Sakariha Purwa, told us he was with 15 workers living on the first floor of a 13-floor construction site. “The contractor came by once with a ten kilo bag of atta,” he said. “Then he stopped answering his phone.” The workers hadn’t been paid. The building owner was “some big builder, living far away.”
Prem Lal said there was no water, nor gas for a stove. “We scrounge wood from the shrub around here to cook. If only the government had given us three days to get home. We could have survived there, harvesting wheat or channa. We could have taken care of our children.” He was reminded of 2016’s demonitization. “The poor man always suffers. It would be better if they just hanged us. It would be better if they put us in jail. All we want is our homes, our villages.”
Ramkaran Adarshi, Bundelkhand in-charge at the Gramin Mazdoor Union, told us many workers called him for help once limited buses and special trains were announced. “I tried calling some of the numbers mentioned for travelling back from this or that state,” he said. “But none of them were working. I never could reach the Uttar Pradesh nodal officer.”
Some migrant workers are stuck despite not having to deal with the logistics of interstate travel. In Banda, we met a group of ‘pattal walle’, who clean plates at weddings, who had travelled there from Lucknow just before Holi. Some of the adults were foregoing food so that their children could eat one meal.
Typically migrant workers send money home, but in some villages, families are sending funds to the men stuck in faraway cities. Others worry about what will happen even if their family members do make it home. In Jana Bazaar village, Ayodhya, a man told us his three sons were marooned in Mumbai after their company shut down. “They are not getting rations. But neither am I. I have a job card, but no ration card.”
ON THE ROAD: THE LOCKDOWN’S STEEP TOLL
The Bharatiya Janata Party rode in to victory in 2014 on images of Gujarat’s shining new highways, which Modi promised would be emulated across the country, perhaps to shore up the same “supply chain” he hopes to strengthen now. But India’s highways under his second term have become inextricably linked to the images of migrant workers walking, cycling and hitchhiking home, sometimes over a thousand kilometres away. And increasingly, as lockdown restrictions ease slightly, dying in fatal accidents on the way.
At first, Khabar Lahariya reporters mostly met workers travelling between different towns on the roads of Bundelkhand and its surrounding districts. At the Banda bus stop at the end of March, the UP government had organised some buses to dispatch people home across the state. On the bus bound to Kanpur, we met Narendra, an elderly man who had already travelled nearly 200 kilometres from Allahabad, eating biscuits and namkeen over his three-day journey. Sarvesh, who looked like he could have been in his teens, had been working in a sweet shop outside Banda for two months and was owed Rs 7,000. His employer distributed Rs. 2,500 between five people before they left. “He said the bank is not open so I can’t give it to you,” Sarvesh said. “When you come back I’ll give you the rest.”
As the lockdown lengthened, we began meeting people who had travelled from further and further away, in greater degrees of desperation. At the end of April, state governments began actively transporting people back on buses. Even as UP coordinated with Haryana to bring over 10,000 workers back, these efforts fell short. On the roads around Chitrakoot, we met cement plant workers ready to walk a distance of 180 kilometres. Another group of women worried about crossing a desolate jungle area on their way home.
Near Bargadh, a group of ten men had been walking for six days, eating biscuits, towards their village beyond Allahabad. An Uttar Pradesh transport corporation bus picked them up at one point and relieved them of Rs 500, but let them off just ten kilometers down the road. One of the men, Neeraj Kumar Chauhan, said that when they asked a policeman for food, they were met with abuse. He replied, “Are you my relative that I should feed you?” Neeraj wondered, “Is this their country now? We make the state. We put the Modi government in power – they should at least help us now, but they’re not.”
By early May, when we met the first lot of special train passengers returning to Banda, they told us the tickets weren’t free – contrary to the government’s assertion. People told us they had paid anywhere from Rs. 600 to Rs. 800 to get on the train. Ram Mohan, a worker from Banda district who hadn’t received his salary for two months said he paid Rs. 800 to the man who entered his Aadhaar data into a computer before boarding. A few of the passengers we spoke to had gone to Gujarat for business or to visit family – not all of them were from the under-resourced group of labourers the trains were supposed to help. Later, people told us on Facebook that they’d had to pay middlemen, and also for the connecting onward buses.
