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Updated: May 29, 2020 9:59:05 am

It is with great anguish and dismay that we write to you as the citizens of India and senior members of the Bar. The Supreme Court (SC) has a pivotal constitutional role in protecting and safeguarding the fundamental rights and freedoms of the citizens of this country, and particularly the vast swathes of our population who eke out a living near or below the poverty line or minimum wage. The SCs constitutional role and duty assume even greater importance in the time of a crisis, such as the present when the entire country and its economy was locked down from March 24 by an order of the central government. More than 75 per cent of the Indian workforce earn their livelihoods in the informal or unorganised sector, and for them, a stoppage of economic activity in the Medium, Small and Micro sectors has resulted in an immediate loss of livelihood and the means of sustenance.

The lockdown was imposed on March 24 without any consideration being paid to the plight of these poor, especially migrant labour earning their livelihood in the major cities, and for whom social distancing was and is a utopian impossibility. These poor citizens were faced with the prospect of being cooped up in small cramped tenements/rooms or on the pavements, without any employment or livelihood or even a definite source of food and were thus compelled to start walking back to their home states, often thousands of kilometres away, with little children, family members or elderly parents. They were forced to do so as the central governments lockdown had precluded them from taking trains or buses back to their home towns.

While hearing public interest litigation on the plight of the migrant workers, Alakh Alok Srivastava v. Union of India, the SC considered the Status Report filed by the learned Solicitor General, representing the Union of India, which referred to the governments circular dated March 29, prohibiting movement and transportation of migrant labourers and a direction to shift them to relief shelter homes and relief camps instead and the Solicitor Generals statement before this Court that as of March 31, no migrant person was walking on the roads in an attempt to reach his/ her home towns villages. The SC, vide order dated 31.03.2020, expressed satisfaction at the steps taken by the Union of India to combat COVID-19 and proceeded to observe that the migration of labourers working in the cities was triggered by panic created by fake news that the lockdown would continue for more than 3 months. As a consequence of the Courts failure to intervene, even though the number of COVID cases was only a few hundred at the time, the millions of migrant workers were unable to proceed to their hometowns. This enforced stay in cramped quarters only exposed poor workers to a higher risk of infection. Moreover, the governments statement has been clearly shown to be contrary to the facts. Several reports suggest that more than 90 per cent of migrant workers did not receive government rations in many states and were suffering from dire food shortages.

The SCs failure to intervene in March resulted in a massive migration of millions of workers by early May they were fed up with being virtually incarcerated for the previous six weeks. By this time, the COVID infections in the country had crossed 50,000 and a significant number of migrant workers were also infected. Even at this stage, the government initially sought to obstruct their travel/movement on foot or by trucks. Subsequently, the government agreed to their movement by bus and trains (Shramik Specials). However, even when the arrangements were made, onerous conditions were sought to be imposed on them, such as obtaining a medical certificate after getting themselves tested at great cost to themselves. When arrangements were made to transport them by road, they were often left at the borders of the receiving states, which at times were unwilling to make any further arrangements for them to reach their homes, almost as if this was not one countrty with a common citizenship. The right to life, liberty and freedom of movement of these hapless poor millions was rendered virtually meaningless.

On May 15, a three-judge bench of the SC dismissed an application seeking immediate directions to all the district magistrates to identify the migrant workers who are walking on roads, provide them with appropriate food and shelter facility and facilitate their travel back to their home states free of cost. Without going into the merits, the said application was dismissed and it was left for the state governments to sort this out. We respectfully submit that this institutional deference to statements made on behalf of the government and the Courts apparent indifference to this enormous humanitarian crisis, would if not rectified immediately, amount to the Court having abdicated its constitutional role and duty to these teeming millions of poor, hungry migrants.

Amid the executive-imposed COVID-19 lockdowns, the Court cannot retreat into self-effacing deference, leaving millions of Indian citizens, especially those who are poor and vulnerable, to the mercy of the executive, reminding us of ADM Jabalpur when detenues were left to the tender mercy of the executive with Diamond bright Diamond hard hope that something would be done.

