Let’s Walk Home Together!!

Hello everyone and welcome back to My Version of You, I hope you all are safe, hydrated and doing extremely good.

So, today I will be posting about the migrants who are walking back to their homes…

I know I am very late to share my version on this but honestly saying I was speechless and still I am to see hundreds of people walking 100’s of kilometers by foot carrying their luggage, with small children and family but, without food or money.

This whole thing made me stun! as this was such a big thing that grabbed national attention but no one legit came forward to help.

There was no candle march, nobody wrote harsh slogans and nobody showed humanity.

This virus forced us to be inhuman?

Or we were so scared of dying that we forgot to be human?

I know many of you will be like we helped, we donated money, food, we helped our employees, we helped our domestic help, we wrote blogs, articles to aware people, we collected money to send some people back home this was more we could do after all it was locked down and we were also struggling from our problems (right).

And I am very thankful for such people who are willing to help no matter what because there are still some who are going with one thing and clicking pictures with 10 people to show they help those 10 people in need. On the other hand, the truth was they did just for a picture (I saw this with my own eyes). If there are bad people there are good too that’s how the universe works.

There are and there were 100’s of people who were and who are still working and helping these people but, the walk is still on…

A lot of them died and we only know about a few (those highlighted cases).

Exhausted by their long journey on foot, 16 migrant specialists returning home to Madhya Pradesh from Maharashtra where they worked in a steel factory, fell asleep on the railway tracks and were crushed to death by train.

In another incident, five migrant workers died when the truck that carried them and many others from Hyderabad, Telangana, to their homes in Uttar Pradesh, was upset on the night.

And in another shocking incident where a small child was trying to wake her dead mother.

People call these people with lots of names like migrants, poor people, illiterate people, and what not but I like to call them foot soldiers.

It’s even hard to think of putting your foot in their shoe and these people are walking continuously with or without shoes no matter with or without food, with or without money and many of them are dying with heat, hunger, accidents, misfortunes and what not?

But who are these people?

Where do these kinds of people come from?

And why are they walking 100’s of kilometres?

Why is our government not putting more effort? Because these people are barely contributing to our nation? Or the price of a poor person’s life is nothing?

Honestly, I don’t have any answers to most of the questions because I am still figuring it out!!

But I hope these foot soldiers get back to their home super soon and safely to their loved ones because of these people we are able to do our day to day work 🙂

So, without further ado, let’s go straight to this article, and let’s see what it has to tell.

“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”

                                                                                                                – Mahatma Gandhi

“Everybody can be great…because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”

                                                                                             -Martin Luther King Jr.

One can safely declare, without indeed comparing word counts, that the never-ending situation of migrant workers and the informal sector has surely pushed other coronavirus-related issues in the background.

For the primary time within the history of independent India, the two issues snatched national attention, though, between them, migrants make better ‘copies’ and offer heart-rending visuals to those who still nurture values. The images of literally hundreds of migrant workers killed while trudging unbelievable distances home, primarily on foot, don’t seem to have excited the regime at all, as much as ensuring inhuman working hours did.

Contrast these tragedies with the later dilution of labor laws in three states to push forth financial recuperation. The progressive picture is of an outright separation between the reality of the migrant workers and the approach which is embraced to handle the crisis of ‘the labor question.’ Our army of pot-bellied, pan-chewing supreme government functionaries may interpret ‘migrants’ to cruel those who are still limping home, without getting killed en route and prohibit those who have as of now returned to their villages with giant blisters on their feet.

Understanding

The recent weakening in labor laws has led to a crucial move in the way the plight of the worker-migrant has so far been understood within the frontal area of the COVID-19 induced lockdown. Until now, for many more of the mainstream media and to a large extent the middle-classes, and the migrant worker was just a figure of abnormality. A bunch that did not follow the strictures laid out for the lockdown, they were addressed and even scorned as irresponsible, opportunistic, and insensible. Their isolated social and household locations – sharing a tenement in the city and having a ‘home’ within the village, which is an outcome of the nature of the labor market – was downplayed to create an image of their reckless behavior.