Other workers paid much more to rent trucks or tempos. On May 11, we met a group of workers headed to Lucknow on an open truck. “Our landlords evicted us,” said Mehboob Khan, an electrician. “We were living on the road. To get a train we’d have had to file some three or more forms, go to the police stations, etc.” Mohammad Kadil added, “There was no issue getting back by truck. The train required too much paperwork and we couldn’t stay there any longer.”
The government’s messaging and policymaking has been inconsistent and impulsive throughout. Its relief measures resemble a tent hastily pitched in a storm, protecting few people from the rain while allowing corruption to slip easily through the cracks. After months of ignoring the gathering clouds of crisis on the horizon.
THE VILLAGE: QUARANTINING IN LIMBO
A 42-year-old man, called simply “Munna” on his Aadhaar card, cycled home from Gujarat with a group of people, reaching UP around the second week of May. After two days in quarantine his health deteriorated, with severe vomiting and diarrhoea. His son told us he hadn’t eaten properly for days. That week, KL’s editor heard of two people who passed away in quarantine of a “stomach-ache”. Munna was one of them.
In schools and colleges repurposed as isolation centers, KL’s reporters observed a lack of basic amenities compounded by a shortage of accurate information as they responded to calls and tip-offs from quarantined workers or harried local pradhans. At a school in Belagara in Ayodhya district, for example, a local pradhan organised food from his own resources as there were no official arrangements in place for the workers quarantined there.
A worker named Shivdarsan called us from Shaadi Madanpur in Banda, to relate how his group of about a hundred people walked from Haryana, taking a state bus part of the way. The bus dropped them “in a jungle” at the Gulshan-e-Fatma Intercollege, and the workers were told they’d be examined in the morning, then sent home. “For the past three days they’ve been saying tomorrow, tomorrow,” Shivdarsan said. “There are small kids going hungry. Today we got just plain rice at 3pm.”
Media attention sometimes resulted in better oversight. The 300-odd workers at Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya in Tindwari said they didn’t get proper meals until news of their neglect reached reporters. The tehsildar in charge denied this, but he also claimed that people were maintaining social distancing at the school – right after men literally crowded around each other to give us interviews. One of them, Hiralal Yadav, told us the electricity was erratic: “We can’t even charge our phones, so we can’t speak to people at home.”
Another worker, Vishnu Kumar, elaborated. “For two to three days we didn’t get proper food. The water supply is only available when there’s electricity to run the motor. We can’t run a fan at night and we get bitten by mosquitoes. There aren’t even bedsheets. I would have stayed in Noida where I was working, but my mother is alone here and needed my help.”
One of the worst quarantine ‘facilities’ we visited was a falling-apart former college in Kamasin, Banda. There was nothing there, just an old building, open to the elements and without electricity. Ashok Kumar, a worker from Delhi, showed us a small polythene bag of watery vegetables and some half-raw puris. “The secretary says no other arrangements can be made here – that we can order food from our houses if we want special treatment,” Kumar said. “He tells us that we can go home if we want, and to not ruin his mood or bother him. If he sends us food, it’s stale or uncooked, or rotting leftovers. Won’t we get sick eating food like that?”
According to Kumar, the quarantine procedure was completely arbitrary. “In the village, there are three more people from ‘outside’, they still haven’t been brought to this facility. They’ve kept a few of us here just to save face and prove a point. They should take care of us or let us go.” Another man, Aravind Yadav, added that five people had simply run away from the building.
Implementation has been the very opposite of systematic. In late April, an entire neighbourhood in the town of Naraini was sanitised after a man who worked as a painter in Mumbai returned to home quarantine and tested positive for Covid-19 a few days later. He had visited another neighbourhood, which had to be quarantined as well.
Occasionally though, conditions during quarantine were better than those outside it, as a group of migrant farmworkers in Karwi told us. Inside the school they’d been given soap and basic meals. Back home, they were out of money and stretching their allotted rations to feed everyone in the family.
