Tag: Migrant Workers During Lockdown

‘I Sold My Phone To Buy A Rickshaw, Will Pedal To Bihar’

By LokMarg

Having exhausted all options and resources, migrant workers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, who are headed home on foot, share their ordeals

Pramod Kamat: “I lived in Rohini area of Delhi. We I heard that my 30-year-old brother died due to hunger at our village in Madhubani district during this lockdown, we decided to move. We went to the police station, seeking permission to go to our village. Police did not give us any permission. I was heavily beaten up by the police because they do not allow us to go in groups.

“I have purchased rickshaw at the cost of Rs 3,000 after selling my mobile phone. Along with my 65-year-old father and other members of my village, I have decided to pedal to the village. It is a tough journey but we will reach in three to four days. We do not have the money to purchase train tickets.”

Pramod’s father, Ganga Kamat: “I am pained for not being able to see my son for the last time. We were waiting for the lockdown to be lifted. It was extended again and again. We all became jobless. The landlord has asked us to vacate the rooms. We do not have money and food. Police spared me from the beating. However, they have severely beaten up my son and other people, who are going with us.”

ALSO READ: ‘Lockdown Has Turned Me Into A Beggar’

Bablu Kumar: “We had struck a deal for Rs 25,000 with a group of truck drivers to take us from here. We deposited Rs 15, 000 first. But he had cautioned us that he will only take us to as much as distance as the police will allow. At Noida border, police stopped the truck and asked us to come down. Truck drivers did not return the money.”

ALSO READ: ‘It Is Humiliating But I Accept Food For Kids’

Vishwanath: “I was living in Noida. The landlord has asked me to pay the rent or vacate the room. I do not have money as I became jobless after the lockdown. The company I was working with asked me not to come to work during the lockdown period.

“I get to know that the government has started a train for us, but we do not have any money to purchase the train tickets. If I get any job in my village, I will not come here. However, I doubt that I will get any work there in Bihar.”

Javed Ali: “I am a truck driver. I am going to Aligarh. Some of the migrants stuck in Yamuna Expressway are also going in the same direction. I have told them that I would drop them at Tappal. I am not charging any money from them. I am helping them on a humanitarian ground. ANI

Migrant

‘Kids Were Moving With Sacks On Head. I Couldn’t Sleep’

By LokMarg

Ajit Menon, a corporate leader, was moved by the TV footage of migrant families moving on foot post-lockdown. Menon shored up his resources to help the vulnerable workers, who he feels have built the NCR with sweat and toil

After the lockdown was announced, there was little for many of us to do at home except watch news channel for new updates. Most TV channels were showing how families of migrant workers in the National Capital Region had begun a mass exodus on foot to reach their hometowns. Some of these families lived hundreds of kilometers away but they felt reaching home was better than being stranded jobless in NCR.

The visuals of people walking with their children and womenfolk carrying sack-loads on their head were distressing. I couldn’t sleep that night; those pictures haunted me. The faces of the children, particularly, pricked my conscience.

ALSO READ: ‘They Built Our Homes, We Can’t Let Them Starve’

There was no question of sitting home and watch TV from the comfort of a lockdown. First thing the next morning, I drew up a list of my contacts from various work areas.  Over the decades of working in the corporate world, I have made friends with NGOs, social workers, social responsibility professionals and many in the government machinery. So, I began calling up these resources to assess our capabilities and limitations.

As the lockdown had been imposed, we had to find out a way out to help the labourers on the move and do it within the boundaries set by the law. It took some time to work out various logistics which included: 1) areas where most migrants had been stranded; 2) their immediate requirements; 3) procurement of the essentials required for distribution and; 4) finally the distribution and revision of the process.

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So, we identified several areas with high density of stranded migrant workers in Delhi and Greater Noida with the help of various social organisations who were already on the ground.

We then created the survival ration kits. Thus, each of the ration pack would carry 3KG of rice and wheat flour, lentils, potatoes, oil and spices. This packet would be enough for a family of four to survive for a week. We marked all the recipients to ensure that we refill their ration supply right after a week.

We expected the lockdown continue for a long haul and we were proved right when it was extended for the third time from May 4 onward. But we are fully prepared to distribute more ration till the lockdown ends. I can only request people who have enough money to donate dry ration to the needy; it’s time for the privileged to help those who built our houses, roads and everything that we see around us.

ALSO READ: ‘It Is Humiliating But I Accept Food For Kids’

I can rewind that the first influx of migrant labourers came to Delhi-NCR when the city went for a makeover ahead of 1982 Asian Games. Many of these workers came from Eastern UP and Bihar. The flyovers, wide roads, bridges and glass-concrete buildings that we see as pride of NCR have been built by the blood and sweat of these migrant labourers. We owe them a lot more than a few packets of weekly ration. I feel bad that I woke up late to the situation and many families left on foot to their hometowns but I am duty-bound to stop as many as I can from leaving the city now by ensure food and essentials to those whom I can.