This Court has the power bestowed by the Constitution of India under Article 142 to undertake any measure to do complete justice. The show of helplessness does no justice to the motto of this court Yato dharmastato jaya. We believe that the survival of Indian democracy and the rule of law, particularly in the current COVID-19 pandemic, is dependent on the Court actively fulfilling its constitutional obligation.

The migrant workers crisis is continuing even today, with millions still stranded on roads, at railway stations and state borders. We urge the Supreme Court to intervene and ensure that adequate transport arrangements, food and shelter are immediately provided by the Central and state governments free of cost. At this time, we recall the words of Martin Luther King Jr. who said: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

This article first appeared in the print edition on May 29 under the title Your Lordships.

P Chidambaram, Anand Grover, Indira Jaising, Mohan Katarki, Siddarth Luthra, Santosh Paul, Mahalaxmi Pavani, Kapil Sibal, Chander Uday Singh, Vikas Singh, Prashant Bhushan, Iqbal Chagla, Aspi Chinoy, Mihir Desai, Janak Dwarkadas, Rajani Iyer, Yusuf Muchhala, Rajiv Patil, Navroz Seervai, Gayatri Singh, Sanjay Singhvi. Full version of this article is available at indianexpress.com

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A letter to justices of Supreme Court, from senior members of the Bar on the migrant crisis - The Indian Express

Broadcaster and leading Brexiter Nigel Farage called it an invasion. Which is stretching it.

He is right that over the past three years, an increasing number of migrants have crossed the English Channel, landed somewhere on the Kent and occasionally Sussex coastline, and entered the UK illegally. In 2018, the Home Office said 297 people were known to have used this route. In 2019, the figure stood at 1,890. By May this year, the figure already stands at 1,590. Its a significant development, although one no doubt exacerbated by the pandemic-induced closure of other migration routes.

But both in size and intention it does not constitute an invasion. At the height of the European migrant crisis in 2015, Italy alone had received over 50,000 boat-borne migrants by June that year. The UK, so far as we know, has received just over two per cent of that figure. And as for the migrants intentions, its safe to say they are not interested in conquest. Many are simply and understandably seeking a better standard of living than that offered by their often wartorn homelands (which are usually the historical recipients of Western military intervention), let alone the miserable migrant camps in which they found themselves at Calais.

There is undoubtedly a problem here, though. A combination of the UN Refugee Convention, international maritime law and French authorities willingness to move a problem on, means that UK border forces end up in the position of being legally obliged to escort hundreds of migrants a year into UK territory, where they will then wait months and years for their applications for asylum to be processed. And thats just the ones who get caught. There are likely to be many more a year who escape the attentions of the UK Border Force, rendezvous with traffickers in the UK before being put to low-to-no paid work in, say, a city-centre carwash. The principal and possibly sole beneficiaries of this infernal arrangement are not the migrants, of course theyre the human-traffickers charging several thousand pounds a head for the crossing, and their criminal associates, extracting more and more in the course of these undocumented individuals precarious, black-marketised existence.

But painting this as an invasion is unhelpful. It overstates and misrepresents the problem of illegal migration. And it dehumanises the migrants, transforming them into a malign force, indeed into invaders.

Yet those willing to dismiss and ignore Farages concerns, as yet more proof of the bigotry, xenophobia, racism etczzz of the wider Brexit vote, are the bigger problem here. With assorted charities to the fore, such as Refugee Action and Care4Calais (which once blithely tweeted the quote Brexit, Donald Trump and facism make these such dangerous times), this constituency consistently presents those making the perilous Channel crossing as helpless victims. Victims of the traffickers. Victims of the countries from which they were forced to flee. And, above all, victims of those across the world, and especially the UK, whose prejudices, nativism and sheer closed-mindedness have erected real borders between people. Or as one commentator put it of the inhabitants of Kent: Brexit has cracked us open, allowed our strongest feelings to come out There are still people who offer help and welcome [to migrants], but they are not running the country.

So while some on the right are using the so-called UK migrant crisis to showcase their patriotism and concern for the nation, their opponents are also using the migrants. Theyre using them to showcase their openness, their compassion, their superior virtue. Indeed, theyre using these bedraggled figures, collapsing on to Englands shorelines, as symbols both of the folly of borders and nations, and of the cruelty and narrow-mindedness of all those who cleave to them. If some on the right have dehumanised those crammed perilously into small dinghies for five grand a pop, then so too have their opponents. And whats more, in doing so, in encouraging others to make that same crossing, they play into the hands of the traffickers and all those who seek to profit from migrants desire to make a better life for themselves.