WOMEN: WHEN HEALTH IS A LUXURY
Most women make sure to pack menstrual products when preparing for a trip. Geeta didn’t have the space. “I had to rip my petticoat to use as rags,” she told us. “What to do, there wasn’t any option! Of course I had everything I needed at home, but we couldn’t carry so much. It was already so tiring to walk with what we had.”
Geeta was among the women quarantined at the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyala in Banda after returning from Delhi and Haryana. Munni, who came from Manesar, told us the contractor she worked for wasn’t releasing payments, nor providing food. “We have small kids to take care of, so we couldn’t just stay there,” she said.
When less than 50 percent of Indian women use hygienic methods during menstruation under ordinary circumstances (in UP, 81 percent use cloth), things are even worse during the lockdown. Sanitary pads were unavailable at first, with the government only adding them to the list of essential items after five days. Menstrual health is always an afterthought, as the original inclusion of sanitary pads as ‘luxury items’ under the 2017 GST laws showed clearly.
Maternal health is another concern. At the school, we met Kaushalya, who is five months pregnant and came from Delhi, and Gauri, who is six months pregnant. Gauri told us that quarantine was far from a relief after the journey. “We get small amounts of food. Like today we just got some biscuits and small cups of tea in the afternoon. How is that supposed to sate my hunger? I’m having cramps. I feel dizzy.”
There’s a lack of clarity and information that makes everything more stressful. “The doctor said we could go home, but the police won’t let us,” Gauri said.” “They just have to show on paper that we were here for 14 days – they don’t care how we spend that time.”
While the government has produced schemes like the Kishori Yojna and Menstrual Hygiene Scheme (MHS) in 2011, or 2015’s Menstrual Hygiene Management National Guidelines, in practice these remain ineffectively implemented. During lockdown planning, reproductive needs are the last thing on officials’ minds.
At Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya, there were no female staff the women could approach, and deep-seated stigma meant that it wasn’t clear who they could ask for help with nutritional or menstrual needs. “There is a female guard stationed outside,” the lekhpal told us when pressed. “If the women can let her know what their problems are, we will figure out how to solve them.”
BREAKING THE CHAIN
Radhey Lal is in his 60s, but before this year had never left Karwi for work. “The situation at home was bad – there was no income to be had,” he told us, shortly after being released from quarantine in May. With the economic growth rate having slowed to under 5 percent even before the lockdown hit, and unemployment at 7.8 percent in February, Radhey Lal’s situation was not unique. In the wake of the lockdown, the economy is now projected to slow to 1.2 percent; we may be in the worst quarter since the mid-1990s.
A contractor from a village near Karwi who had ties with a potato farmer near Agra organised some men to go there for the harvest. Radhey Lal thought he’d try his luck. He and the others worked for just over a week before lockdown hit. With food supplies running out, a pradhan managed to organise transport for them to go back home and into quarantine. When we asked Radhey Lal if he would leave Karwi again to work in the future, he was nonplussed. He didn’t like the idea of facing that kind of risk. But he knew he might not have the luxury of choice.
As Modi urges Indians to be “vocal for local”, it’s worth interrogating what compels a man from Chitrakoot to travel to Agra for the potato harvest; for people in Lucknow to come to Banda for the wedding season; for men to travel to Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana, Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai and Bengaluru to work at construction sites with hazardous conditions and uncertain salaries. Anywhere from 40 to 60 percent of people from Bundelkhand and the districts surrounding it in UP and MP leave home for work. There are several kinds of circular and seasonal migration, with a range of motivations, and governments need to start accounting for them all with greater intention and interstate cooperation.
Especially for landless peasants, villages and small towns hold few local industries, and little meaningful employment. Gandhi’s now quaint dream was to create a khadi economy parallel to agriculture, powered by the charkha. Instead, the national rural employment guarantee that bears his name can usefully fuel development when implemented in tandem with thoughtful rural planning, but it is chronically short of funds, and late with wage payments. However, absent any clear government announcement of simple, direct cash transfers, the MGNREGA is the only possible source of income for many people. Despite concerns about social distancing, migrant workers returning from cities have started working in the programme’s projects, with work underway in 64 percent of UP’s gram panchayats as of early May.
