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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

Dear Readers,

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See the original post here:
Time for collective action to overcome migrant crisis - BusinessLine

Vultures are becoming extinct and experts have been urging us to take urgent steps to conserve them. None in our right senses would ever dispute the necessity. Though not a pretty sight, the giant birds help the world stay clean by feasting on dead carcasses. That they play a crucial role as scavengers is text-book knowledge that we have grown up with. Yet, at no point have I empathised more with the vulture as much as I have in recent days since the bird found mention during a significant hearing in the Supreme Court, no less.

As the countrys second-most senior law officer, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, was making an argument involving the current migrant crisis when he launched a broadside against all those who have criticised the governments handling of a crisis that many have described as an unmitigated humanitarian tragedy. In coming down heavily against "armchair intellectuals" and all those behind the uncharitable headlines the crisis has been generating, he referred to an iconic photograph of a famine-stricken child taken decades ago in Sudan during a bad bout of famine. The photograph that won the South African photographer a Pultizer had a vulture menacingly sitting some distance away from the child.

The image was powerful and what the solicitor general narrated had the court listening to him in rapt attention. According to Mehta, the photographer was later asked how many vultures were there. When he said there was one, he was corrected immediately. There were two, the photographer was told, implying he was the other vulture.

Also Read |Cruel Homecoming! Of A Dying Son And Race Against Time For A Migrant Worker

Fact checks revealed that the tale the solicitor general narrated was apocryphal and suffered from inaccuracies. Though focused on getting the perfect frame, the photographer did not leave the hapless child at the mercy of the waiting vulture, which he happened to shoo away.

The child also lived through the scary encounter, though he unfortunately died like many others in his continent more than a decade later because of a fever. Yet, the underlying parallel that Mehta sought to draw carried weight. Many who read what happened in the court that day would have been prompted to ponder whether journalists highlighting the ongoing migrant crisis too were as heartless as the photographer was made out to be.

For the record, Mehta did not elaborate on what he expected the photographer to do. But perhaps what he left unsaid has encouraged those not happy with the overwhelmingly negative coverage of the migrant crisis to question the role of journalists. Suddenly, the idea of journalists as no better than vultures has gained currency, at least among sections who wish to undermine the reporting on the migrant crisis. Besides being portrayed as amoral, arguments are being forwarded that helping the migrants should take precedence for humanitys sake over reporting on their misery.

True, sensitivity and helpfulness are qualities that we should all cherish and actively practice. And it is only to be appreciated when a journalist, beyond the call of his or her duty, takes time off to help a person in misery. I can vouch for several such instances in the recent past when a reporter or a photographer, moved by the plight of the subject, has taken out money from their pocket to help a migrant in distress. It could have been to buy some packets of biscuits, or for buying a seat in a bus to ferry the migrants to their distant homes. But our individual capacity to help remains limited.

What we can instead do more effectively is to highlight their plight, speak truth to power and bring pressure on the powers-that-be to provide succour.

Also Read |Caught Between Hope And Despair, Bundelkhand Migrants Slip Into Dark Mode

Making the world a better place to live in is the basic tenet of journalism and fortunately, it remains so, despite the many shortcomings that have seeped in. Like every other profession, journalism too has good professionals and the bad. There are of course some who feast on tragedies to sell their stories and advance their interests. I can recount some, if it helps, including an instance when a reporter manufactured a story about the distress sale of children by enticing their uncle to hand them over against a few thousand rupees. The uncle had some 16,000 rupees already in his bank account. It turned out that the purported sale of his two nephews was more out of greed than distress.

But nothing justifies the attempt to portray our entire tribe as self-centred. It is okay to help those in need as and when the situation permits. But our primary job remains highlighting the unfairness and injustices so that they are not allowed to linger or recur. We fail most of the time. But that only means we dont give up but try harder. Sudan, for example, is hardly any better since the devastating famine that the photographer catalogued. But it did shake the worlds conscience and we need to be grateful to him for that.

None of the arguments made in our support will possibly make Mehta change his mind. People, after all, will subscribe to what suits them the best. It is also equally in societys interest that journalists keep doing what they are meant to do hold the mirror with warts and all. Being denigrated as vultures should actually be considered a badge of honour, just as a young Outlook colleague of mine did soon after Mehta made his controversial point. He tweeted out a picture of himself reporting on the migrant crisis with a caption: Vulture-ing. I remain very proud of his reporting and have no hesitation in proclaiming myself as the organisations Vulture-in-Chief.

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If Journalists Are Vultures, I'm Happy To Be A Vulture-in-Chief - Outlook India

Inside Indias migrant crisis, better engagement of the public and private sectors in healthcare, and are we really doing better than other countries? here is a roundup of articles in Indian news publications on how India is dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic.

EXPERT SPEAK

India could have 10 million undetected Covid-19 infections, says disease modelling expert: Its hard to know what to make of the governments claim that perhaps 2.9 million Covid-19 cases and 78,000 Covid-19 related deaths have been averted, because this is based on un-transparent mathematical modelling which the country has been asked to trust and not question. We dont know what went into these mathematical models and, therefore, we have no way of judging the outcome they have produced. Watch this interview with Gautam Menon, one of Indias most highly regarded experts in disease modelling, professor of physics and biology both at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai and Ashoka University in Sonepat.

Centre has offered nothing against jobs lost by informal workers, circular migrants: Millions of migrant workers have had to walk across states and cities to reach their homes, showing that policy makers ignore them. They have few rights and entitlements and are treated as irritants or nowhere citizens. Virtually nothing has been provided against the jobs lost by the informal workers and circular migrants. Read this interview with Ravi Srivastava, director of the Centre for Employment Studies at the Institute for Human Development, who along with other economists have advocated an emergency income transfer of Rs 6,000 per month to each household.

