IN SHARP RELIEF
Madhu Bhushan and Sunanda Bhat // Bangalore
An Interview with Amrit Phull on the Migrant Crisis amid India's Covid-19 Lockdown
Covid-19, the infectious respiratory disease that has circulated the world as a disruptive global pandemic, has been christened “The Great Leveler,” “The Great Equalizer,” and “The Great Revealer” — as if the pandemic were an irrepressible and ungovernable force barreling through borders and across frontiers, pushing the boundaries of our social capacities. To call the pandemic a “Great” anything is to assume it adequately shines a light on the realities of the human condition to reveal a more honest portrait of the world. We’ve seen a seismic shift in social and economic behaviours (though for the most privileged and secure, this shift may not be so monumental). While this is a reality, to give the pandemic such monikers would be to invalidate the realities of those who cannot lean on their savings, their governments, their status, or the colour of their skin, for example, to survive. Covid-19 has been no equalizer: it has instead thrown human culture and its varied spectrum, between the haves and the have-nots, into even sharper relief.
On March 24, 2020, India’s nation-wide lockdown came into effect. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the ruling Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) gave the 1.83 billion citizens a scant four hours between his televised announcement and a patrolled freeze on human and resource mobility. It was a motion that mirrored the policies of disproportionately less populated, wealthier nations, a motion applauded by the UN and WHO as “comprehensive” and “robust.” But scaffolding the lifestyles of urban elites is an unprotected, precarious sub-group of Indian society that would have only four hours to process this imminent threat to their livelihood. Fluid, young, and immense, this group is the nation’s migrant workers, estimated at 140 million nationwide.
Madhu Bhushan and Sunanda Bhat of the social justice platform Naavu Bharatiyaru speak with The Site Magazine editor Amrit Phull about India’s migrant crisis amidst this unprecedented lockdown. Through their grassroots experiences with migrant relief efforts in the 8.43-million-strong southern city of Bangalore, they describe a failing public food system, the magnification of classist and religious prejudices, and abuses of power that have exacerbated the lives of an already vulnerable migrant population. Bhushan and Bhat acknowledge the powerful, ongoing efforts by citizens and relief organizations to fill the void created by an apathetic government. They argue the necessity for both bottom-up and top-down approaches for achieving long-term change, in hopes that a decision such as travelling home, even if it means thousands of kilometres by foot, even if it means death, will never again be the only chance at survival.
Amrit Phull (AP): What is Naavu Bharatiyaru? And what is its focus?
Madhu Bhushan (MB): Naavu Bharatiyaru translates to “We the people.” It is the first line of the Constitution of India. We are a broad-based social justice platform based in Karnataka comprised of many organisations and individuals who came together last year to protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Registry of Citizens (NRC) in India by raising awareness among the public and petitioning the government. This was the focus of our campaign and then Covid-19 hit us, so our efforts naturally moved from a concern about who is excluded from citizenship and therefore considered “lesser than” to the humanitarian crisis at large, in which we saw a similar narrative. We knew that migrant workers and people in unrecognized slums with no rights of tenure or documentation were to bear the brunt of the of damage to come. Some workers have been here five, even ten years, and therefore occupy this netherworld of neither belonging to the state they are in, nor the state they are originally from. Seeing that debt, starvation, and insecurity were imminent, we set out with the intention of building support, resiliency, and awareness with on-the-ground action, social advocacy, and documentation. We quickly realized the volume of need far surpassed our expectations.
AP: How did you uncover or estimate this need?
MB: Due to the lockdown, almost none of us could physically move around. So, we had to mobilise and organise support through volunteers both online and on-the-ground. And because we are a small organization, less formal than a large relief organization, which gave us the advantage of flexibility. We circulated an online survey and contact number to help map the locations and needs of migrant labourers by neighbourhood, gathering data on income, employers, access to food, and more. It escalated rapidly, beginning with one or two calls to mapping more than 15,000 migrant workers in the city of Bangalore and we knew that these numbers represented only a fraction of workers in need. At the same time, we responded to a call that the government of Karnataka sent out for NGOs, relief organizations, and unions to help address this crisis that they were virtually unprepared for. Our role involved on-the-ground reportage and advocacy in collaboration with the Labour Department and Food & Civil Supply Department.
AP: Estimates of migrant populations from city to city appear to be informally and loosely documented. Are they accurate? Were there existing datasets or records that the government or the unions made available to you?
MB: There is absolutely no data on how many migrant workers there are in the city, never mind the state. A large part of our work is to push for official datasets as a government responsibility, which becomes especially critical during a time of crisis. Without these sets, all the organizations invited to collaborated in the relief effort are running on assumptions, one being that migrant labour is almost entirely construction work by citizens of North India (in states like Bihar, Jharkhand, Odissa, Uttar Pradesh, to name a few). Following the survey and our on-the-ground efforts, we saw that migrant labour is everywhere. They are the backbone of our cities: restaurants, tailor shops, hotels, food stalls, security agencies—it’s not just construction. The functioning of the economy is dependent on migrant labour. And until the media began publishing the heart-breaking images of migrants trying to return home and dying on the journey, the general public was barely aware of this. The migrant worker is suddenly visible.
