REPORT BY VIJAYASREE
It is often said that though the British took all
our wealth away from us till we attained independence, but gave us 2 boons to
keep – the Education System and the Railways. Since the longest time, there
have been several criticisms over the English Education System and many debates
over bringing back the Indian Gurukul System. But when it came to the railways,
not much was said as it is the strongest transportation and network system that
India has, which reaches each and every corner of the country.
On Friday, 8th May 2020, as the sun rose
and people looked at it as the beginning of a new day and completion of another
day in the 3rd phase of lockdown, 16 migrant workers, who were
sleeping on the railway tracks, were crushed by a goods train which was heading
to Manmad from Nanded, in the Aurangabad District of Maharashtra. There were 4
others who survived due to not sleeping on the tracks and were distressed by
the fact that they could not save the others before the train crossed. The
country mourned the gruesome death of the migrant workers who were heading home
due to loss of their job during the lockdown. They were working in a nearby
steel plant in Jalna. The workers were travelling to the Aurangabad Railway
Station, which was to flag off a train to Madhya Pradesh, with the only hope to
reach home. But little did they know that their hopes would shred off and they
would never meet their families ever again.
The migrants had almost walked for over 40kms, and
decided to take rest due to the extreme exhaustion caused due to walking for a
long time. They opted for the tracks as they wanted to avoid getting caught by
the police on the highways to reach Aurangabad Railway Station. Under the
Indian Lockdown, all transportation has been suspended, other than the ones
allowed by order. While, according to the railways, such track accident cases
come under trespassing and not railway accidents, the Migrants had no idea that
the goods trains with essential supplies were functioning. Another road
accident in Chhattisgarh, where a migrant labourer couple, were mowed over by a
vehicle also was a recent happening. Many such incidents taking the lives of
desperate migrants have been in headlines.
Already, the migrants have been in limelight due to
their inability to survive in their work places without food and shelter in the
hot Indian summer followed by their desperation to head home to their loved
ones. The desperation saw several migrant workers along with their families,
and in several cases, infants and pregnant women, walking for several
kilometers to get home, get a ride or reach the nearest railway station. In a hopeless state, several
hitched rides across district and state borders to reach homes, with no money
or food. Some
days ago, there were several busses that left major cities with the workers to
their home states, but many of them were left out. The Government
initiated several trains in the month of May to aid the migrant workers reach
to their respective destinations in the following days. But the lack of
locomotive services and the huge number of migrants has created a ruckus all
across India and the blame game just doesn’t seem to end.
Now who is to be held responsible, becomes the main
question in the minds of several people across the nation.
India is a country with the second largest
population in the world and the lockdown was imposed in the nation. No one, not
even the government had imagined that the lockdown would be this long. But the
government did forget to consider many aspects, one of the most important being
that of the migrant workers. In a way to also satisfy the contractors, land
owners and the lobbies of all those industrialists who recruit migrant workers,
the government has not been able to make proper arrangements for the migrant
workers to go to their homes.
Lack of communication and miscommunication between
the different district and state administrations have also been a major
challenge in handling the Migrant Labourers. In one of the cases, a bus that
left from Surat was stopped at the Madhya Pradesh Border because the
administration of Surat did not inform the Madhya Pradesh Administration. This
again left several Migrant Labourers stranded for days.
Since the introduction of train facilities, the
dispute over the fares was prominent. Initially the Migrant workers were asked
to bare the minimal According to the Railway Board Chairman V K Yadav the
charges were levied purposely so that only the Migrant workers could access the
facilities, or else it would be eligible for each and every person to access
the facilities, which would make it difficult to track the movement. But due to
the poor state of the migrants, the centre and the state has decided to take
out the fare from their pockets (85% cost taken by centre, while 15% by state).
But the lack of proper administration since the beginning, especially in the
case of managing the Migrant workers has caused a ripple effect in problems.
For the migrants, walking home, than dying hungry
seemed like a better option in order to survive. Similar such crisis is also
seen among Indian abroad, who are stranded in different countries with no ways
to return. For them too, the Vande Bharat Mission has been initiated to get
them back, on the most important loophole that not many understand
is on part of the factory owners, who hire these migrants. It is their
responsibility to make sure that the workers are kept in good conditions with
reasonable facilities. But several factory owners left the migrant owners to
survive on their own in a state of plight. Recently, in Karnataka, the state
government canceled all the transport facilities because the builders lobby
needed the migrant workers to stay back, without knowing what the migrant
labourers wanted.
Internal Migration is going to still be a problem.
The conditional inequalities of each state need to be dealt with individually,
and a common action plan can’t be the solution.
The last thing that we would want to see in this
world is the loss of empathy towards one another and the rise of apathy. We
might have understood the cost of human life in reference to the virus, but it
might take us time to understand value of human life in other aspects of life.
Editor’s
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