MANAGING COVID-19

Is India really doing better than other countries? The number of cases in India has been increasing even after two months of lockdown and many states of India are running out of hospital beds and staff. The epidemic curve of Covid-19 cases in India doesnt seem to be flattening while other countries like Russia, the UK, Spain, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Canada, Belgium have almost bent the curve. MoHFW press conferences should also focus on highlighting the steps they are taking to change the curve, other than presenting anecdotal evidence. Read more here.

Lessons from a pandemic: How India can reform its private healthcare sector: The novel coronavirus pandemic is the most devastating public health emergency in the last century of human history. It is making countries around the world take a hard look at their health systems. In India, instead of just planning a return to normal once we are past the immediate crisis, it is time to begin a society-wide debate about the need for a paradigm shift in our health system. Read the second in a two part series here on Indias healthcare sector, which looks at what lessons can be drawn from the epidemic for better engagement of the public and private sectors.

Indias largest wholesale medicine market closed until 4 June due to sudden Covid -19 outbreak: Shop owners have decided to temporarily shut Bhagirath Palace in the national capitals Chandni Chowk Indias largest wholesale market for medicinal drugs until 4 June after at least 12 people from the area tested Covid-positive over the last 10 days. Read more here.

Fifth phase of lockdown begins Monday. Heres what you must know: The guidelines issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs say that the lockdown is being extended until June 30 only in containment zones. These containment zones will be demarcated by states, depending upon the severity of the coronavirus outbreak in an area. Malls, hotels, and restaurants; places of worship; schools and colleges, all have been allowed to open in a phased manner over the next couple of months. Malls, hotels, and restaurants, and religious places such as temples, mosques, and churches will reopen from June 8. Read more here.

CITIZENS UNDER LOCKDOWN

For Mumbais security guards, the Covid-19 lockdown has made work both harder and riskier: Thousands of security guards in Mumbais housing societies were among the few low-income workers who still had stable jobs, but some of them chose to join the migrant exodus out of the city. A few have remained back and have been dealing with a whole new set of responsibilities and anxieties at work. Read more here.

How many casual workers in the cities have sought to go home? There has been no count of the number of workers returning to their home states. An analysis of NSS data tells us that the first wave of returnees is likely to be mainly urban casual workers who lost their livelihoods and lived in insecure accommodation. Read more here.

UNDERSTANDING COVID-19

Everyone is cherrypicking studies on HCQ. But scientists are divided: People currently prescribing hydroxychloroquine and those taking it should do so with the full knowledge that it is completely experimental for Covid-19 and not without risks. Cherry picking a few studies that fit your preconceived idea about hydroxychloroquines benefits or safety and disregarding the rest isnt good science and shouldnt guide health decisions. Read more here.

28% of 40,184 Covid-19 positive cases in India till 30 April were asymptomatic:At least 28 per cent of 40,184 people who had tested positive for Covid-19 between January 22 and April 30 in India were asymptomatic, a study found, raising concerns about the novel coronavirus being spread by those who show mild or no symptoms. Read more here.

VIDEO

Refugees at home inside Indias migrant crisis: We cannot understate the psychological trauma that this time has presented for thousands of people across the country. These factors are understandably drivers of one of the largest exoduses India has ever seen a reverse migration of people from cities back to their hometowns en masse. One might imagine that such a crisis would invoke nothing but empathy across the spectrum. But unfortunately, there has been a certain section of our society that has responded to this reverse migration with resentment towards migrants for leaving just as the economy needs them most. Watch this documentary by Malaika Vaz on the issue.

How has the lockdown to battle Covid-19 changed India's environment and biodiversity?

Covid-19 has impacted every system and process on our planet. On one hand, millions have been left jobless while on the other, the air has never been cleaner. The pandemic is urging India to prioritise the understanding of various sources of environmental pollution, and some of the better known culprits, industrial and vehicular pollution are re-examined. Watch the video here.

Originally posted here:
India coronavirus dispatch: Are we doing better than other countries? - Business Standard

Screengrab of the video

The worst of the times has brought out the best in people, at least some of them. This video of a 99-year-old woman packing food for migrant workers is a testimony to this.

The woman in the video is seen delicately rolling rotis with sabzi in a foil sheet meant for migrant workers stuck in Mumbai without any work in view of nationwide lockdown.

The video was shared by her nephew on Twitter Zahid F Ebrahim, a Supreme Court Advocate in Karachi, according to his Twitter bio.

My 99 year old phuppi prepares food packets for migrant workers in Bombay, he captioned the video.

Heart warming, said one witter user.

The tweet has been shared 1300 times and has been liked over 11,500 times.

Good samaritans like this woman have kept our faith i humanity afloat as India is grappling with the worst migrant crisis. Migrant workers in cities have been left without jobs and basic necessities like food as the Centre imposed a lockdown in March. The road to home has been treacherous with many of them getting killed in road accidents or succumbing to starvation.

https://pubstack.nw18.com/pubsync/fallback/api/videos/recommended?source=n18english&channels=5d95e6c378c2f2492e2148a2&categories=5d95e6d7340a9e4981b2e109&query=99-year-old,Woman,Packing,Food,for,Migrant,Workers,in,Mumbai,Gives,Us,Hope,in,Times,of,Crisis,coronavirus,warriors,Migrant,crisis,&publish_min=2020-05-30T03:19:27.000Z&publish_max=2020-06-01T03:19:27.000Z&sort_by=date-relevance&order_by=0&limit=2

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99-year-old Woman Packing Food for Migrant Workers in Mumbai Gives Us Hope in Times of Crisis - News18