Social Policy,COVID-19 and Impoverished Migrants: Challenges and Prospects in Locked Down India

Abstract

As countries shore up existing safeguards to address the social and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, India faces a humanitarian disaster of unprecedented proportions. Ninety per cent of the Indian workforce is employed in the unorganised sector; uncounted millions work in urban areas at great distances from rural homes. When the Government of India (GOI) announced the sudden ‘lockdown’ in March to contain the spread of the pandemic, migrant informal workers were mired in a survival crisis, through income loss, hunger, destitution and persecution from authorities policing containment and fearful communities maintaining ‘social distance’. In this context, the article analyses how poverty, informality and inequality are accentuated by the COVID-19 pandemic experiences of ‘locked down’ migrant workers. The article examines the nature and scope of existing social policy, designed under changing political regimes and a fluctuating economic climate, to protect this vulnerable group and mitigate dislocation, discrimination and destitution at this moment and in future.

Introduction

As millions of migrant workers in India began their long trek home, carrying children, clutching their meagre possessions, crowding disrupted transport networks, beaten and resourceless, after the sudden lockdown in the wake of the novel coronavirus pandemic, they faced hunger, destitution, the wrath of the police and suspicion of communities and tragic death (Ghosh, 2020; Jadhav, 2020; Jha & Pankaj, 2020). The suffering borne by the uprooted informal workers, who constitute more than 90 per cent of India’s workforce and have helped to build India’s US$2.9 trillion economy demonstrate the frailty of state social protection systems, the erosion of recent progress and the urgent need for state welfare measures to be more robust and accountable. ¹ Unorganised-sector workers and circular migrants working on casual and irregular contracts are emerging as the most vulnerable community and are at great risk.

The pandemic caused by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), the gravest health emergency of our times, is poised to disrupt social, economic and political systems and lives worldwide. COVID-19 confirmed cases in India stood at 95,698, with 3,025 deaths, 3.2 per cent case fatality and 0.22/100,000 population on 18 May 2020 (John Hopkins University and Medicine, 2020). ² As preventive mitigation measures, India initiated harsh controls since March, asking 1.3 billion people to stay at home for the period of lockdown unless involved in permitted essential services. Through a combination of control measures that involve restriction on mobility and closure of factories and workplaces, worldwide, countries are working to ‘flatten the curve’, that is, ‘reducing the number of COVID-19 cases … to prevent the clogging and collapse of healthcare system’. With global fatalities crossing 300,000 and people confined to homes, employment and livelihoods are being lost at a rapid rate. ³ The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates the loss of 25 million jobs, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) foresees USD 220 billion in loss of income for developing countries (International Labour Organisation (ILO)-Monitor Ed-3, 2020; United Nations Development Programme [UNDP], 2020). The country being home to millions living on the verge of destitution and insecurity, even in the euphoric times of high GDP growth, is it time to interrogate concerns about state responsibility and social policy in India?

This article discusses how poverty, informality and inequality have been accentuated in the context of COVID-19 caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2 through the experiences of migrant workers in India during the period of pandemic ‘lockdown’. It also examines the two generations of social protection instruments: first, during the regime of the coalition centre-left political party, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), from 2004 to –2014, and second, from 2014 under the centre-right Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) from 2014 to the present. The article examines how social policies under changing political regimes and fluctuating economic climates designed protection instruments and how these safety nets can be mobilised by democratic and accountable governance to respond to the crisis of millions of informal workers displaced by COVID-19. Overall, the aim is to discuss the scope of current social policy in India to protect the most vulnerable in the context of dislocation from work, loss of income and livelihoods and the added problems of stigma, discrimination and destitution.

For the analysis and discussion, the article draws on sources such as academic articles, policy briefs, government surveys, reports, press notes and advisories and current newspaper and online media reportage of the unfolding health and humanitarian crisis about informal migrant workers. The article finds that the debates about entrenched poverty among India’s rural and urban informal workers, and redistributive concerns around this, had moved to the edge of social policy debates in recent years shaped by economic growth optimism, change in political regime, delayed data and fragmented, scheme-based interventions. The article argues that the scale and depth of poverty revealed by the COVID-19 migrant issue suggest renewed attention towards the urgency of adequate financial resources to consolidate social protection and democratic governance that demonstrate commitment to protect the basic entitlement and fundamental rights of all, and especially its most disadvantaged citizens.