Such a view overlooks the reality that the chief distinctive feature of migrants is the sharp separation between the site of work – a factory, small enterprise, household, or service sector businesses located in an urban center – and the place of social propagation, which is still found within the villages and small towns of states such as UP, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Bengal, and Odisha. The urban poor navigates two universes: urban insecure work and ideal rural ‘refuge’ and stability.

‘Walking back home’ from urban and industrial centers, which has been broadly called ‘reverse migration,’ permitted the worker-migrants to script themselves back into the narrative of the country. This emergency may be a product of the quick concern due to the pandemic, but it exposes long-term designs and a few auxiliary gaps that remained hidden beneath the powerful narratives of ‘development’ as encapsulated in political campaign phrases such as ‘Shining India,’ ‘Achche Din (Great Days)’ and ‘Sabka Vikaas (Growth for All),’ the final two utilized aggressively by the Modi government.

A pandemic of this scale is usually feared since it exposes the restrictions of public health. In India, in any case, COVID-19 has exposed the condition of the labor force. More than 100 million workers have allegedly lost employment. The nature of information collection does not permit us to know the precise number of migrant workers in this pool. Of the total workforce of India, around 90-92% (around 450 million) come under informal employment, which implies that they work without any social and work security.

 A traditionalist estimate of the migrants in this informal workforce would be more than 100 million. The growing informalisation, especially in the occupations of urban centers based only on the migration, reflects by the casualization of the labor.

The current work methodologies of survival by walking and withdrawing can hardly be understood in terms of ‘temporary displacement.’

We all know how poor people got to grease the system even for their genuine dues. Thus, immediate clarifications got to be issued in chaste bureaucracies, in all languages, to protect the helpless from the insatiable or bumbling foot-soldiers of a genetically indifferent state. Exact names and identities are however to be settled for those without ration cards and had the government known exactly who precisely these shadowy people were, the problem may not have exacerbated such unmanageable proportions.

The pandemic-induced lockdown has not made this ‘crisis’ of work. It has instead taken the lid off the idea of ‘usual times’ and exposed the structural forces of disruption that are a part of the story of three decades of India’s economic growth: urbanization, gendered patterns of work and migration, and the emergence of the biometric state, all of which have been robustly promoted by the corporate sector and the state. One shift had ended up recognizable by mid-April, the conclusion of the first stage of the lockdown. From a figure of abnormality, the worker-migrant became the emblem of impending starvation. This did not mean the end of the collective controlling, policing, forced collective sanitizing, and wilful policy neglect that has characterized their plight so far.

Several experts found the reported relief bundles as well as small and too late. Today, the fact that even after more than 60 days of the lockdown, the migrants are still determined to go back to their villages and within the process meet death, proves the failure of governance.

A direct question emerges here:

Why was a devoted Vande Bharat Mission not adopted for them?

Is it because they are still regarded as smaller than the other citizens of an India in which class trumps the idea of balance?

While the personal decisions of the migrant workers to undertake long journeys on foot were borne out of franticness, the solidified impact of their refusal to remain where they were, exposed the link between labor and work security.

In leaving their sites of work, they revealed the nonattendance of provision for social security. While walking to their homes, they brought hunger, food, and the faulty and defective system of nourishment distribution into prominence. These ‘reverse migrations’ are simply long journeys attempted by workers to avoid hunger in the city.

The imbalance of control between capital and labor and the impediment of the state’s welfare mechanisms were all put into question when migrants strolled on the highways and expressways of prosperous modern India. When the usual users of these spaces of modernity claim to be #MeTooMigrant, as the recent viral hashtag on Twitter suggests, appears both the insensitivity of the middle and upper classes and a mockery of the labor question.

A simple yardstick will be enough to expose such an otherwise ‘sympathetic’ claim: Are middle-class migrants faced with hunger and starvation within the same way as worker-migrants? If not, the hashtag deserves a remorseless burial.

Like every positive measure, if any measures will be taken for migrants even that can be prone to misuse but after the hell that the migrants are going through, every god step is god. The state might also not evade its responsibility and would be compelled to do something beneficial rather than asking citizens to move clang metal and light pointless lights.

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