Varun Aggarwal makes one thing clear about the issue facing Indian migrants today, when we talk to him about it ahead of a webinar that he will host this evening. This is not a “migrant crisis”. It’s a “migrant policy crisis”. “Migrant people move from one place to another. That’s just what they do, and it’s our constitutional right to live and work where we want to. But it’s the lack of management [in solving their humanitarian woes] that is the problem,” says the founder of India Migration Now, an action-based research organisation that was started in Mumbai in 2008.
Aggarwal gives us an example to elucidate his point. A lot of the migrants he has spoken to have said that they would rather put their faith in the informal trucking sector to get back home. But why won’t they put that same trust in the Indian Railways, which is among the most spread-out rail systems in the world? It’s because despite paying touts a premium and getting their tickets, many of them haven’t actually been able to board a train to get back to their villages. “In a typical situation, there are a few people who would want to take a truck back from Mumbai to, say, Bihar. But now, many are even willing to walk,” Aggarwal points out.
Varun Aggarwal
The solution, he adds, is for the authorities to figure out economic pathways that can lower the cost of migration. To the government’s credit, it has announced a slew of welfare schemes. But how long are we going to wait for these benefits to bear fruit? Aggarwal says, “We can’t have our citizens living without food. Even if they do get rations from the government, they will need fuel to convert the same into food, especially in urban landscapes. People, in fact, are better off in the villages, where the delivery of social systems is better. But that being said, in the medium term, there are also many migrants who will want to return to cities from their villages since jobs are restarting, and employers are paying better wages.”
In other words, we need more effective government intervention instead of relying on citizens carrying out relief work, which is the case at present. But will the authorities deal with the “migrant policy crisis” before the problem is exacerbated? Or will they remain caught on the back foot like they were when the pandemic first unfolded in end-March? Only time will reveal the answer.
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