Three key sections of discussion in this article are as follows. In the first part, we trace the trajectory of social policies in India and its ideological underpinnings, how these addressed new risks under neoliberal globalisation, including successes and criticisms. The principal focus here is on poverty eradication, goals and outcomes under different policy and political-economic regimes and how the current pandemic may affect its course. In the second section, we look at the situation of informal workers, especially migrants, their vulnerabilities following the 60-day lockdown measure and the path it shows for the need for social protection in the short and longer term. ⁴ In section three, we look at all possible social safety nets being mooted by the government, activists, civil society groups, planners and academics that can be put in place to protect displaced informal workers and stem the exponential growth of poverty and inequality.

Poverty and Social Protection in Post-liberalisation India

Far-reaching shifts in economic policies from the beginning of the 1990s boosted the Indian economy but also led to inequality and vulnerability for disadvantaged groups and communities. The last three decades witnessed fundamental changes in the nature, character and modus operandi of the Indian state, as new economic policies and programmes were triggered by developments on the global stage (Jha, 2012). While the scope of social policies also increased during this period, the performance and reach remained diverse across different states, and not all need and rights could be addressed (Drèze, 2016, pp. 14–15). There have been repeated calls to make economic growth more inclusive and temper its harmful effects through redistributive social policy (Sumner, 2019, pp. 410–411). According to development economists, India’s development story has been about ‘two Indias’ defined by increasingly unequal distribution of incomes. While a visibly opulent consuming class represented the success story, stagnation of real wages and absence of basic services such as education, healthcare, nutrition and safe water was the reality for a large, impoverished population (Drèze & Sen, 2013, pp. ix–x). The authors end with a less-than-optimistic outlook, that Indian society missed the opportunity to use its political democracy and freedom of expression to engage with redistributive shortcomings (Drèze & Sen, 2013, p. x).

With economic globalisation and its concomitant objectives and agenda, changes in systems of welfare were introduced. Welfare states were an integral feature of advanced liberal economies in the 20th century after the two world wars, when social protection networks were established to protect the working class from fluctuating incomes, thus enabling economic and political stability (Swank & Betz, 2003, p. 224). Social policy that compensated for the harmful consequences of economic development in the last century remain even more relevant in times of liberalisation and international flow of capital and labour (Swank & Betz, 2003, p. 224). Instead, in the wealthier countries, model welfare states have shrunk, while in emerging economies with a large, deprived population, social protection programmes attempted to secure targeted and conditional protection for vulnerable population groups. Social policy was to play a residual role to support flexible labour market and competitive economy in the global market place (Jessop, 2004; Kennett, 2004, p. 4). In India, redistributive policies is linked to democratic electoral politics, and the economic transition created new pressures to address entrenched poverty and inequalities (Bardhan, 2009).

Social and economic inequalities in India follow the contours of caste, gender, tribe, religion and regional divisions. Social welfare policies have tried to address these varied aspects of vulnerability through poverty alleviation programmes since the 1980s (see Nayak, Saxena, & Farrington, 2002). Despite these efforts, most people (outside of the small formal sector) remain dependent on family, community, agriculture and the informal economy for income, livelihood and social protection to cope with life course risks and economic downturns. They also rely on expensive private healthcare and education due to inadequate public services. This situation creates many challenges for social policy over time, such as which risks should be prioritises, which sections of the population should be covered, how much should be spent and, most importantly, what should be the minimum level of protection that the state should provide.

Post-liberalisation India witnessed a new dynamism in social policy. Observers viewed the creation of a new framework of social legislation as an increased government commitment to protect the vulnerable (Drèze & Khera, 2016, pp. 5-6). Giving substance, durability and legal recognition to the vision enshrined in the Directive Principles of State Policy in the Indian Constitution, activists and civil society groups argue that ‘the rights approach’ gave continuity and durability to ad hoc welfare schemes and enabled the poorest to secure basic entitlement through democratic elections and legal action (Drèze & Khera, 2016, p. 6). Harriss (2013, p. 563) finds the expansion of social legislation as arising from the need to complement labour market flexibility that emerged under the competitive pressures of neoliberal globalisation in this period (Harriss, 2013, p. 564). Examining the resulting contestation in the framing of entitlements and the scope of assistance in the social legislations, the author finds competing notions of social provisioning. While governments and financial institutions favour the targeting-privatisation and beneficiary-clients-consumer-citizen approach, civil society and activists view social protection recipients as right-holders (Harriss, 2013, p. 564). Such contestations around the goals, purpose and outcome of social protection have persisted and grown stronger over the decades. The exposure of the poorest to the greatest risk from the COVID-19 lockdown and unpreparedness of social policy systems and resources, at present, reflect the outcome of lost opportunity in creating a minimum protection floor.

