My friend who lives and works in London took the first flight back to Delhi in the second week of March this year amidst the COVID-19 outbreak to be with his family. Another colleague who is an American chose to fly back to the U.S. (even though the situation there was much worse) to spend this time with his near and dear ones. Not that the world is coming to an end, it is usually common to hold on to familiar territory and people in uncertain times irrespective of how irrational it may seem.
Migrants in Indian cities are no different and think similarly during emergencies. Business is shut, work is on a halt, the safest place to be is always presumed to be home, even though it may be reported to be haunted. While many got stranded at railway stations and bus stands, others with no choice, ‘simply’ walked back.
Some unlucky ones either got stranded on the way while others were at the pity of the state government for food and shelter which on any other day won’t seem any worse than a refugee camp. A few others struck deals with ad-hoc transporters and paid a bomb (₹5000/passenger) to go 1,600 km on a rickety bus.
It is these people who came to your city to serve it in every way possible. First alone, and the families soon follow. And once there is regular income and skill to operate independently, the migrants become ‘almost permanent’ city dwellers who find their sweet spot of how they will maintain their income and expenditure equilibrium. These migrants often are also able to build a dependable social safety-net, more so like a ‘social insurance’ that is more often than not a mix of shared insecurities that they endure as a group.
They develop unique informal institutions and structures that they all abide by to reap benefits of this home-grown social insurance system. Once a migrant becomes a city dweller there is usually no moving back to the village and fore-go an opportunity that a new day may bring to earn an extra buck. Yes, the migrant daily wage worker shifts base for money, not really for a better ‘civilised’ way of life (which they do realise as a by-product after a few years of being in the city).
The migrants, who often leave behind ghostly villages, assume most of the blue-collar roles in the city. They are your daily domestic help, fruit and vegetable vendors, sanitation person, rickshaw puller, factory worker, shop assistants/salesmen, small-restaurant staff, delivery boys, office boys/runners, and the most common, construction workers or labourers. A few lucky ones who get mentored by a veteran migrant are able to develop minor skill-sets like cooks, barbers, cobblers, electricians, plumbers, tailors, mechanics, etc.
They usually leave behind the inter-generational agricultural practice due to multiple reasons ranging from agricultural distress, lack of adequate institutional establishments like schools, health care centres, infrastructure, and more importantly jobs for youth. The migrants also leave behind the benefits of government schemes in place, like the PDS, MGNREGA, free healthcare, and education because of the rudimentary nature of their provisioning. The system of migration is then considered as a self-equalizer that seems to offset the loss of benefits in the village with the relatively higher income one may earn in the city, but may not be able to avail PDS and MGNREGA for instance.
Our cities have not quite been able to articulate the idea of regular functioning without them yet, who are literally the engines of our comfortable realities where the rubber really meets the road.
They offer their services without any contract or paper-work, are expected to offer services at sub-par or ‘market’ prices (I call it the competition of distress), they are usually not compensated on no-show days, they are socially discriminated and systematically excluded from activities that may be socially frowned upon and they make ends meet (often with a family) in sub-optimal living conditions with a reasonably strong fear of eviction.
The COVID -19-beginning to 2020 gave us a sense of how the world (or cities) would seem without their true engines of ‘growth’. We had an echo of ‘they will die of corona later, but of hunger first’ by the opposition parties (mocking the ill-preparedness of the lockdown) and the civil society. Almost all small businesses operate on working capital debt, either have no labour or are suffering from an acute demand flux, forcing them to stop salaries and in some cases, shut shop, leading to an un-forced eviction of the migrant workers.
The migrants, unfortunately, aren’t party to non-linear arguments about how and why businesses are suffering or if a particular establishment is essential or not. They are human resources that process products and services in return for timely payment and have a system in place of how to spend and remit the same. If they can’t do it, they will either go home or stay back at the pity of the state. They would any day pick the former, but a lot of their actions also depend on how their communities (remember social insurance?) respond to government relief action.
The cities could not formalise their employment and made sure the migrants remained vulnerable, where the slightest emergency made the system shut down. The service seekers yearned for more distress and desperation of the migrant worker, to pay marginally less for the same services that left them with no savings.
The ‘owner’ of the city never kept emergency provisions for the migrant worker, why must he then consider the same for the former? The insecurity of the middle class stepped on that of the migrant worker, making the latter step aside. The mass exodus of the migrants is a bitter pill for the middle-class urban dweller who is generally averse to social empathy and compassion. This is a lesson for us to understand the true value of labour and the price we may end up paying for the same.