"Guest Labourers" - Day #7 (31 March 2020) - 21 day #Covid19 Lock down

Day #7 (31 March 2020)

“Guest labourers”

The Migrant workers are fleeing back home ! They call it reverse-migration. Everywhere in the world, Covid19 has caused probably the largest movement of migrants ever. Infact, it’s not the fear of the Covid19, but the lock down that has suddenly left them stranded without homes, food, jobs, salary and even basic necessities in the cities that they came to with the hope of building their lives. Most of them who came were not driven by the aspiration to emigrate and settle there, like many of our well-to-do settlers in developed nations. They left their villages because their villages were losing it’s future. They did not see the design, they only saw the effect. And millions left their homes, painfully, to work in the cities, make their daily money and build their lives. I remember a poem, I once read and am not able to trace it now. Nevertheless, I think it begins with these words “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark”.

Madhan was a migrant labourer. He was from Assam, some where on the banks of the River Brahmaputra. He did tell me the name of his village, but I have a poor memory. What I remember is his graphic description of the floods, when the Brahmaputra rises, and their fields of paddy get flooded, sometimes leaving their crop damaged. He was part of a team of five workers from Assam who stayed in our land in Karakulam, when I was building my house. Madhan worked with a contractor, associated with COSTFORD, an alternate building group in Kerala. COSTFORD was established by the master designer and eco-construction pioneer Laurie Baker. These workers had become experts in mud-based construction. Today, I proudly live in a mud and bamboo home, and I owe it all to these excellent workers, as much as I owe it to the Engineers and Architects who did the designs and supervised the work.

Madhan and team stayed in my land for nearly five months, in a make-shift shed. When the day’s work was over, I sometimes joined them in their evening tea. They always made black tea. Once in a while, I brought them some hot snacks to eat. This always made them happy, and made me a benevolent employee ! One day, over a glass of tea, Madhan said, “We are so grateful to you. We are poor people. It’s because rich people like you are building such houses that we get job, and are able to look after our family”. I asked him, “Your family?”. He said, “I live with my father and mother. My wife and two children are there with them. I go home once or twice every year”. I asked him, “But what were you doing there, before you came here; you must have had some job?”. “We are farmers”, he replied, and pointed to two of his relatives who were also in the team. “Ah!”, that interested me. It was too tempting ! I did a complete interview, unstructured, free-wheeling...and here is their story

Madhan and his family owns 20 acres of paddy land between his father, himself and his brothers. He alone has 6 acres. They were not small farmers by Indian standards ! The flood plains of Brahmaputra is one of the most fertile, and he told me that their land yielded 5 to 6 tonnes of paddy per acre, in a good year. Did I hear it right ? Acre ? Yes. This is super-bumper crop. I did a quick calculation; that makes 30 Tonnes of paddy and at the then minimum procurement rate of the Food Corporation of India which was around Rs 15 per kilo, he could easily get Rs 4.5 lakh / year. I asked him, “Why are you here ? Why are you doing this in Kerala” ? All this hardship, 3500 kms away from your village ?” He refuted my figures. He said they only get Rs 5-6 per kilo of paddy. “Some buyers come to our village and offer only this much. We have no choice. We sell”. That was just one-third of what they are entitled to. This is the Shark ! This is village in India ! A 6-acre farmer, migrates 3500 kms away, comes to a 21 cent Engineer, calls him rich, and works as a labourer in his building !! The irony of a cruel nation ! The design of making a migrant labourer out of a rich farmer !!

All migrant labourers are not Madhans. But each of them had a life and a livelihood, or atleast a possibility of a livelihood before he or she became a migrant labourer. Many of them may have had a history of prosperity, in their families, in their villages. Otherwise, we would never have been taught that “Villages are the backbone of India” or “Villages are the Pride of the nation” and so on. But in just 7 decades of growth that India planned and executed for itself, we have killed the villages !. The last two decades has been the worst !! Today, villages are more known for the extreme poverty and the suicide of farmers, as much as it’s still know for never letting this nation down on food security. What an irony !

Moreover, the way migrants were handled in this crisis exposed two different attitudes. One, entrenched in the relics of a feudal past, the nation threw lakhs of them into the highways, forced them to walk hundreds of kilometres to their villages, and when that shamed the nation, we herded them into buses ( during Covid19 times !) and sent them packing. We even sprayed chemicals on them to disinfect them, as we do floors and even animals, and later apologised to the nation ! On the other hand, we saw in Kerala, my home state, a Chief Minister instructing his officers that the migrant labourers demands be handled in a dignified manner.We set up 4000 odd camps, moved 1.5 lakh labourers into the camps, ensured food of their choice through community kitchens, and even provided cable TV for entertainment, to keep them engaged during the lock down. The CM even coined a new name for them. In Kerala, now we call them “Guest labourers” !.

Nevertheless, Migration of this nature can never be an indicator of prosperity or growth, as is sometimes justified by archaic economists and planners. Migration, especially from the rural to the urban, is a disease in itself, as serious as a Covid19. The disease needs a vaccine. Migration also demands a political vaccine, a revolutionary change in the way we conceive and build our societies, its relationships and its economic function !

After word :

While I was musing over the migrant issue for this day’s writing, Devinder Sharma, one of India’s best analyst of the rural sector, wrote a hard hitting and analytical opinion which is enlightening, and needs to be read - “Why the long march home?” https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/comment/why-the-long-march-home-819476.html