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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | No Savings, Scanty Jobs: Why Second Wave Has Been Harder For Migrant Workers -Shreehari Paliath

No Savings, Scanty Jobs: Why Second Wave Has Been Harder For Migrant Workers -Shreehari Paliath

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published Published on Jun 1, 2021   modified Modified on Jun 1, 2021

-IndiaSpend.com

Migrant workers in different states have been struggling to find work, wages and rations, say activists and researchers. The Public Distribution System must be universalised, they say, and free rations must be provided for at least six more months.

Bengaluru: Sudhir Paswan, 29, is back to square one--in his village in Bihar's Muzaffarpur district, counting his losses. It has been more than a week since he returned, after failing to secure a job in Delhi. A labourer who loaded and unloaded goods in Delhi's Okhla Industrial Area, he would earn between Rs 200 and Rs 700 a day. "Since the lockdown, there was no work and access to food and essentials became difficult. I had to leave the city," he said. Over 800,000 migrants left India's capital, for instance, for their hometowns in 2021. Paswan is just one of them.

Jobs have been hit harder since the lockdowns of 2021, put in place to control the second wave of Covid-19. May has shown double-digit unemployment figures, said Mahesh Vyas, chief executive officer of Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), a think-tank. "More than 97% of India's population became poorer compared to where they were in terms of income," he said. Its effect on the informal sector, which had barely recovered from the effect of the first lockdown in 2020, has been debilitating.

Paswan returned home with his wife and their ailing three-year-old son, whose treatment at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences they had to discontinue midway. They had to borrow money from family and friends for their train journey.

Like Paswan, Rabiya (she uses one name), a 35-year-old single mother of three from Kanpur, who has been working in Gurugram, is struggling to make ends meet. She had been earning Rs 7,000 at a facility manufacturing motorcycle parts when work came to a halt with the April 2021 lockdown. She now gets work only if there is a need to clean machine parts at the facility.

Besides job precarity, the migrant workforce is facing another grim reality--hunger. Rabiya's ration card to access subsidised foodgrains has not been active since she moved from Uttar Pradesh to the National Capital Region (NCR) nearly three years ago. "I have no family support and need rations to feed my children. It is becoming difficult to get by," she said.

None of the migrant workers IndiaSpend spoke to had ration cards with them--their cards were with their families in their villages or hometowns. "I left the card with my parents who stay in the village," said Gobardhan Adivasi, a mason from Tikamgrah in Madhya Pradesh, who works in Faridabad. "By the time we finish work in the evening, we have to buy dry rations in black because of the lockdown." His contractor owed him money for three days' work, he complained.

Every state in India has announced mini-lockdowns or extended them to curb the rise of record infections in the country. The current lockdowns have been tougher for migrant workers compared to last year's all-India lockdown, workers in Delhi-NCR told IndiaSpend--months of unemployment in 2020 had left them with little or no savings, and now jobs are scarce and living costs have rocketed.

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IndiaSpend.com, 1 June, 2021, https://www.indiaspend.com/economy/no-savings-scanty-jobs-why-second-wave-has-been-harder-for-migrant-workers-752355


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