Heart of darkness: Help for millions of migrant workers has been mangled in a bureaucratic maze

The Covid pandemic has revealed India’s heart of darkness, but it has also shown us its soul. It’s residing in heroes like Jyoti Kumari, Anirudh Jhare and Mohammed Yakoob and scores of other unnamed people who set aside their own travail to give succour to fellow migrants hard scrabbling their way home.

Jyoti cycled 1,200 km from Delhi to Darbhanga, with her injured father as the pillion. Instead of heading home to Nagpur, Anirudh pushed disabled Gayoor Ahmed’s tricycle for five days to his home in UP. Pushed off a truck ferrying migrants, Yakoob refused to abandon the dying Amrit Kumar. No help was at hand as Yakoob cradled Amrit till his end.

Darkness is what is not easily visible. It is the casualness with which the country was shut down in a couple of hours, putting millions of people through an ordeal that will be remembered for generations. Whether it delayed Covid, remains a matter of debate.

It is the casualness with which the country was shut down in a couple of hours, putting millions of people through an ordeal that will be remembered for generations.

The initial government fumble in handling Covid is understandable. This is a ‘novel’ or new virus, and its effects not clearly known. But by 25 March, there had been enough time to think of options and consequences. Perhaps our allegedly grounded leaders and their allegedly experienced bureaucrats have no inkling of the role of tens of millions of migrant workers in the economy of their continent-sized country. Canute-like on 29 March, the Union home secretary ordered the migrants to stop. Businesses were asked to pay them full salary and landlords ordered not to demand rent.

That was in the make-believe world of North Block. In the real world, it was each man for himself. For small businesses it was sink or swim. For millions of workers it was about food and rent, here and now. Beyond the fatwa there was little else. So the migrants decided to vote with their feet: Better to starve and die at home than in some distant shanty, uncared and unmourned.

So just a step beyond darkness is the emptiness you can find in the bureaucratic soul whose directive to help migrants arrived as late as 15 May and who earlier had no compunction charging destitute people rail fare with a “corona tax”, to reach home. ‘Empathy’ and ‘compassion’ are not in the common vocabulary of our languages. They do not quite translate to daya and sahanubhooti, that are more about charity than self-realisation. But even charity, with notable exceptions, has been absent.

Now the government has come up with an allegedly vast stimulus, but it’s mainly for the long run when, as Keynes said, we’ll be dead.

Those who have lost everything and are still trying desperately to reach a place far away called home have been lathi charged, blocked at borders, cheated, sent to camps and generally treated as subhumans. In a recent interview Naushad Forbes, the former CII president, suggests that had government accepted a proposal to guarantee loans to companies by banks to fund wages during the lockdown and also transferred money directly into their Jan Dhan accounts on a periodic basis, the workers would have been reassured.

Now the government has come up with an allegedly vast stimulus, but it’s mainly for the long run when, as Keynes said, we’ll be dead. Schemes have been announced for migrants, though how they’ll work is a mystery. There has been some black humour as well — the labour reforms of UP and MP.  Given their hopeless physical and human infrastructure, do they seriously think they will attract Cisco or Apple by stiffing their already benighted workforce?

Orders have borne no relation to reality or logic. Restart industry, but go to jail if anyone gets infected. Fifty people can attend a wedding, but only 20 a funeral. Go through stringent social distancing till you reach your seat in the aircraft and then be jam-packed for the flight. But if you’re looking for a true blue bureaucratic maze, look no further than the shambolic evacuation of migrants by rail — which is only halfway done.

---

This commentary originally appeared in The Times of India.

• Domestic Politics and Governance
• India
• Human Infrastructure
• Migrant Workers
• Restart Industry
• Social Distancing

The views expressed above belong to the author(s). ORF research and analyses now available on Telegram! Click here to access our curated content — blogs, longforms and interviews.