The Migrant MESS

You will find them everywhere in our cities—hanging from the scaffoldings of buildings, carting heavy loads in factories, guarding our homes, fixing our plumbing, doing our domestic chores or selling fruits and vegetables. Yet they remain invisible, a workforce peopled mostly by migrants from rural India, and contributing an estimated 10 per cent to India’s GDP.

It took a pandemic and a subsequent lockdown to thrust them into the national consciousness and shake our collective conscience. As national television played out images of desperate migrants on a loop—an exhausted child asleep on his mother’s suitcase as she drags it along, a young man cradling his friend who died of exhaustion as they set out from Surat to their home in Uttar Pradesh, and a 15-year-old old girl cycling her disabled father 1,200 km back home unfolded—India came face to face with a tragedy of an unimaginable scale. It was enough for the Supreme Court to ask on May 26 that the central and state governments submit a report in two days on their actions to help migrant workers. On May 28, the Union government said it has sent 9.1 million migrant workers home between May 1 and May 27—5 million by train and 4.1 million by road. The apex court has now issued detailed guidelines for the Centre and states to follow to transport migrant labourers.

Narendra Modi’s critics blame the prime minister for announcing a national lockdown on March 24 at four hours’ notice, leaving daily wage-earning migrants no time to prepare for days without work. The focus at the time, say government officials in the know, was saving lives more than livelihoods. Health experts, too, had sternly advised the government that any movement of migrants back to their home states could see COVID-19 entering rural India, where the health infrastructure was