Saving India's migrant workers

A "bad boy" of Bollywood movies makes an unusual transformation from screen villain into a real-life do-gooder. Sonu Sood just could not stand by and watch millions of jobless workers walking thousands of miles back to their village homes when the coronavirus pandemic shut down their workplaces in distant towns and cities.

Then, an extraordinary social worker, Bunker Roy, who runs the Barefoot College in India and several other countries, sprang into action to help. And an Andhra Pradesh businessman, Chandrasekhar, too, did his bit. They were joined by scores of ordinary people who rose to the occasion to help them get back home.

This was perhaps the largest-ever migration of workers on the planet. The pandemic affected 40 million migrant workers who had left their homes to work in another state, city, or district. There were 139 million interstate migrants in India, according to the Census of 2011, and many have gone back home.

As many as eight out of 10 migrant labourers had not been paid at all during the lockdown that began on March 24, according to a survey. In late March, the government made it compulsory for salaries and wages to be paid even during the lockdown period. Yet, many rich employers did not pay them for the month of March, not even for the days that the labourers had worked.

More than 60 percent of workers in Tamil Nadu had not been paid wages they were owed from before the lockdown. The diamond industry in Gujarat did not pay workers despite repeated government instructions. Some employers took advantage of workers because formal contracts are non-existent and working and living conditions are decided by contractors.

Many wealthy people took the easy route of donating money to the government or to an NGO and hoping for the best. But the actor, Sood, was painfully aware that the bureaucracy may endlessly delay matters.

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No longer could Sood and his friend Neeti Goel watch the heart-breaking spectacle of thousands of migrants walking hundreds and even thousands of miles home, starving and hungry. Many Indians arranged for them to be fed along the route, but these efforts were not enough. So, the duo organised the Ghar Bhejo (Send Home) initiative, chartering six flights of Airbus A-320 planes to take stranded workers to towns and cities near their homes.

The actor had heard about the plight of women embroidery workers from the state of Odisha who were employed in Kerala but had lost their jobs during the lockdown. Some of Sood's colleagues proposed sending them home by bus or train, but the actor intervened with an offer to send them by plane.

Getting migrant workers home

Aware of the slowly moving wheels of bureaucracy, he plunged into process himself. He obtained the required permits from the government to have airports at Kochi and Bhubaneswar re-opened that had been under lockdown. In April, a group of 147 women and 20 men were flown by an Air Asia chartered flight from Kochi to Bhubaneswar. For many, it was their first time flying on a plane. In early June, he sent 173 workers from Mumbai to Dehradun by air.

Sood also arranged for dozens of buses and trains to take thousands of workers back home. He said: "I have been getting requests from all across the country. I am trying my level best to get them reunited with their families. I will continue to do my best till the last migrant reaches home." He has started a tollfree helpline to help migrants reach their homes.

While Sood is a recent entrant in the field of social work, a real life Indian hero is Bunker Roy, who started relief work in the village of Tilonia in Rajasthan since 1972, and was named by Time magazine among 100 most influential personalities in 2010. He is a graduate of the elite St Stephen's College in Delhi and a former squash champion who represented India in world championships.

Roy started relief work on April 12, distributing survival kits to thousands of migrant workers, daily wage workers, men and women with no ration cards, no Aadhar (identification) cards, no papers of any kind that made them eligible to get government assistance. He explains that, with the help of village-level state officials, his organisation helped 327 workers suffering from the lung disease, silicosis, who had been abandoned and were unnoticed because they lacked papers. They had picked up the disease in their workplace by breathing in dust containing silica.

In cooperation with the village officials, Roy identified them and gave them food and provisions to last 15 days and replenished the supplies afterwards. He has distributed survival kits to 232 migrant labour families, 41 of which have left for their hometown. In April, Roy's organisation spent US$236,000, and in May US$318,000 on thousands of protective face masks and food for more than 200,000 people in more than 260 villages and many slums in Rajasthan. Beyond his relief work in Rajasthan, he supported his local community organisations across India to reach the last mile to deliver food and other relief material to the neediest.

Stirring stories

Roy's Barefoot College, which has spread to more than 70 countries in Africa, Latin America and South Asia, uses Gandhian principles of service and sustainability in order to educate more than 7,000 children each year by making academic subjects relevant to rural lifestyles.

Alongside these efforts of Sood and Roy, a businessman from Andhra Pradesh, Chandrasekhar, had arranged for trucks to take thousands of migrant workers from Andhra Pradesh to the borders of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Odisha. He spends between 50,000 rupees (S$915) and 60,000 rupees on this initiative every day. Chandrasekhar offers a poignant vignette of a woman from Uttar Pradesh who gave birth to a baby near Vizianagaram in Andhra Pradesh on her way to her hometown, and then she resumed her journey on foot. He heard about her plight and arranged for her to be sent home by vehicle.

These stirring stories of poor and starving workers walking on highways contain the plotlines of a Bollywood movie. This great human migration of workers will not be forgotten.