Before I finish, I must share that a few among our team of volunteers clicked a photographs of the family which had received the packet of dry ration. When I saw the picture and the look on the face of the family, it brought both tears and joy. That moment will remain engraved on my memory. I felt as if I achieved much bigger than what money and material success can give you.

Food

‘It Is Humiliating, But I Accept Food Donations For Kids’

By LokMarg

Sarvesh Kumar, 29, a factory guard in Greater Noida, wasn’t paid his two-month salary due to the lockdown. He finds living on charity humiliating but has accepted it to feed his family

I never thought I would see such days in my life when I would need donated food to survive. Not long ago, I had registered myself with a private security agency in Greater Noida (Uttar Pradesh). The agency deputed me to a private factory as a guard. My wife and two young children – one is three-year old and another one-year – also settled with me. Then this virus outbreak and the sudden lockdown turned our lives upside down.

When the factory downed shutters, and I saw migrant labourers leaving for their native places, I too planned to back to my native Shahjahanpur in Uttar Pradesh. However, I was yet to receive my salary and other dues from the contractor. Initially, my supervisor kept delaying the payments at one or the other pretext. But when I ran out of even daily ration, and asked him for my money firmly, he told me he doesn’t have the money to pay. Nor could he commute in the lockdown to provide me food items.

ALSO READ: The Invisible Indians In Pandemic

When I told him about my little children going hungry, he became abusive. I know this is a crime to default on an employee’s salary, so I went to the local police chowki to file a written complaint but all in vain. The policemen hounded me out and told me not to come out and stay put wherever I was till the lockdown ended.

It was when I was returning from the police station disheartened, some apartment dwellers spotted me walking in the sun. They asked about my situation and offered some packets of biscuits and water. As I narrated my story, they even arranged some dry ration for my family.

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I never wanted to live on charity but this situation is critical. I don’t have land or farms back home. If I can find work, I am ready to labour for 24 hours to feed my children. It is humiliating when I see my children cry with hunger and I have little to offer.

Security guards of nearby industries often help me with food and milk. I don’t want it for free as it makes me feel like a beggar. Yet, I am accepting all such donations because of my children. I don’t know for how long I will survive like this. I want to work and earn money. 

ALSO READ: ‘Lockdown Has Made Me A Beggar’

When the lockdown was imposed, I never thought such a situation would arise. I am grateful to the people who are helping me but I want to request the government to help people like me feed their children. I want this lockdown to end soon. I am worried about my children. If this continues, people like me will be forced to go out on streets in search of food.

Labourers

‘They Built Our Homes. How Can We Let Them Starve?’

By LokMarg

Ujjwal Mishra, a resident of Crossings Republic in Ghaziabad, UP, sought donations to feed the labourers lest they leave on foot during lockdown

I was sitting in my apartment at Crossings Republic (in Ghaziabad-NCR) and browsing through social media when I saw a Facebook post by one of my friends. This post mentioned a poor labourer family stuck with no ration and money, and a toddler to feed. I was moved by the simple words used in the post.

I asked myself how I let myself sit at home and cool my heels in the lockdown while hundreds of construction labourers living nearby go to sleep hungry. Worse, they could be forced to walk hundreds of kilometres to their hometowns, as was splashed in the media.

ALSO READ: ‘Lockdown Has Turned Me Into A Beggar’

I began a local campaign and requested nearby apartments to donate dry ration. I used my SUV to collect these donations and stashed them in the boot. Next, with the help of some friends, I unpacked the donations and made smaller packets of rice, lentils, oil, salt, potatoes and other edibles. Then, I contacted local police to help me with transport and distribute the ration to the needy.

Police were helpful. They identified the areas where labourers needed help. Social media friends from far and wide too showed interest. I gave them the contact number of a local ration store from where they could place online orders and donate. Soon, my staircase, where I stored the donated ration, was full of stock. I worked late each day as there were too many families to feed.

ALSO READ: The Invisible Indians In Pandemics

As the news spread, both needy and the donors started calling me. Once, I received a call from a friend who told me that there were eight families who hadn’t eaten a meal since last two days. I rushed with ration packets, as well as some cooked food, in the night and reached them. 

I realised that weekly dry ration works better for the needy to survive than cooked food. I kept a list of the places where ration was distributed as the packets would last for a week. I would re-distribute ration in the same areas, to the same labourers in order to refill their supplies. I made a promise to them that I would not let them leave for their hometowns in the lockdown.

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Sadly, the builders have abandoned their labourers largely. These families don’t have much demands; all they need is essentials to survive the lockdown. I will request the government to allow people to work on this model– distribution and refill of ration– to stop the labourers from coming out on the streets or try to walk back home.

These are the ones who built our houses, roads, markets and all the concrete jungle we see today. We shall not let them and their children sleep hungry in such times of crisis.

The Invisible Indians In Pandemics

By Amit Sengupta

Classical literature and cinema are full of stories about stoic and steadfast human struggles against poverty, homelessness, displacement and hunger; as much as the ritualistic tragedy, and the inevitable defeat of humanity and humanism. So how does the life unfold as cinema and literature, tragic as it is, in the time of lockdown and pandemic?