Thats the problem with this rather confected outrage over illegal immigration in the Channel. It exemplifies the way in which immigration has been turned into a means of political showmanship. On one side, the virtue-signalling cosmopolitan; on the one other the flag-waving patriot.

But at least the flag-waving patriot is on the right path namely, defending the importance of borders. For these were never merely lines arbitrarily drawn on a map, dividing and antagonising us for ever more. Rather, like the boundaries between humans and animals, and good and evil, they indicate something substantial. They are the territorial expression of a political community, a means by which we as a people constitute ourselves as such, the means by which we judge what we value and what we dont. They are the bounds within which the laws, mores, and, deeper still, the everyday rituals and features of our public life and culture develop and bond us to one another. A national territory is not merely a physical space. It is the domain in which citizenship from our rights to duties pertains and has real meaning. Get rid of the borders, or render them meaningless by encouraging and even celebrating their transgression, and you undermine what it is to be a citizen. Indeed, you undermine what it is to belong to anywhere at all.

That, in a sense, is the predicament in which we find ourselves. Too many, thinking it the right-on, woke thing to do, oppose borders. They see them in terms of Trumps much-trumpeted wall, as a bigoted means to keep them out. And they therefore see migrants as a means to undermine these expressions of bigotry and closed-mindedness. But in doing so, in green-lighting the transgression of borders, they imperil the very meaning of citizenship and civic belonging.

Ironically, if we are to have an open and generous immigration system, one which wipes out the market for human traffickers, it needs to be something citizens of a post-Brexit UK support. It needs to be something democratically agreed upon. Something that a political community values. And for that you need the very thing the virtue-signallers decrying borders are undermining a citizenry.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.

Picture by: YouTube.

To enquire about republishing spikeds content, a right to reply or to request a correction, please contact the managing editor, Viv Regan.

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The shallow exploitation of the migrant crisis - Spiked

Railway officials found the body of a migrant labourer lying in a toilet of a Shramik Special train in Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh, The Indian Express reported on Friday. The officials found the body while cleaning the train in the Jhansi railway yard on May 27. The worker had boarded the train on May 23 to travel to Gorakhpur.

The Jhansi-Gorakhpur train left Jhansi on May 23 and reached Gorakhpur on May 24. Its rakes were then sent back to Jhansi for maintenance and sanitisation on May 27, the officials said, according to PTI. The deceased was identified as Mohan Lal Sharma, a resident of Basti district of Uttar Pradesh. His family members said he worked in Mumbai. On the route from Jhansi to Gorakhpur, Basti comes before Gorakhpur.

We got information around 10 pm Wednesday regarding a body being found in a train at the Jhansi railway yard, Jhansi Government Railway Police Inspector Anjana Verma said. We immediately rushed there along with a medical team. The body was found in the toilet of the Shramik train and it had decomposed and was smelling. His face had swollen and we kept the body at the mortuary.

Railway officials added that at no point during the trains journey did any railway authority receive any call from the train for medical help. The Government Railway Police have sent Sharmas body for an autopsy, and have taken samples for testing for coronavirus infection.

Railway officials said Sharmas Aadhaar card, some documents and cash were found on his person. The first opportunity for maintenance and sanitisation for the railways was when the rake reached Jhansi on May 27, when the staff recovered the body, North Central Railway Spokesperson Ajit Kumar Singh said.

Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers began a long journey home on foot after March 25, when the Centre imposed a nationwide lockdown to combat the Covid-19 crisis. However, some died on the way. After much outcry, the Centre started Shramik Special trains from May 1 to ferry migrant workers. However, some labourers still continued to travel home on foot or in private vehicles. The fourth phase of the lockdown will end on May 31.

There have been reports of migrant workers dying in terrible circumstances. The Patna High Court on Thursday took note of a widely-shared video of a child trying to wake up his dead mother at Bihars Muzaffarpur railway station.

