One of the most telling human stories to result from the COVID-19 outbreak and the resulting nationwide lockdown is that of stranded migrant workers. But theirs isn’t a new story; it’s taken a pandemic for urban India to take note of an issue that has remained an unseen aspect of the country’s economy for much of its contemporary history. P Sainath, founder of People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) and Ramon Magsaysay Award recipient, has chronicled the migrant condition for several decades. In an interview, he details the current situation of workers, and the possible way forward.
Recently, 16 workers from MP were killed under a train in their sleep in Aurangabad. What does it say about us that our first reaction is to question why the dead workers were sleeping on the tracks, and not those who pushed them to walk home?
How many English publications even bothered to give names of the workers crushed under the train? They just had to go faceless, and nameless. That is our attitude towards the poor. If it had been a plane crash, you would have helplines giving information. Even if there had been 300 killed in the crash, their names would appear in the newspapers. But 16 poor guys from Madhya Pradesh, eight of them Gond Adivasis, who gives a shit? They were walking along those railway lines as a guide to home — to a station from where they
— source firstpost.com | Parth MN | May 13, 2020