Creating impetus for social policy in the closing decade of the 20th century were important discussions on poverty and inequality. During the high-growth years, absolute poverty had reduced among some groups, but increasing economic inequalities created disparities between urban and rural areas and different states in India (Deaton & Dreze, 2002, p. 3743). An important finding from this discussion that is relevant for the present COVID-19-hit society is that while many livelihoods were disrupted due to structural changes in the economy during the growth years, what arrested extreme impoverishment was the widespread seasonal labour migration (Deaton & Dreze, 2002, p. 3743). Three million people migrated for work from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh to prosperous states like Maharashtra and Punjab in the 1990s (World Bank, 2009, p. 18). Migration was viewed as evidence of ‘economic potential’, migrant preference and pre-condition for national prosperity by the World Bank that advised the governments to facilitate ‘labour mobility’ (World Bank, 2009, p. 18). The point that the article emphasises is that while the risky labour mobility grew India’s economy and contributed to minimal poverty reduction, it put migrant labour in the frontline to absorb the shocks of the declining agrarian sector and periodic economic crisis. ⁵ If there grew a complacency among state policymakers that poverty had been addressed sustainably, on what kinds of data or evidence was this assumption based?

Poverty measurements serve as justification for state social protection measures. National poverty lines reflect the income or consumption threshold below which a person’s minimum nutritional, clothing and shelter needs cannot be met in that country. Fixing a threshold is not a technical exercise but a political and controversial one (Fernandez, 2010). In 2014, the Rangarajan Committee’s recommendation to revise the national poverty line increased the number of absolute poor in India from 268 to 363 million (Government of India, 2014). The newly elected National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by the BJP government rejected the recommendation and decided to follow the older Tendulkar poverty line with a lower threshold (Sharma, 2014; Sharma & Suneja, 2020). Revised indicators such as multidimensional poverty index (MPI) did not resolve this problem. For instance, UNDP and OPHI, in a recent influential report, claimed that from 2005 to –2016, India ‘lifted 271 million people out of poverty’ though 373 million faced acute deprivation, based on the MPI (UNDP, 2019). Since 2011, the Indian government has used its own version of MPI, the socio-economic caste census (SECC) data, along with biometric information, to identify the poor and deliver its welfare schemes (Dhal-Samanta, 2020). ⁶ To add to the story, the World Poverty Clock initiative found only 5 per cent of India’s population, or a mere 50 million people, lived in extreme poverty in 2018 (Kharas et al., 2019). In a surprising reversal to such optimism, a NITI Aayog (‘Government think tank’) report claimed that poverty in India grew since 2018 (NITI Aayog, 2020). The politics of poverty measurement and projection of reduced poverty is routinely claimed as success for economic policies for political regimes.

Furthermore, the emergence of the centre-right politics of populism, and their electoral success from 2014 onwards, added a new dimension to social policy. The discourse of ‘deserving-ness’, amplified effectively through mainstream and social media, set aside civil society insistence for rights-entitlement framing of social policy. James Putzel argues that the populist right sought to win support by demonizing the ‘undeserving poor’ who receive unfair assistance or protection by liberal elites (2020, p. 426). A range of new social programmes, from toilet building and health insurance to cooking gas cash subsidy transfers and public housing, also emerged from 2014, suggesting that welfare was indispensable to Indian politics. Direct transfer of benefits (DBT) through biometric identification and mobile telephony (called the Jan-Dhan–Aadhaar–Mobile trinity) were promoted as models to reduce intermediaries, inefficient institutions and corruption in service delivery (Government of India, 2016; Rao & Nair, 2019, pp. 469-470; Ravi, 2018). In the face of growing rural distress, cash support to farmers was also introduced (Government of India, 2019). However, continuity of programmes remained uncertain as financial allocations for a clutch of previous-generation rights-based programmes, such as the Public Distribution System (PDS) under Right to Food and the public works scheme under MGNREGA, the right to work, stagnated. In general, social programme narrative was shifting during this time from rights, information, participatory democracy and accountability to responsibility, patriotism, compliance and surveillance. New welfare programmes aimed to reduce corruption and ‘ghost beneficiaries’ rather than extend long-promised social and economic rights. With the emergence of debates and experiments with ‘basic income’ grant to address a new generation of risks from the slowing of economic growth and de-globalising trends, poverty re-emerged as a social policy concern.

