Migrant workers who returned to villages face the prospect of choosing between low rural wages and the fear of infection on returning to their old urban jobs
Raji Ali is a young man trying to remove water from his small farm, which has got flooded for the third time since the monsoons arrived this year. Ali lives in a village in Uttar Dinajpur, in northern West Bengal, which is famous for tea gardens. But Ali hasn’t always been farming. Till before the Government of India announced a nationwide lockdown in end-March, he lived at Grant Road in Mumbai, where he was a daily wage worker and earned about ₹600 per day. Life wasn’t easy, and he lived with 50 other men from his village in a rented room, which cost them ₹18,000 a month. While they all came back to their village on the first Shramik Express train, Ali and five of his friends have now decided to return to Mumbai, this time to work at a construction site in Worli.
“It is over two months that we came back home, and we asked the panchayat to give us jobs under government schemes, but there is no work available here. There is a lot of scarcity of work and wages, and we barely have anything to eat. We had sowed wheat, but the floods have ruined everything,” he says. Ali has now heard from his contacts in Mumbai that they are looking for construction workers and is trying to get a train ticket back there.
“No one is paying for our fares. We are in need of work, so some of us are going back. But most are scared of the coronavirus and don’t want to leave the village. Will you help me find a job? Or can you tell someone to provide us work in our panchayat so that we don’t have to go?”
But while Ali is trying to find his way back to the big city, there are incidences of companies in sectors such as manufacturing, textiles, construction and real estate bringing workers back from villages at their expense. For instance, in the first week of July, Ashiana Housing sent seven of its supervisors from Chennai to Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh to bring back skilled workers. It took the supervisors three to 12 days to convince the workers, and take 150 of them back to Chennai.
Although the developer had booked train tickets for them, about 30 workers refused to travel by public transport. “We sent a bus from Chennai to that village and brought them back, and the supervisors travelled with them,” says Ankur Gupta, joint managing director of Ashiana Housing. Before the pandemic, the company had more than 1,500 workers, of which nearly 300 had returned to their villages.
While Ashiana Housing is still paying wages at earlier levels of ₹500 to ₹600 per day, there are developers in Mumbai who are paying 20 percent more than before. “These wage rises are short-term; as the situation improves, they will stabilise. Other costs are also increasing, and the first thing we decided to do when the pandemic hit was to save cash; we need to be prudent,” says Gupta.
(This story appears in the 28 August, 2020 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)