Migrant Workers: The Backbone Of The Society.

Like Covid- 19, which has literally brought the world to a standstill, the partition was also a disease, which crept in and they both share one key element which leaders today overlooked as disdainful as the founder of India and Pakistan did in 1947. While, the nation is still fighting the battle against coronavirus. India is being reminded of a modern tragedy.

Hundreds of thousands of desperately poor workers and their families have taken to the roads in recent days, fleeing cities for their villages in a mass migration similar of the 1947 Partition that gave birth to modern India and Pakistan.

The partition, in which as many as 14 million people crossed from one side of the new border to the other perhaps a million more died, are hardly exact. The numbers today appear to be much smaller. These migrants aren’t fleeing violence and aren’t being attacked by marauding gangs, or other refugees, along the way, there’s no sectarian dimension to the exodus and this great migration is unlikely to result in any permanent demographic shift.

The images that began flooding out of India after Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared a three- week lockdown of the country due to the pandemic of the country starting March 24 have in some ways been as heart- wrenching as newsreel footage from 1947, men and women with feet worn bloody by walking hundreds of miles brutal heat, children clamoring for food, crowds clinging of the roof of overloaded buses still running.  The crisis has drawn the attention of the global media and India’s Supreme Court.

The migrant workers crisis has shown the relevance of that question in today’s India. These migrant workers have been contributing towards the development of the nation by the sheer sweat and their brow. With the increasing distress, many migrant workers took recourse of their own means of transport to go home- many had no other option but to walk long distances, before the central government finally notified the start of services of “Shramik train”. This is not even about containing the coronavirus infection. This is not even about saving the government some relief package. This is about keeping workers hostage.

Presently, the situation is very dynamic. While, the government is releasing a huge packages for the development of the country, but still the workers are facing a crisis why this amount is not used for the well- being of their livelihood irrespective of this that government released few schemes for them like MNREGA.

Even, government has used a large amount of money on the virtual rally in Bihar. why the government is not thinking about the migrant workers while knowing this that these workers the basic need for the development of the country and their lives are very important.

A direct question arises here: Why was a dedicated Vande Bharat Mission not adopted for them? It is because they are still regarded as a little less than other citizens of the India?