Worldwide, 81 per cent of all workers are affected by partial or complete lockdown due to the preventive actions taken to curb the spread of the pandemic. Businesses and enterprises face insolvency, and workers are facing loss of income and employment (ILO, 2020). But the impact will be the worst among informal workers, who are least protected among all types of workers (ILO, 2020). Millions dependent on the informal economy face survival crisis in India (UNDP, 2020). The 2017–18 labour force survey counts 415 million informal workers in India, 90 per cent of the total workforce, and 28 million rural-to-urban workers—consisting of small farmers, labourers, shepherds, fisherfolk, weavers and artisans, forest gatherers, food processors, construction labourers and tradesmen, domestic workers, manufacturing workers (factories, workshops, homes), street vendors, transport workers and waste pickers (Chen, 2020). They bear multiple deprivations and injustices due to the nature and character of their employment conditions. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) of 2017–18, for instance, more than 70 per cent of the workers in the non-agricultural sector with a regular salary—most of them migrants—did not have a written job contract, about 55 per cent were not eligible for paid leave, and 50 per cent did not have any social security benefits (Government of India, 2019).

In 2006, a national committee found that a majority of this group lived in poverty and lacked legal security of work. The commission had recommended the setting up of National Social Security and Welfare Fund and social security and welfare boards (Kannan, Srivastava, & Sengupta, 2006, p. 3477; NCEUS, 2007). The social legislation from this exercise, ‘The Unorganised Worker’s Social Security Act’ (UWSSA), 2008, never emerged as a viable instrument due to lack of dedicated funds and absence of political support (Dutta & Pal, 2012). In the absence of formal recognition of informal workers’ needs and rights and avenues to protect them, the government would urgently need to combine the two generations of welfare and poverty relief measures—a combination of transfers in cash and kind, public works and free health services—to address the present condition. The unfolding migrant situation, deemed an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, requires urgent recognition of the gaps in social protection for people who carry the weight but not so much the rewards of the Indian economy.

Migrant Workers: COVID-19 Lockdown Experiences and Implications

Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, a sudden proclamation of the national lockdown (24 March to 31 May), the first phase for 21 days, extended for 19 days, further extended for 15 days and extended again for 15 days starting May 18, to break the chain of transmission of the coronavirus caused panic among millions of migrant workers in India’s big cities. ⁷ As the announcement of lockdown with a notice of less than 4 hours spread, migrant workers were rendered instantly without work. Panic-stricken workers arrived at bus stops and highways in large crowds hoping to reach their distant rural homes. The point of the lockdown measure was to initiate ‘social distancing’ to prevent the spread of infection. But there was no way that the migrant workers could fulfil those conditions in their temporary, cramped urban homes without work, income or social protection. Their response to the directive for preventive confinement over the next days and weeks exposed the insecurity, uncertainty and precarity of their life and circumstances. At present, 400 million workers in the informal economy, constituting 90 per cent of India’s workforce, are at risk of falling deeper into poverty. Outraged by the condition of the migrant workers, public policy academics have described the COVID-19 lockdown as ‘the choice between virus and starvation (Chen, 2020).

On 14 April, according to an IMF blog, the quarantine and social distancing practices, the ‘Great Lockdown’, had led to a massive collapse in all economic activities, ‘the worst economic downturn since the great depression’ (Gopinath, 2020). According to a Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) report, India’s lockdown order led to a jump in unemployment rate from 21 per cent to 26 per cent in mid-April and a weekly decline in labour market participation (The Economic Times, 2020, April 29). CMIE data show that the unemployment rate increased from 7.03 per cent in May 2019 to 23.98 per cent on 2 May 2020 (Centre for Monitoring of Indian Economy [CMIE], 2020).Following the lockdown, millions of workers left from industries such as retail, construction, textile, tourism and leather.On 26 March, Surendra Pandey walked 110 km to his home when the plywood factory in Lucknow, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, downed shutters. There was no transport available, he told press reporters, and kind people helped him with water and food during his inter-state travel. At this point, India had only 600 confirmed coronavirus cases and 13 deaths (Sharma & Khanna, 2020). A 39-year-old manual worker from the industrial town Surat in the Western state of Gujarat, also walking back home with his 15-year-old son, told reporters that he would have to borrow money to survive (Sharma & Khanna, 2020).