AP: What is at stake for migrant workers when deciding whether to stay or leave? Where is home?
MB: See, it is not such a rational argument of weighing what is better. Once the lockdown was announced, they were left with four hours to decide what to do. There was no prior consultation with the workers whose lives would be most affected. There simply was no plan, only panic, and they had been left waiting for food, for rations, for instructions, for salaries, for things to improve. And now they are being left to beg, and it’s getting worse and worse.
Home is home, it’s where their families are, where they came from, where they feel safe. One of the workers told me very clearly that if he were to go home, at least he would be able to eat whatever his family is growing on whatever land they have access to. They leave home to work in the South because they need the money. But now, neither do they have money nor employment. And so he concluded, “if we are to die, we prefer to die with our families”.
Sunanda Bhat (SB): When the State has failed to provide for the workers, our group, through legal means and social media campaigns, has held the State accountable and ensured the delivery of provisions for those in need. When we run out of ration kits, we notify relevant departments and encourage the workers to reach out to those departments directly, but workers often report that instead of receiving help, they are abused for not speaking the state language. Municipality officials evade our questions around lack of help, citing excuses that rations could only be given to those in temporary houses, not pukka [trans. formal] housing, or that they have to be given to construction labourers, not zaari [trans. embroidery] workers. In the end, asking for help makes the workers vulnerable to mistreatment.
AP: So the lack of effective communication is magnified by differences in language, class…
MB: And by religion, by caste, by fake news: this crisis has further exposed the ubiquitous, complex discrimination embedded throughout Indian society. For example, many Muslim groups have facilitated large community kitchens for food delivery for people in need. One local responsible for distributing food to the workers informed a delivery person not to wear their skullcap while entering the neighbourhood. Another person refused to take a delivery from a Muslim man. Everyone is susceptible to fake news when there is so little being officially communicated, and there are Whatsapp videos circulating claiming Muslims are poisoning the food. There was even an instance of a migrant worker himself refusing to accept food for this reason.
The existing fault lines of Indian society and the inadequacy of the state have become louder amidst the crisis. The government in particular failed to make an on-the-ground connection with communities, which is why they resorted to calling on members of civil society to help bridge the gap. In contrast, the Labour Department showed great initiative by giving responsibility and resources directly to trade unions. But at the end of the day, this initiative stopped at food distribution. So much more could have been done, like drawing a proper data base, calculating a realistic need, facilitating counselling and support to the workers. Instead they are not being taken care of, they are not getting food, they are being made to feel like outsiders and they just want to go home.
AP: Are migrant workers aware of their rights specific to this crisis? Now that they have become more visible, is there a risk to being seen? Is there a risk in accessing one’s rights?
SB: It is because of this desperation that workers are increasingly aware of their rights and increasingly unafraid to articulate them. For example, major infrastructure projects in Bangalore have been handed over to private, and ultimately autonomous, builders. On a typical day, migrant labour in the construction sector is hugely exploited. Wages go unpaid for months on end, no one is keeping check, and the consequences of speaking up are dangerous. So in order to avoid abuse and/or losing one’s job, workers stay silent. But because of Covid-19, there have been instances where the Labour Department has reached out directly to these workers and stated that punitive action will be taken against employers and contractors who won’t pay their workers, which has never happened in the past. And this has emboldened the workers to be vocal about the reality of their working conditions. Trains were being arranged for the workers to return home during the lockdown, but after real-estate firms and prominent builders met with the Chief Minister over concerns of a labour exodus, the state cancelled the trains. They did not even want the labourers to have the dignity of getting to go back home. Protests followed—and it was not just the labourers, it was civil society as well. Eventually, the trains were restarted as a result of public interest litigations that were filed at the High Court of Karnataka. But the Labour Commissioner who was quite vocal about labour rights has since been shunted out and replaced by the Commissioner of Industry and Commerce. You can see the clear conflict of interest here.
AP: Are there female migrant labourers? Or have male migrant labourers moved to southern urban centres with their families?
SB: The migrant workers in Bangalore are largely young, single males who have left their families in North Indian states for the promise of better pay. However, there are workers from North Karnataka who move here along with their families where both male and female members work in projects like road digging and other infrastructural work. In anticipation of the trains that were organized by the state, migrant workers are being hosted at the Bangalore International Exhibition Centre where there is no separate section for women, so it appears that women and elderly are not given any kind of special treatment or facilities.
