Context: Avoidable misery of migrant workers endured during the lockdown was not an anomaly but an effect of their implicit exclusion from full citizenship.
Issues faced by the migrants:
Lack of choices: The lockdown offered them only two options – starvation/charity or an arduous walk to their homes, risking starvation and death.
Absence of permanent home and belongings: of migrant workers has led to the tradition of shifting settlements.
Lack of support: occasioned by the invisibility of migrant workers in government records;
A state of ‘non-being’ marks the political existence of nomadic tribes extends to India’s migrant workers.
Colonial treatment: Indian state’s governance structure treats them nomadic tribes either as threat or nuisance. (under the Habitual Offenders Act, 1952).
No legal remedy: Section 4 of the Epidemic Disease Act 1897 provides protection to law enforcement officers adversely impacting the remedial rights of the migrants.
Lack of income: The active production of migrant labour (by the violation of land rights) and their invisibilized exploitation (in low paid wage work) are two parallel processes that feed into each other.
A large portion of lowly paid labouring population has historically come from Adivasi, Dalit and socially oppressed castes as well as religious minorities.
Lack of organized platform: The new labour codes make it nearly impossible to unionize.
Way Forward:
Bridging the social distance: between migrant workers and the rest of urban society, including the ruling elites.
Process of claiming entitlements as citizens (such as decent pay, housing, and social protection requires migrant workers to get organized.