According to trade union reports, 60,000––70,000 people, mainly in domestic service and construction work, left the state of Gujarat for their home state, neighbouring Rajasthan, within days after the lockdown order (Sharma & Khanna, 2020). From New Delhi, men, women and children walked to neighbouring Uttar Pradesh. On 27 March, a man working as a welder left the southern state and information technology (IT) hub, Bangalore, to walk home, an impossible 800 km to Rajasthan. Reporters found him in Tumkur, 70 km away, where he had reached in 18 hours on foot (Nagaraj & Srivastava, 2020). Another Reuters story, carried on 21 April, described how a group of 50 construction workers, women and men with small children, walked from the national capital, Delhi, after lockdown, on the midnight of March 24, to their village in drought-affected Bundelkhand in the state of Madhya Pradesh, a distance of nearly 500 km. They reached their village after walking and taking lifts from the occasional truck carrying essential goods. On their journey, they were pushed by the police to keep walking and not stop or gather anywhere (Pal & Siddiqui, 2020). Seasonal labourers in agriculture travel hundreds of kilometres on established routes. In a heartrending episode, a 12-year-old tribal girl, who had migrated with a group of women and men from Chhattisgarh to Telangana for chilli harvest, died of dehydration on the way as the group walked back home (Verma, 2020). Scheduled tribes are among the poorest communities in India who migrate seasonally for agricultural work. As India moves into lockdown Phase 3 from the first week of May, stories of terrible ordeals and desperate journeys keep coming, with migrant workers with children walking, cycling and riding on concrete mixer trucks (Scroll, 2020, May 2). The latest traumatic incident is the death of 16 migrant workers who were crushed to death by a goods train as they fell asleep exhausted on a railway track after walking for kilometres (Banerjee & Mahale, 2020).

Migrants began fleeing the cities out of fear of COVID-19 infection. They left on foot due to transport lockdown. As the period of lockdown kept increasing, migrants preferred to leave for rural homes because they lacked the economic means to support themselves and self-isolate in urban areas. The initial government response to prevent migrant movement towards their homes was informed by the fear that they would carry the contagious coronavirus to their hometowns and villages leading to community transmission of the COVID-19. Thus, migrants were not allowed to leave the city. When the Government of India (GOI) went to the Supreme Court to clarify why migrants could not leave their destination cities, the Apex Court had asked the central government to ensure the provision of food, water and shelter for the migrants (Bindra & Sharma, 2020). Health experts had questioned the assumption that most migrants were likely to be COVID-positive (Bindra & Sharma, 2020). Later, the state governments were tasked with the responsibility of arranging quarantine for all returning migrants and providing them with health services if required. On 23 April, news reports estimated that 34 per cent of all COVID-positive cases (out of 4,281 cases from 284 districts) were from the 31 high in-migration districts in the country, based on the economic survey of 2016–17 (Kaushik, 2020).

When some of the migrants managed to reach their villages/hometowns in extreme harsh conditions, walking for hundreds of kilometres, they were placed under home quarantine or put in quarantine centres under deplorable conditions. According to estimates by Research and Information System for Developing Countries and based on NSSO data, 4–6 million people are waiting to return to Uttar Pradesh, 1.8–2.8 million to Bihar, 700,000–1 million to Rajasthan and 600,000–900,000 to Madhya Pradesh (Singh & Magazine, 2020). This is close to 8 million people. A migrant worker returning home from Ahmedabad to Banswara in Rajasthan, a distance of 240 km, after walking 90 km and hitching rides for the rest told a news magazine about how villagers continued to be suspicious despite the fact that he had tested negative for COVID-19 and was maintaining the required 14-day quarantine. He also mentioned how many lacked the means to self-quarantine in the village (Ghosh, 2020). The village head of Saraiya block in Muzaffarpur district of Bihar describes, ‘in my village school building, 14 migrants have been quarantined for last three days, but the building has no window, toilet, door or bed’ (Tewary, 2020).

A similar situation of insanitary conditions was reported from other areas. Many migrant workers belonging to socially deprived communities faced discrimination. A family in a Bihar village where a migrant worker had returned were not allowed to access their own food stores and take water from the communal hand pump and were forced to depend on water used by cattle (Agrawal, 2020). The return of migrant workers has led to social tensions in many states, and reports of violent clashes among villagers have come up from many places. A youth was beaten to death in Madhaul village in Sitamarhi district on 29 March 2020, after he alleged that two migrant workers had returned to the village from Mumbai without taking any tests. In another incident, angry villagers in Jehanabad district of Bihar assaulted a team of officials who had gone to a village to detain migrant workers and put them in a quarantine centre (Manoj, 2020).

Why did the corona pandemic that requires a health and humanitarian response become an issue of policing or ‘community surveillance’? Some observers are viewing this as the marriage of the spheres of ‘welfare’ and ‘repression’:

the public health crisis has provoked the imposition of the “‘state of emergency”. Security forces are commanded onto the streets as agents of welfare. Police are mobilised as the protectors of public health, the enforcers of social distancing. States are justifying intensified surveillance as a public safety measure. (Bhattacharya & Dale, 2020)

Such a situation prompted the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to warn that flouting the rule of law in the name of fighting the pandemic risks sparking a ‘human rights disaster’. There have been reports from different regions that security forces have been using excessive force to make people abide by the lockdowns and curfews, she said, ‘such violations have often been committed against people belonging to the poorest and most vulnerable segments of the population’. Health systems in many migrant home states are poor, and some migrants could be asymptomatic carriers of the virus. But none of these factors are dependent on the migrants’ own actions. Yet, the blame for contracting the disease and the responsibility for doing something about it seems to be overwhelmingly borne by the migrants themselves. Questions need to be asked about the manner in which pandemic communication has been misdirected towards hate and stigma and has been further warped by infodemic on social media (Sengupta, 2020; UN News, 2020). Community surveillance is merging into vigilantism and violence (Agrawal, 2020), putting the migrant in an anxious and complicated situation.

