Beyond Charts, Graphs and Models
A Migration Story
Imagine that you are Mohin, a man from an obscure village in Begusarai district in Bihar. In a small house, you live with your parents, five brothers and three sisters. Three of your brothers are married with children. Your sisters are not married yet but they have to be. You need money for it. Your father owns a very small amount of land like many other families in your village. It’s enough to generate some food for your family in a good season. The land is too small and no surplus crop is generated for you to sell in the market. The land is so small that all five brothers and your father working together is not needed. Three people working on that land is producing the same amount of crop as six people working on it. You got married recently. Your family is growing and you have to feed them.You have never gone to school. You survive on agriculture but you are not really a farmer. So you decide to look for bigger farms to work in.
In a good year, you are a farm worker for someone who owns a large amount of land. You don’t have any fixed income. You are called for work during the harvest season. Tractors do the ploughing and sowing. Scarecrows don’t scare the tiny pests which plague the crops, so sometimes you are called to spray a liquid with a machine on the fields for a little amount of money. If the crops are good, your landlord pays you cash. If there’s famine, premature monsoon, hailstorms, locusts or pests, you don’t get paid at all. Your father’s field too bears the brunt of crop failure. So you neither get enough food nor money and your survival beyond that month is at stake. You took great loans from the big farmer who is also a moneylender for a new crop in your field and it failed. You have to pay back your debts with interest. You won’t have money to feed even just yourself by the end of this month. If someone gets sick, getting treatment is out of question. The nearest hospital is 15 kilometres from your village.
You realise that you have to find some other work to sustain your growing family. You have heard of a distant cousin who moved out to settle in the big city, Delhi. He sends money home. His children go to a government school. He recently got a TV and fridge in his house. So you start your journey from Begusarai, Bihar to New Delhi. You take loans to make the journey.
You come to the city and stay at your cousin’s place initially and start looking for work. For the first time you see so many people huddled up in one room. There is no running water in summers. Electricity connection comes from the factory nearby. There are no fields anywhere. There are wide roads and huge buildings which hide your residence from the passers by. The Delhi metro swooshes past them on tall bridges. Your wife gets bedazzled every time she sees one pass over the nearby main road. There are hundreds of cars, bikes, scooters, orange and green buses which spill over, red buses which no one seems to take. Everyone is busy, everyone is moving. You notice yellow-green autos ferrying very busy people to different places from the metro station. Your cousin drives one of them. You ask him for a favour. You ask him to help you get an auto to drive. You have no money to buy one, so you are lent one by the local union leader. You pay some local constables, you learn to drive the auto late at night when your brother returns. You start working as an auto driver from wee hours in the morning till late at night. You build a tent in a slum by paying rent to a local leader inside. You have to start paying off your loans. You realise that the income is not going to be enough. So you let your wife secure a job as a maid in the nearby colony where rich people live. She goes off early in the morning with other women in your neighbourhood to work. She comes back in the evening.
As life progresses, you realise that you cannot make a wrong turn while driving an auto or the passenger might get angry and insult you in the middle of the road. The passers by won’t help you. If the passenger calls the cops and complains that you harassed or abused them, you could be arrested and beaten up, even if you did not. Back in the village, a mob beat up and killed your distant cousin because he took water from a well that was not meant for him. Here, your wife asked for water at her workplace one day and was handed it over in a separate glass which she was asked to wash and keep below the kitchen sink.
Some years later, you are still paying off your loans, you stay in a brick house with a tin roof in a slum on rent. You recently sent your two children to a government school and your third child is a toddler. Your younger brother from the village has come to stay with you, with his wife and children to look for work in the city.
You recently heard that a new disease is spreading rapidly. People who use planes to go from one place to another are carrying it. People you drive from the metro to the shopping mall nearby. People in whose homes your wife works. It looks like a flu but it killed the elderly lady in whose house your neighbour’s wife used to work. Some people in his family have fever now. Some masked men in white uniforms came to take them away somewhere. Your wife was asked not to come to work a week ago. Her salary wasn’t paid by most of the houses she worked in. The children have stopped going to school. Two days ago, they filled up the city with the sound of banging utensils, cheering and clapping from their balconies…. You wonder if they have started rationing food at home too…
On the neighbour’s TV you see the PM announce a lockdown. Everything will be closed from today. All public transport will stop running from midnight. All offices will be shut. All trains will be stopped on their tracks. Your income is gone. The disease is probably spreading in your neighbourhood.
You are filled with fear. Fear of being separated from your family. Fear of being taken away by strange men into unknown places. Fear that now that you don’t have work, you will run out of money to feed your family.
Someone said, they would show Ramayan on TV from tomorrow. Like Ram, you and your family pack up all your belongings and begin to walk back home through the eerily deserted main road.. there are thousands of others walking with you.…
Social scientists have called you landless labourers in the village, and urban poor in the city. People on TV call you migrant workers. Some people are distributing food and water as you move. If you are lucky, you will run into them before they run out of supplies. People are out with their cameras. They are clicking photos as you walk. A masked lady holds a mike attached to a rod from a distance. She asks you, ‘Why are you walking? Why don’t you want to stay? How will you reach? How do you feel?’ You can’t speak much. As you walk in the scorching sun with a toddler on your back, you wonder whether starving it out in the village would have been a better road to take than this…
Economists, sociologists, policy analysts, geographers, engineers, natural scientists— actually, nearly all academia engages itself with the study of the thousands of people who have a similar story as Mohin.
There are hundreds of academic findings which have shown that agrarian distress is directly linked to rural-urban migration. The findings also state that caste atrocities, informal money-lending, small land holdings, underemployment and crop failure due to climate change, environmental degradation and unforeseeable natural disasters cause agrarian distress. There are people like Mohin on one hand, and then there are also people who commit suicide because of the sheer stress of being trapped. The cities are no better. Urban middle and elite classes want to avail services of maids, auto-drivers, vegetable vendors, rickshaw pullers, security guards and more. All unorganized, informal employment. The city would further exploit these people by denying them access to basic services like running water, electricity, education and healthcare, treating them as the filth that pollutes it (while rich industries keep dumping waste into the rivers and lakes).
Academic studies which highlight these issues and also give solutions, are largely ignored by those in power for various reasons. These issues are raised only when its politically advantageous to raise them. They die down once election is over.
In one of the world’s largest democracies, in the middle of the most stringent lockdown, this population that we call migrant workers, was treated as an afterthought. May this be a wake up call for administrators heavily interested and invested in projections and estimations. Mohin is a fictional name. But his story is what data looks like when you open your eyes to a world beyond just the numbers…
