In February, B Ajurm Patro travelled 1,000km from her village in Odisha’s Ganjam district to Chennai in search of a job. In May, unemployed, starving and with the fear of the coronavirus stalking her, she took a bus back. Now, despite cases surging in Tamil Nadu and her daughter just three, she is ready to make the journey again.

Her heart is telling her to stay put in Manapalli, a village of 1,500 people that acts as a reservoir of migrant labour for the industrial powerhouse southern states, but her mind is made up.

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“What work is there for us in Manapalli? We can’t have two square meals a day even if we toil hard,” she said, looking around her modest two-room mud house where supplies have dwindled since they got back on May 27. “Our house has to be made concrete. Can we always live in a tin-roofed house?” she asked

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Migrant workers in Delhi walk back to their villages in Uttar Pradesh in March. (Sanchit Khanna/ HT Photo)

Manapalli is one of hundreds of villages in Khallikote block, a former zamindari estate in Ganjam district. Though electricity has reached the village, piped water is still a pipe dream. 

Every evening, Ajurm, 40, meets other women who rue the loss of their jobs in Chennai. Once the Ganjam administration relaxes its curbs — Ajurm hopes this will happen by the end of June — all the women have decided to go back to Tamil Nadu.

It took 70 days for Ajurm, her husband B Ghana Patro and daughter Smrutilekha to get back home. But they couldn’t amass enough money to bring back her 20-year-old son Kailash, who worked as a construction labourer in Chennai and who is still stuck in the city.

Ajurm thinks of her son every day, and it steels her determination to get back. “I felt bad leaving him back there,” she said.

Ajurm’s story is shared by millions of workers who are now taking buses, trains and hitching rides on trucks to go back to their factories, construction sites, auto shops and gyms, merely two months after their harrowing journey back home spotlighted the predicament of communities caught in a web of migration.

The pandemic and overnight shuttering of the economy exposed their economic precarity. Some perished on the way and the others vowed to never go back to cities that did little to support them in crisis — only to change their mind in the face of economic ruin back home. “What choice do we have? We have to go back and we will,” said Ajurm.

Long journey

Ajurm’s journey followed a typical pattern. They were a marginal family with no land holdings so Ghana migrated in 2015 to work at a construction site in Ahmedabad, then in Mumbai and finally in Chennai. When Kailash passed his Class 12 examinations in 2019, he too went to Chennai to join his father. Finally, in February, with Smritilekha old enough to travel, Ajurm realised the money she made as an agricultural labour was a fraction of what she could make in the city.

So she used a contractor her husband and son knew, and, with 30 other women from Manapalli, arrived in Chennai in the first week of February. She soon got a job lifting bricks and carrying a mixture of cement and sand, making Rs 350-400 a day. Her mason husband earned Rs 700 and son another Rs 400, giving her hope that she would soon be able to cast the roof of her house with cement and bricks.

When the lockdown was enforced on March 25, all three of them lost their jobs. By then, many other workers around their neighbourhood had started walking or cycling back home but it wasn’t an option for Ajurm. “How could I take the risk of cycling with a 3-year-old or walking all the way,” she said.

The contractor arranged food for a couple of more weeks, but soon supplies ran out. They wanted to come back but there was one problem: Two seats on a bus cost Rs 9,000 while the couple had just Rs 5,000 with them. Kailash solved the problem. He borrowed Rs 5,000 from another contractor, though this meant he would be in debt and stuck in the city. “He too wanted to come back, but he did not have enough money to get a seat,” said Ghana.

Familiar pattern

Migration is an old phenomenon in India, but exploded as growth soared with liberalisation in 1991, birthing a paradox: Booming cities needed cheap labour but the high cost of living was far beyond what migrant workers could afford. Nevertheless, for millions of people trying to break out of poverty, the cities offered the opportunity of jobs that did not exist in their home districts.

“As workers sought to tap into opportunities offered by inhospitable cities, they worked out a variety of complex, and often personally devastating, arrangements,” said Narender Pani, a professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies.

A few days after the lockdown was clamped on March 25, migrant workers started appearing on highways, bags slung on their backs, a bundle on their heads and children cradled in one arm. From May 1, the government announced shramik special trains, which soon sparked complaints of poor scheduling, and long hours without food or water. Nevertheless, 3,800 trains ran full over almost a month.

“What the crisis did, irreversibly, is that it brought up migration as an issue like never before,” said Chinmay Tumbe, a professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.

There were some big takeaways from the crisis.

One, it laid bare what Sai Balakrishnan, a professor at Harvard University, calls the spatial rift of India’s unequal development. Balakrishnan connected the migration to the Green Revolution that enabled some dominant agrarian castes to accumulate capital in the west and south even as the absence of state intervention deprived the east.

Two, it showed how dependent the big cities were on migrant labour. Within weeks of their leaving, labour shortages were reported from major projects in Delhi and Mumbai. “In our metros, they make up 15-20% of the workforce, and their absence may hurt businesses quite badly,” said Tumbe.

Three, it shone a light on the continued precarity of workers who do not consider cities they live in for decades as their home – because of uncertainties around food, health care, care-giving and housing. “This is a very sobering reality of the exclusionary nature of our cities and urbanisation,” said Balakrishnan.

Policy measures such as one-nation-one-ration card, which allows holders to draw benefits from any fair-price shop in the country regardless of home state, may alleviate some of this. “It needs to get off the ground real quick. We need to be more clear on its architecture and need more discussion on that. Who will pay for it is a challenge,” said Tumbe.

Four, it underlined the growing chasm between the economic reality of migration and the political rhetoric on nativism. In the past two years, a number of states have moved to reserve large chunks of jobs for local populations amid rising tension over the figure of the “outsider” taking up jobs. How this will square with migration remains to be seen.

Tumbe predicted some tension in the next six months as the economy struggles to regain steam after the pandemic. “Once the employment reality kicks in, there will be pressure to give more jobs to locals. The one-nation-one-ration-card policy incentivises inter-state migration, but most state governments incentivise locals. How will this play out at a time of low employment?”

To this end, he suggested the constitution of an inter-state migrant council on the lines of the GST council. Some states such as Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh have already set up migrant commissions.

Worst affected

Some of those worst affected by the crisis were Dalit and Adivasi workers, who make up a large pool of migrant workers and who faced discrimination back in their villages. Many of them moved to cities to escape the deeply entrenched social inequalities in rural areas.

“That internal distress migration in India is disproportionately made up of Dalits and Adivasis is well documented in migration research… the Dalits and Adivasis from eastern UP, Bihar, Odisha, have to trek almost across the breadth of the country to find work,” said Balakrishnan.

Sanjib Mondal is one of them. A resident of the North 24 Parganas district in West Bengal, Mondal came back in May, only to see cyclone Amphan pummel his village and destroy his home.

Now, despite his fears of contracting Covid-19, he knows he has to go back and find work in Gujarat. “We have a home neither here nor there, but the money is better there. So what’s the harm in going back?” he asked.

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