Lack of work has also pushed several thousand migrant workers to the edge of starvation, sparking protests. In Gujarat, in the second such incident in the last 10 days, more than 2,500 workers in Surat took to the streets late on April 10, Friday, demanding wages, food and permission to return to their home states of Odisha, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar (Langa, 2020). Besides, a shelter home in Delhi’s Kashmere Gate was set on fire on Saturday, allegedly by migrant workers who lived there, a day after they had a fight with the staff over food (Singh-Sengar, 2020). Daily wage earners or those working on piece-rate wages, with their meagre income, do not have the capacity to stay at the destination without work. Salim Baig was stopped by police in Delhi as he tried to walk home with a group to Moradabad and was taken to a shelter home (Sinha, 2020). There, conditions worsened, and he had to stay on one meal after the residents started pelting stones and set the place on fire. Angry volunteers abused the inmates and refused to give them food. They were afraid they would have to sleep outdoors near ‘dumpsters and animals’. Soon after the announcement of the extension of the lockdown, in Mumbai, a false rumour about a special train sent thousands of migrants to a suburban train station, creating a riot situation (Miglani & Jain, 2020). These situations underscore not just shortcomings of emergency measures and unpreparedness of local administration but also the challenges of providing relief to millions of unprotected informal workers with no means of subsistence, no homes to practise distancing and receiving confusing information and communication about the ongoing situation, as the COVID-19 lockdown was extended with no end date in sight.

COVID-19 Relief Measures: Hits and Misses

That the lockdown announcement had huge implications for the economy in general and for the informal migrant labourers in particular was acknowledged and responded to by the government. On 26 March, the Indian finance minister announced a relief package for the poor affected by COVID-19. Amounting to US$22.6 billion, this would pay for free food grains, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) for cooking, cash transfers for 3 months and insurance for frontline healthcare workers (The Economic Times, 2020). In April, the government announced that 330 million poor people have been assisted through transfers amounting to ₹312,350 million (USD 4,129 million) under Prime Minister’s Poor Relief Scheme (PMGKY) (All India Radio News, 2020); ₹100,000 million (USD 1,322 million) has been transferred to 200 million women holding special Jan-Dhan accounts (₹500 per person), ₹14,050 million (USD 186 million) was provided under welfare pension schemes to 28.2 million people, ₹161,460 million (USD 2,134 million) to 80 million registered farmers under cash income support scheme, PM-KISAN, and ₹34,970 million (USD 462 million) worth of financial support to 21.7 million building and construction workers. Under the PMGKY, 392.7 million people received free food grains, and 26.6 million LPG cylinders were distributed under the PMUY scheme (All India Radio News, 2020). However, an assessment by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) shows that overall support by the central and state governments through various cash and kind transfers and other measures, such as healthcare infrastructure, testing facilities and tax relief, was only about 0.2 per cent of India’s GDP (IMF Policy Tracker).

Critics argue that these disbursements are part of regular welfare dues to eligible groups and do not address the new catastrophic losses, such as that of incomes, leading to ongoing survival crises suffered by stranded and out-of-work migrant informal workers. The government, they claimed, was dressing up the small, targeted transfers as a special package for COVID-19 (Bajaj et al., 2020). These transfers amounted to less than 0.8 per cent of the GDP and only 5.6 per cent of the central government’s planned financial outlay for 2020––21. Cash transfers to Jan-Dhan accounts amount to less than ₹17 (USD 0.22) per household and ₹4 (USD 0.05) per person per day (Bajaj et al., 2020). Moreover, migrant workers unable to return home and those who are not ration card holders at the destination would not benefit from additional free food grains under the PDS. They cannot avail increased MGNREGA (public works) wages until they go back home and the lockdown is over. Besides, GOI continues to use outdated 2011 data to distribute food under the National Food Security Act. Dreze (2020, April 9) recommends the use of the projected 2020 census figures to design the relief package. The PMJDY list for cash transfers would exclude poorer women. As the majority of the seasonal migrants are landless or marginal farmers, they will not be benefitted from the grant to landholders under schemes such as PM-KISAN through which the central government provides an income support of ₹6,000 (USD 79) a year to farmers in three equal cash transfers of ₹2,000 (USD 26) every 4 months.

