Plight of labourers

When 26-year-old daily wager Narendra Shelke walked over 135 km on foot without food from Nagpur to his home at Chandrapur in Maharashtra, he was only symbolising the plight of many others like him, across the country, who have been forced to undertake a similar trek, faced as they are with an ordeal that means no work and no food in the cities with the country under lockdown to combat the coronavirus pandemic. The familiar comfort of home amid uncertainty has made the daily wagers and migrant workers look for ways to face this forced deprivation. With rail and bus services suspended, they have no option but to trudge for hours to reach their destination.

The situation offers a contrast where the government sends special planes to evacuate Indian nationals from countries facing the pandemic and putting them up in quarantine facilities set up by the paramilitary forces. While the desire to return to one’s native place is understandable, the proposition does not seem to be that easy with panchayats in many districts of Haryana urging the villagers to go for self-imposed isolation during the lockdown period, ban the entry of outsiders and seal the borders. As the police are manning the highway, the returning workforce has taken to commuting via the dry canal beds to avoid action. Punjab has declared slums and clusters as quarantine camps and decided to deliver basic subsistence assistance, including medicines, there to prevent any possible spread of the disease. With Mumbai now reporting Covid cases even in the slum areas, there are testing times ahead for the already stretched public health facilities. In the Baddi-Barotiwala-Nalagarh area of Himachal Pradesh, unit managements have decided to keep their workforce within the premises, but pharma manufacturers sense trouble as they have limited space to house all workers.

There will be calls for testing the migrants returning home — with thermal screening, as in Uttar Pradesh — and replication of the exercise elsewhere with more pointed diagnostic facilities along with its financial ramifications. The government should bring clarity to its plans to safeguard the health of the people as it is labouring to do in the economic sphere.

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