AP: In the same way that the crisis has amplified the insecurity of migrant workers, what other parts of Indian society have been made vulnerable?
MB: While the migrants’ plight has been made visible, the opposite has happened for women suffering from domestic violence. We have been working with police to take some kind of special measures because women cannot physically leave their homes during this time. It is such a tragic and complex circumstance: at first glance, the number of emergency calls made by women in abusive situations might indicate that the violence has decreased, when in fact these women are simply unable to call because their violators are with them, in their homes. Finding refuge in these Covid times is difficult since not many shelters are taking in women. No facilities have been created such that abusers can be removed from the homes for the safety of the women.
SB: In poorer communities, there is little to no support, nor is there any opportunity to socially distance when families live in 10’x10’ spaces. Elderly women and men who survive on begging have no support and may not have the proper papers to access the Public Distribution System (PDS, India’s food ration distribution system), so they fall through the cracks. And there has not been any proactive health measures or check-ups. Hospitals are just waiting for the cases to come to them. Besides telling the general population to take care of your elderly people, there has been no greater effort to help those in need.
MB: In the context of construction labour, for example, you can at least notionally use the law to force the contractor responsible for a large enough group of workers to honour basic employment rights and obligations, like pay or boarding. Women, however, are mostly self-employed and each employer is a separate individual, so it is simply impossible to enforce fair treatment effectively. Domestic workers are often the sole breadwinners of their family and because they are part of an informal economy, they don’t get any special economic packages or support during this crisis. Employers are refusing to hand over monthly salaries to their maids and cooks during the lockdown and some RWAs (Resident Welfare Associations) have put in place hugely discriminative and fundamentally illegal rules, like having domestic helpers use separate elevators or stairwells in buildings over twenty storeys or banning domestic work entirely. The worst aspects of class, caste, and prejudice have been reinforced, and women are bearing the brunt of this discrimination. They too have gathered for protest at the Labour Commissioners office, seeking justice and rights.
Sex workers are extremely vulnerable and are even more subjugated during this time. As sex workers already bear the brunt of cultural stigma around HIV, they are even more demonized in the midst of this virus. Self-organized groups of sex workers are raising issues with the labour unions in reaction to being purposefully excluded from any form of public aid during this time.
AP: What is the next stage of policy advocacy?
MB: Currently, we are pressuring the government to think long term. A huge structural change in the social security system needs to be considered as part of the economic stimulus that India has implemented, which in and of itself is so fraught. In order to access rations via the PDS (which really should be a universal system) one must have the correct ration papers, Adhaar cards, or biometrics—and in some cases, members of the urban poor with these documents are still being turned away. We are pushing for a system that can help ensure that no one has to suffer if they don’t have the right documentation.
The Mahatma Gandhi Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is a social welfare program that secures a minimum salary for rural areas, but a similar program for the urban poor is not in place. We have a shamefully minimal Covid-19 fiscal stimulus package put in place by the Modi government at less than 1% of the GDP—much less than the falsely advertised 20%. People cannot survive on third-rate rations. We need to put money into the people’s hands.
AP: How are volunteers contributing to the cause?
MB: This effort has not just been people donating money. This has been a moment of great solidarity and acknowledgement of the real value of labour and the worker to our economy. We hope this will have a long-term impact in giving workers their rightful due. In the short term, people are recognizing that relief needs to be extended urgently and they are doing so in different ways from purchasing rations for ten to fifteen families at a time to transferring money into the workers accounts directly.
SB: We are continuing our on-the-ground effort, working with migrants, reporting, making awareness videos, and more. Many thousands of people are doing excellent volunteer work to help support groups that have been wholly abandoned. Those who would like to contribute to the cause need to spend time researching on how to engage in a way that is meaningful to them. One must feel connected to the work and the cause, engage with a community, and have real, in-person conversations.
Author Bios:
Sunanda Bhat is a documentary filmmaker based in Bangalore. She has made several award-winning documentaries and short films that have been screened in various international film festivals. Her interest in non-fiction films is to represent people living on the margins of an intricate and stratified Indian society. She looks at ways to bring in textures of landscape through layers of the lives of her characters. More about her work at www.songlinefilms.com.
Madhu Bhushan is an independent activist-writer and (re)searcher, she has worked with the CIEDS Collective and Vimochana for almost three decades. She has been part of the women’s movement for many years using a creative, critical, and compassionate approach in her work on crisis intervention, community outreach, and campaigns and advocacy. She is also on the governing boards of the Center for Vernacular Architecture and of the Alternative Law Forum. Madhu has written for three documentaries, and is the writer-producer of Sikkidre Shikhari, Ildidre Bhikari, a film about the Hakki Pikkis—a nomadic tribe she has been associated with since the 1980s.
For more information on Naavu Bharateeyaru, visit their website, twitter, or facebook page.