Similar is the case with benefits under the Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Board (BOCWWB). Registration under the statutes requires 90 days of work in the previous year. Also, most states do not register migrants, and registration is not portable. Further, the number of BOCWWB-registered workers is only 35 million in the whole country (The Economic Times, 2020, March 27). An alternative suggestion was a Union bank of India (UBI)-type transfer that would include stranded workers, amounting to an income support based on the current national floor wage of approximately ₹200 (2.6 USD) per day for the period of the lockdown (The Economic Times, 2020, March 25). The 2019 nobel laureate economist Abhijit Bannerjee argues that the Indian government needed to support the poor (Biswas, 2020). The emergency situation created by the COVID-19 lockdown and the uncertainty about the future trajectory of the pandemic requires immediate and near universal cash transfers to the poor (Biswas, 2020). Instead of narrow targeting and searching for beneficiaries or establishing ‘deservingness’, the government should use a consolidated list of beneficiaries of all welfare schemes to make immediate transfers (Biswas, 2020; Somanchi & Khera, 2020). Beyond standard welfare measures, the COVID-19 pandemic requires disaster-grade response, and the government issued directives under the appropriate law, the National Disaster Management Act, to support key decisions.

Using a section of the National Disaster Management Act (NDMA), 2005, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) issued a number of advisories to state governments, including order for restricting the movement of migrants along with the provisions that must be made for them (Ministry of Home Affairs, March 29, April 3). State governments were tasked with providing temporary shelters with basic amenities for migrants who remained in destination areas, return migrants were to be kept in quarantine for 14 days in home states, landlords were asked to defer rents for migrants, and employers were asked to give them wages for the period of the lockdown. A critical gap has been the absence of adherence to minimum standard of relief (including provision of food, water, shelter and sanitation) and compensation for loss of life and livelihood that must be provided to affected persons under the disaster management law (Sibal, 2020). The government has also transferred significant responsibility of disaster relief to states and private enterprise owners, whereas the NDMA (2005) requires the central government to take some financial liability for immediate disaster relief. Activists and volunteers have raised alarm about the abysmal conditions in the temporary shelters where migrants are confined (Roy Burman, 28 April 2020).

The Indian government’s pandemic response is moving towards technologies and citizen responsibility to stay safe. Automation and contact tracing applications are being used in many countries by governments to trace community transmission of COVID-19 and take decisions about lifting the lockdown measure (The Economist, 2020; Kelion, 2020). Concerns are also being raised about data privacy and providing private parties, technology providers and states with wide-ranging powers of surveillance over individuals (Soltani, Calo, & Bergstrom, 2020). The Aarogya Setu Application (ASA) launched by the GOI for the contact tracing of COVID-19-affected people finds itself as a centre of these debates. The ASA is being used to seek a number of additional information, beyond health and travel, and it is being connected to the issue of travel passes (Mehrotra, 2020). The conflation of disease surveillance/monitoring with personal, societal and national security signals the central place of security in government welfare discourse. Migrant workers and people in their rural communities are unlikely to own smartphones. For them, COVID-19 protection would require improved and free healthcare services, water and sanitation access and support in the form of frontline health workers to monitor the health and well-being of return migrants and home communities through the period of quarantine and in days to come. Reliance on technology must be combined with, and not replace, measures that directly aid the well-being of informal workers and their home destination communities.

In his address to the nation on 12 May, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced an economic package worth ₹20 trillion (USD 264.08 billion), with the intended aim to make India self-reliant in the post COVID-19 world. He described this intervention as a movement towards self-reliant India (‘Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan’). This was followed by a five-phased announcement by the finance minister who emphasised ’land, labour, liquidity and laws’ as vital aspects of this package. The announcement of free food grain supply (5 kg of grains per person and 1 kg of chickpeas per family) for 2 months to 80 million migrant workers without a ration card, outside the ambit of National Food Security Act, was expected to provide some relief to migrant workers. The new provisions also promised an additional allocation of USD 5.286 billion for the public works programme MGNREGA that is expected to generate 3 billion person-days of work to address the subsistence needs of out-of-work migrants returning to rural areas. Observers have pointed out that the COVID-19 relief package continues to fall short of expectations as it includes previously announced fiscal and monetary measures. The additional measures in the recent announcement amount to only 2.7 per cent of the GDP as relief for businesses and not more than 1.1 per cent of the GDP as a safety net for poor households, migrants and farmers (IMF, 2020). ⁸ Thus, as COVID-19 cases travel with the tired migrants to their rural homes and the lockdown moves into Phase 4 from 18 May to 31 May–, government social protection measures resemble a drop in an ocean of trouble.