According to SWAN’s informal survey, out of over 600 workers who reached out to them for help, “around one-third of the workers plan to continue in the same line of work or with the same employer, another one-third are unsure about what to do. Roughly 16 percent plan to leave [the city] and then return after some time, and about 13 percent plan to find work back in their hometown”. Five percent “want to earn some money and leave.”
“India is probably the only country where the number of reported deaths attributed to lockdown measures was at one point higher than the number of deaths attributed to coronavirus infection.”
Most migrant workers Khabar Lahariya spoke to said they would have to return to cities eventually. A woman named Usha was on the road from Delhi to Mahoba for seven days. “Everyone was taking off, so I also joined them,” she said. “Our landlord was kicking us out, or demanding payments we couldn’t afford. But yes, I’ll go back.”
In Kotwa Safi, Chitrakoot, Suresh Pandey, who was a supervisor in a transport company in Gurgaon, told us how he walked to Anand Vihar in Delhi, caught a bus in the crush there to Allahabad, then walked five hours to Jasra before getting a tempo to a quarantine center in his district. “On the tenth day of quarantine, my father suddenly died, so I got permission to come home,” he said. “I will go back,” he added. “There is no employment here.”
In Banda, a man named Birbal described the vicious cycle in which he was trapped after borrowing money from a contractor to travel to the city, pay rent and food. “During my quarantine I still had to pay my expenses. I have almost Rs 10,000 to 15,000 to pay off. Of course, I need to repay my loans. If not today, then tomorrow. The contractor says he is not responsible for the lockdown or the government.”
Dhananjay Karvariya, the husband of the pradhan at Pannah, Banda, felt people should stay in the villages for the next six months or so. “They shouldn’t go chasing employment elsewhere for that time,” he suggested. Dhananjay admitted that caste plays “a small factor” in migration, but argued that with people from across communities and education levels leaving for work, migration also has to do with dignity and the hope for a better life away from rural “backwardness”.
“People here are not proud of working in the village,” he said. “They feel demeaned in the eyes of their neighbours if they stay back. According to my experience, this is a big reason for migration. They want to live with respect among their society, and so they balk at working in the village.”
Ambedkar’s view on the Indian village as “a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism” is often quoted to support rapid urbanisation and industrialisation. But while Ambedkar viewed migration as a means of social mobility, he was also deeply engaged with rural land and labour reforms that would improve life in the villages too.
As people make it back to villages, or begin to work again under even more strained circumstances, perhaps it is only a matter of time before the ruling party comes face to face with what John Steinbeck called “the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.” In the roughly 50 stories Khabar Lahariya has reported on migrant worker issues since the lockdown, labourers have sounded a tired litany of appeals, heartbreaking but sometimes frustratingly formulaic, for more rations, more benefits, safe transport home and the right to hunker down through this contagion like everyone else. But with hunger and debt close at hand in both cities and villages, this exhausted pleading has given way to stronger demands, with violent clashes over food already breaking out in different parts of the country.
With a little imagination, the way forward for more equitable growth also emerges from between the lines of KL’s reporting. In cities, urban planning must be more inclusive, accounting for circular migrants with portable benefits (such as the One Nation, One Ration Card scheme), rent subsidies or vouchers, and affordable or subsidised access to essential supplies. In villages, we need more sustainable versions of growth that go beyond creating material assets like toilets in easily subvertable schemes, but invest more meaningfully in people and the places they come from, seeing valuable human resources instead of rural vote banks. A nation can’t leap ahead to to provide “a ray of hope” to the world or even become “self-reliant” while bearing the weight of an oppressed workforce. “Today our villages have become a mere appendage to the cities,” Gandhi wrote in 1937. The greater part of a century later, as Modi rehashes the idea of Hind Swaraj as Atma Nirbhar Bharat and touts the khadi revival, for migrant workers, the road ahead seems longer than ever.