A man-made disaster is unfolding

With millions of migrant workers leaving cities to return to their villages, a humanitarian crisis is unfolding across India. The government’s sudden 21-day lockdown has left many without work or means of earning a livelihood. Overnight, these workers have been thrown out of their shanties, without food and water. Hungry, frightened and with no means of public transport available to them, millions of migrants have begun a long march back to their villages. Many are trudging hundreds of miles from cities like Delhi to neighbouring states. Others are packing themselves into water tankers to reach home. In their desperation, nobody is observing physical distancing, required to slow the spread of coronavirus.

The sheer scale of this mass migration has not been seen in decades. This is a man-made disaster. It could have been avoided had governments at the Centre and the states thought through the implications of imposing a nation-wide lockdown without preparation. They should have made arrangements for food and shelter for migrant populations in our cities, and provided public transport to those who wished to return to their villages. Such arrangements could have been made when a lockdown seemed inevitable or even in the interim period between the ‘janata curfew’ and the announcement of the 21-day lockdown. Adding salt to injury is the Union Home Ministry’s latest move to deal with the migration. It has ordered state governments to ‘contain migrants’ within cities. While this may be aimed at preventing them from carrying coronavirus infections back to their villages, this decision is ill-conceived. Migrants attempting to cross state borders to return home are now being beaten and pushed back by police. In what’s clearly an afterthought, the government has promised to provide the migrants with food and shelter in the cities. But the use of coercive force to hold them back against their will could trigger protests and riots. And for this, the government will have only itself to blame.

What prevented the Modi government from anticipating and acting to prevent this mass exodus? Lack of foresight? Misplaced priorities? Or reluctance to empathise with the poor? Our decision-makers need to draw lessons from the everyday heroism of ‘ordinary’ people. When they left Delhi last week, a group of migrant youth carried home Saligram, a paralysed octogenarian from their village, over a distance of 200 km. They could have abandoned him but did not. When youth without resources can feel responsible for a helpless man, less fortunate than themselves, why cannot the government keep in mind the plight of the dispossessed when it makes its decisions?