The video that went viral earlier this week showed the child playing with a cloth covering his mothers body as announcements of train arrivals and departures continued in the background. The woman, identified as Arbeena, had reportedly died of extreme heat, hunger and dehydration. They had arrived in Bihar from Gujarat in a special train for migrant labourers and her family claimed she had fallen sick on the train due to lack of food and water.

Read more:
Migrant crisis: Labourers body found lying in toilet of special train four days after he boarded it - Scroll.in

Everything about the Indian governments policy towards the countrys large, vulnerable population of migrant workers has been a mess, we wrote at the beginning of the month. As India approaches the end of Lockdown 4.0, this unfortunately still holds true.

The current phase of the tragic botch-up is even more baffling.

There is no doubt that the question of whether large-scale movement should have been allowed from urban areas to rural ones and from rich, better-equipped states to poorer ones was complicated, even if the Centre resolutely ignored compassion as a consideration in its decision-making process.

But on April 29, it decided to permit the operation of trains to take stranded migrant workers back home. By April 29, after more than a month of lockdown, the government had plenty of time to figure out what to do about the migrant workers who wanted to go home, a concern that had become apparent from even before lockdown was announced.

Instead, the result was chaos. There was a convoluted procedure for those who hoped to register for trains. No one was given clear information The Centre at first did not want to be involved in the operation or pay for the tickets, leaving it to states to coordinate between themselves. Then, suddenly, after the problems were highlighted by the Oppostion, there was a complete u-turn with the Centre taking charge this time without any coordination with the states.

No wonder that tens of thousands of Indians continued to take to the roads to walk, cycle or attempt dangerous journeys in trucks back home.

Over the last week, scores of stories have emerged of how the Indian Railways has mismanaged the movement of these trains, leading to delays stretching on for days, with passengers going hungry and without water. As of Thursday, nine people had died on the Shramik trains in 48 hours, the Indian Express reported. On Wednesday, a heartbreaking video of a toddler trying to wake up his dead mother lying on the platform at a railway station went viral.

The Centre has tried to brush off these reports. It has claimed that those who died on the trains were old, sick people and chronic disease patients. It insists that the trains that were delayed by many hours taking unconventional routes, such as one from Mumbai to Gorakhpur that ended up in far-off Odisha, were just involved in route rationalisation.

It claimed that these diversions were necessary because of the congestion along the way. One Railway official told the Indian Express that these measures were effected so that trains are not held up at one place for hours without water and food.

Except, this is exactly what happened. Numerous accounts make it clear that passengers were not given even the basics.

We should have reached the previous night itself, one passenger told Scroll.in. The train was stopping at such places where there was no [access to] water. Nothing can replace waterwe can buy it also but the train never stopped at such places.

The Indian Railways, the organisation famed for being able to move millions of people every day, has been unable to organise a few hundred trains daily, without extremely long delays. It has failed to provide food and water to the passengers.

The Railways can offer all sorts of explanations delayed departures, congestion on the route, the lack of timetables but all these point to immense organisational failures. Nobody is claiming that these operations are easy. But the magnitude of the mess reveals just how little thought and planning has gone into movements that have been predictable for weeks, if not months.

Union Minister for Railways Piyush Goyal has spent the last few weeks squabbling with states about trains. The incidents and deaths over the last few days should remind him to focus first on the organisation that he is supposed to be overseeing before he starts to point fingers at others.

See the article here:
Railways monumental mess-ups are another sign of Centres tragic mishandling of the migrant crisis - Scroll.in

The sun has still not set on hungry and thirsty children with bags on heads, mothers hugging their infants, and workers with blisters on their feet, setting off on a journey into the unknown, hoping to reach places they connect as homes.

This humanitarian crisis has been brought upon by a failure of public policy and public action. To make things worse, States have carried out an unprecedented assault on the rights of the working people by withdrawing basic protections that had been hard won by a tiny sliver of the working class. Unfortunately, many employers appear to approve of these changes while being silent on the plight of those who help build their industries. But the heroes among them are those who have overcome the myopia of their peers and spoken of the countrys collective future.

In an exceptional article (Economic Times, May 16), Azim Premji, the former Chairperson of Wipro, writes of the unforgivable tragedy of the death of 16 migrant labourers on railway tracks, acknowledging that the blame lies on the society that we built. He notes the worsening precarity of workers and the lack of any social security cover for these labour migrants.