Social Policy: Suggested Directions

The current lockdown measures in India, which are at the high end of the University of Oxford’s COVID-19 Government Response Stringency Index, have impacted informal workers significantly, forcing many of them to return to or attempt to reach rural areas (Hale et al., 2020). With the sudden lockdown and halting of economic activities, migrants’ crucial link of rendering their ‘labour’ was abruptly disconnected, and their only ownership in the form of ‘physical labour’ for any ‘exchange-entitlement’ collapsed. This brings us to engage with insecurity and precarity of the lives and circumstances of labour migrants.

The pandemic lockdown, by restricting mobility and halting livelihoods, has emphasised how this group is being impoverished and left to handle its situation without support (Chen, 2020). The high proportion of infection and registered deaths from coronavirus in crowded informal settlements, like Dharavi in Mumbai, where 800,000 people are packed in 2.5 km2, underscores the welfare deficit in the shape of affordable housing, sanitation and healthcare for migrants and the urban poor in destination areas. Social distancing and self-quarantine are untenable mitigative strategies in places where the poor live in tiny, crowded tenements, queue up for water and share minimal public sanitation facilities. Most houses are merely 10 x 10 ft, in which eight to ten people live in such small rooms. In future, focus on living conditions, especially housing, healthcare and basic services, must receive priority in urban poor settlements. At present, the state needs to intensify and expand the coverage of emergency relief, income, food transfers and free health services, including COVID detection tests and the cost of hospitalisation.

The migrant crisis induced by the COVID-19 pandemic is in continuity with a series of social crises that temporary migrants face (Das & Kumar, 2020). For instance, migrants in places like Delhi NCR from distant villages in Eastern India are never truly accepted by the residents, who sell them goods and services and rent them places to stay but continue to view them as strangers (Das & Kumar, 2020). This is possibly the reason why migrants set out for their distant villages in large numbers when the lockdown was announced (Das & Kumar, 2020). Information and social communication campaigns will be necessary to build trust that has been affected by COVID-19 misinformation and to ensure that host communities respect the rights of informal workers who provide them with valuable services. Similar efforts would be required in home communities where returning migrants are facing discrimination.

Temporary migration is the evidence of rural livelihood precarity and diversification attempts by households aided by social and transportation networks and labouring opportunities created during India’s economic growth years. Rural economy and government safety nets for rural distress may have to be scaled up to support returning migrants and their families. The abject condition of the migrant is a portent for other things, such as the end of a fairly long and stable phase of economic growth for India. In capital’s crisis, labour is the first and worst casualty. If migrants leave the city never to return, what will emerge under present conditions are simply poorer villages and communities. Agrarian economy, farmer incomes and the non-farm rural sector will require renewed attention.

Migrants are facing hunger, loss of income and uncertainty of paid work at their home villages. In the past, mass exoduses due to famines, droughts, floods, epidemics, environmental factors and regional conflicts led to people leaving rural areas. What is fundamentally different at present is the emergence of a new phenomenon of the exodus of migrants from their place of work. For the immediate hardships experienced by the migrants, emergency relief and compensation should be awarded to them, based on the calculation of minimum floor level wages, as direct cash transfer for a minimum period of 3 months. To deal with food insecurity, in-kind transfer under the PDS should be universalised. Doorstep delivery of kind and cash transfers such as old-age pensions and maternity benefits in cases where workers and dependents lack access to bank accounts should be expedited.

Conclusion

The crisis of COVID-19 has, for the first time, brought ‘invisible’ migrants and the phenomenon of migration to the centre stage of policy concern around social protection. Migrant worker tragedy unfolding in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown is reinforcing the necessity of consolidating the social policy efforts of the past decades. Migrant workers occupy a special position in the debates around development and social protection. They have driven the engine of globalisation, though not reaped great benefits from the process. In the wake of COVID-19, the very factors that made them desirable as a workforce are turning against them.

The current tragedy of poor migrants is hiding the bigger story: mass-scale unemployment and insecure, unprotected work that has characterised labour Post-COVID 19, workplaces must provide better protection and decent work standards for informal workers based on existing policy framework. Government must also recognize that rural employment that continues to support the subsistence of millions is facing adverse conditions. Rural social protection schemes, such as public works under MGNREGA, should be expanded to urban areas, and other welfare measures, such as maternal and child protection and PDS, should be made portable. Similarly, farmers and the agrarian rural sector will need greater commitment from the state as urban informal work and migrant remittances dry up. As special trains leave with groups of migrants, 58 days into the COVID-19 lockdown, India’s social policy experiments and vibrant democracy must rise up to address resurgent poverty brought on by the new challenges of the 21st century.