India announced a total lockdown due to COVID-19 on 24 March 2020 – without putting in place any social protection measures to protect people who are poor and marginalised. Thousands of migrant workers who had come to the cities to eke out a livelihood started leaving with their families, desperate to reach their villages where they could at least turn to their family networks for support.
37% of India’s 1.3 billion people are migrant workers as per the 2011 census – more than 450 million people. Since the sudden lockdown, their livelihoods have been devastated. Within days of its imposition, there was an exodus of an estimated 30-60 million migrant workers from urban centres to rural areas.
The backbone of urban life
Over years, migrant workers have left their villages in desperation over failing agricultural systems that are deeply rooted in unjust and rigid social hierarchies. Rural India continues to stifle poor people through caste, class, gender and religious oppression. So, people move with their families, hoping to find better opportunities in towns and cities and to escape socioeconomic repression.
Over generations it is these ‘unseen masses’ who have built and maintained the urban centres for rich and middle-class people. It is these migrant workers who have built the towns and cities while themselves living on the pavements, who have cleaned homes and offices while living in filthy slums, who have cooked and fed other people’s children while their own go hungry, and who have protected those homes and offices while they themselves are constantly under threat from unscrupulous swindlers and criminals.
Nobody feels accountable to poor people
It was heart-breaking to see and hear about thousands of migrant workers leaving their urban settlements and setting off on journeys of hundreds of miles back to their villages without food, water or access to sanitation facilities. While the government organised flights and ships to bring back rich Indians who were stranded in other countries, the public transport system in India remained indifferent to the plight of migrant workers who had to make their way home using their own means.
So, they walked, and used cycle- and motor-rickshaws, bicycles and even wheelbarrows to move their families and meagre belongings back to their villages.
A few civil society organisations offered some basic help. But the government did very little, and even that was delayed.
And when exhausted groups of migrant workers reached state borders, they were made to sit by the roadside and were sprayed with disinfectant meant for sanitising buildings and roads!
Impact on the health of migrants and their children
Even before the pandemic, as per the NFHS-4 Survey 2015–16, 58% of children under 5 and 53% of women between the ages of age 15 and 49 were severely anaemic. Inequality and lack of access to health services contributes to 72 children under five in the poorest households dying out of every 1,000 live births, compared with just 23 deaths among richest households. There are also huge geographical differences, with Uttar Pradesh having an overall average of 78 children under five dying out of every 1,000 live births, compared with a mortality rate in Kerala of just 7.
Caste and class inequalities are huge in India. The pandemic has affected different groups of people differently.
There have been horrific reports of pregnant women and children walking hundreds of miles to reach their villages. Stories of women and children as young as two dying along the way due to starvation and exhaustion. Images of malnourished children walking quietly beside their parents. Or lying prone across bicycles. Or sitting by the roadside too tired to move. These are the images that show how we as nation have failed the most vulnerable people.
Action too late
National and state governments are now trying to dissuade migrant workers from moving back to their villages by giving them assurances of cash transfers and free rations. Yet the exodus continues as migrant workers – faced with the continued lockdown and no jobs – are still short of money and food and unable to pay rents and feed their families. The spread of COVID-19 in the cities, particularly in slums, is another reason to flee.
What Save the Children has done
In 15 states of India, we have provided different types of support to families of returning migrant workers and their children – distributing hygiene and food kits, and dry rations for a month, and carrying out door-to-door enquiries to provide further nutritional support.
Our staff have carried out widescale awareness-raising activities highlighting the continuing importance of breastfeeding, menstrual hygiene and nutrition.
We have phoned thousands of families to inform them about the best ways to keep their children and themselves safe during the pandemic.
Over the last few months, our frontline workers have reached more than 300,000 children and 500,000 adults.
We realise that all this is just a drop in the ocean and have urged the government to provide the support that is needed. In particular, we have called on the government to ensure that migrant children do not drop out of education. And that it supports migrant families who have lost their livelihood.
A traumatised generation
Just as a generation of children were traumatised by partition, so the children of migrant workers have borne witness to the trauma of the urban exodus. This period will be etched in their memories and they will remember for a lifetime the pain of walking in the scorching heat, the agony of foot sores, the hunger and thirst, the unbearable exhaustion, and the anguish of their parents and fellow travellers.
Once they physically heal, they will then have to face the remorseless onslaught of caste, class and gender inequalities that their parents were trying to escape in the first place.
Their dream of a better life has been shattered.
They survived, but will they thrive?