He writes that it was shocking to hear that various state governments, encouraged by businesses, are considering (or have already done so) suspending many of the labour laws that protect workers. He notes that measures such as these will only exacerbate the plight of the poor and that they are not only unjust but dysfunctional. He believes that the interests of businesses and workers are deeply aligned particularly in the times of the crisis.

He then goes on to underscore the need for a large fiscal stimulus to include a much expanded MGNREGA, and an urban employment guarantee scheme, a strengthened public health system, free and universal PDS and emergency cash relief to each poor household and migrant for a period of time, and finally autonomous and free movement of migrant labourers to their homes.

Similar measures were outlined in an appeal by the Indian Society of Labour Economics to the Prime Minister and the Chief Ministers and recommended by a vast section of economists and industry associations such as the CII. Had these measures been taken promptly and expeditiously, they would have stemmed the tide of reverse migration, lowering the huge costs to migrants and the economy.

Instead, a package of about twenty trillion rupees has been announced by the Central government, mainly comprising credit and policy-related measures but the total additional budgetary outlay for the much needed fiscal stimulus to demand and income support is less than one per cent of GDP during 2020-21.

Meanwhile, the crisis that has hit the migrants and informal workers looks set to intensify despite the easing of the lockdown. Workers in urban areas, who still continue to grapple with hunger and unemployment, have to deal with unpaid rents, bills and other liabilities built up over the last two months.

In the rural areas, the MGNREGA is only slowly ramping up but the subsistence and employment crisis will intensify in the lean monsoon period. The government should urgently announce a second round of stimulus measures with emergency income support to all households except the well-to-do along with an urban EGS and free universal PDS.

As the migrant crisis exploded, we saw the spectacle of an exceptionally strong government at the Centre deciding to sit on the sidelines, leaving States to coordinate and implement movement, even though both inter-State migration and inter-State quarantine are central subjects. The Prime Ministers addresses to the nation remained silent on the issue. The governments directives demonstrated a marked reluctance to facilitate inter-State movement of migrants.

Till as late as May 8, the Central Labour Ministry was of the view that migrant workers should be persuaded to stay back. The States where migrants worked, on their own part, were equally reluctant to send them back, with the Karnataka government initially deciding not to send trains purportedly under pressure from its builder lobby. The source States were themselves not keen on receiving large number of migrants because of the pressure on their fiscal and administrative resources.

Clearly, neither the Central government, nor the States or the employers have covered themselves in glory in the way this huge humanitarian crisis has been handled. There are extensive and continuing reports of unpaid wages and workers being coerced to stay back on sites, even without payments.

The recent changes in labour laws announced by several States are against the backdrop of the existential crisis faced by labour, and will encourage, as Naushad Forbes, former President, CII, has warned a race to the bottom with no laws.

The most comprehensive changes have been proposed in States such as Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Gujarat will lead to a virtual demolition of the edifice of labour laws. The changes violate major ILO conventions and are on a common template provided by the Central government with the ostensible and unrealistic goal of attracting fresh investments, at a time when the primary objective has to be to keep industries afloat, restore demand, and revive the confidence of labour who feel let down by employers.

This is the time that all stakeholders must come forward to rebuild jobs, incomes and the economy. The Central government should take urgent measures to boost income and demand. It must deploy its resources, including the army and paramilitary, who have performed so well in national disasters, and assist the State governments in moving the migrants safely to their homes. Industry should collectively reject the rationale and need of rebuilding its future on the blood and sweat of workers and uphold the dignity of work.

A large number of industrialists, and people of substantial means have already been deeply involved with humanitarian efforts along with millions of other Indians. The actor Sonu Sood arranged a large number of buses for migrants to reach home. An urgent coordinated effort by industry to provide wages and help send migrants home at the earliest will go a long way in restoring the confidence of the workers in their employers.

Along with the pandemic, the crisis afflicting the vast sections of the working poor will still require very large proactive measures, which should also seek to build, and not destroy, partnerships among different sections of people, including workers and their employers.

The writer, a former Professor of Economics at JNU, is honorary Director of the Centre for Employment Studies, Institute for Human Development, Delhi

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Time for collective action to overcome migrant crisis - BusinessLine