THE MIGRANT DILEMMA

Rakesh Paswan, a 30-year-old mason from East Champaran in Bihar, made a scarce living in the national capital region until the lockdown on March 25. Struggling with unemployment and hunger, when the shutdown was extended till May 3, he cycled 1,100 kilometres to go home.

- Sujit Thakur with Ashish Misra and Shubham Shankhdhar

It took him a week. He is still quarantined in his village, ut his family is determined that he will not return to the city. Meanwhile, factory owners in the cities are complaining of the shortage of labour. Saurabh Baweja, who runs a factory making home appliances, says there are over 2,000 such units in Delhi employing “a lakh or more workers from UP and Bihar, more than half of them are gone and the other half are looking to leave”.

As the lockdown was extended yet again, with the loosening of some restrictions, the Centre told states to “mutually agree” to permit migrants to return home. On May 1, the Railways announced that it would run six Shramik Specials, trains that would transport workers through state lines. Who was eligible for these journeys was not clarified, so thousands showed up, hoping they could get a train home. When the Centre did issue a clarification, it did little to help.

The Centre has some questions to answer about its lockdown, about the condition in which migrant workers have had to survive and why it has taken so long to allow them to go home. According to Manoj Jha, spokesman for the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the single largest party in the Bihar assembly (albeit in opposition), the “priority of stranded labourers is to get home and the governments at both the Centre and the state should have arranged for this to happen”.