You may read Munshi Premchand’s Sadgati, among others. You may read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Poor People. Or else, you can simply watch three classics in black & white of our turbulent times: Do Bigha Zameen by Bimal Roy, about a landless farmer’s ordeal in Calcutta; Bicycle Thieves by Vittorio de Sica in war-torn Rome; and, of course, Pather Panchali by Satyajit Ray and written by Bibhutibhushan Bondopadhyay. In the last shot of Ray’s first film, abject poverty forces a poor Brahmin family into exile; their migration begins on a bullock cart, even as a snake slithers into their abandoned ‘home’.

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For those who might find ‘this kind of cinema’ unpalatable and unnerving,  there is Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin, set up in the backdrop of the Great Depression in Europe, where hunger, homelessness and poverty stalked the continent, even as the seeds were being sown for the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy. And, while, you might laugh, and roll down with amusement, you might actually observe that the underlying theme is really not so comic! Not only does this film anticipate the ‘big brother is watching’ and Doublespeak syndrome, the Surveillance State and the ruthless capitalist machine in another epical classic penned by George Orwell – ‘1984’, it actually graphically depicts the mass unemployment stalking thousands of workers and the sheer brutality of the mechanical machine.

In one interesting scene, a bumbling Chaplin, as usual enjoying himself thoroughly, is being chased by a bunch of utterly bumbling cops. So he falls into a gutter. As he emerges from the gutter he finds himself at the vanguard of a worker’s march on the streets. He quickly picks up a red flag and starts marching right in front – as if he is the leader. In fact, he too is a jobless worker, a citizen in exile, a condemned nobody, in a general realm of utter despair.

ALSO READ: ‘Lockdown Has Turned Me Into A Beggar’

Cut to the present scenario in urban India.

In a dark irony, the real life parallel cinema has gone ‘viral’ at several crossroads in present times, even during the emptiness and helplessness of the lockdown. It’s mostly about poverty, hunger, homelessness and migration. And it stalks about 40 crore unorganized workers in the vast, sprawling and unaccountable informal sector of India, employing as many as 93 per cent of the workforce, who are virtually invisible and ghettoized, practically without any fundamental or trade union rights, no health insurance, no maternity leave, no provident fund, just about nothing. Half of them are women, and a majority of them are Dalits and most backward classes/castes. They are basically outside the market, except as ‘free labour’, and Indian citizens outside the directive principles of the Indian Constitution.

Tens of thousands of them started marching soon after the Prime Minister’s second 8 pm monologue, with just about three hours given as time in the thick of night to restore normalcy in life and to organize and plan ahead. Most of them had no option since they were thrown out of their homes and jobs, and their day-to-day life of basic, minimum subsistence outside all social security schemes or a future.

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So, while swanky cars zipped past them, and people watched this Reality TV from high-rise balconies on expressways, the poor started walking to unknown destinations from where had migrated to look for work, many of them barefoot, children in tow, often sharing the burden. It was the long march, from here to eternity, under a scorching sun; hungry and thirsty women, mothers, children, walking along.

The Prime Minister’s unplanned and rather insensitive lockdown anouncement had failed for the whole world to see. The virus was all over the place, in human exodus and exile, in mass migration, in the sheer mass tragedy unfolding on the streets and highways.

A girl posted on social media that she stopped her car and asked a family moving on foot if they needed anything: biscuits, water? A young couple with two little ones. The woman is holding a sack on her head with her belongings – the sack has a name – ‘Santushti’. The man is holding a larger sack on his head – it too has a name, ‘Good Times’ or acche din. The woman smiled with gratitude, and said, “Nahi didi, hamare paas abhi toh hain. Aap kisi aur ko de dena…” (No sister, we have food as of now. You give it to someone else.)

Hundreds of workers who were not allowed to march, found shelter on the banks of a dirty Yamuna in the capital of India in recent times, not far from the citadels of power, under a concrete flyover.  Most of them have not got even one meal a day; and they have no work, no money, nowhere to go. They are trapped, even as NGOs, students, good citizens try to reach out. There are innumerable and scattered stories about the fate of these invisible men and women across the cities in India, especially around industrial zones and townships.

In Surat, there have been repeated and angry pitched battles of the workers with the cops. This is the textile hub of India, apart from its famous diamond industry. Surat is in crisis anyway since demonitisation and GST, with its small scale industry in a black hole. And they were/are all die-hard Modi supporters.

In Bombay, hundreds of workers came out, without any bag or luggage, at Bandra railway station, saying that they just want to go home, that life here is just not livable, that there is no hope left now. Thankfully, the cops did not beat them up, though FIRs have been lodged against scores, including a ‘trade union’ leader who gave a call to the workers to hit the streets near the Bandra railway station. Indeed, not to miss another diabolical and sinister chance, the usual ‘Hindutva’ TV channels quickly found a reason to give it a communal dimension, just because there was a masjid close by. They did not even bother to check if the masjid was actually providing food to the workers.

A reporter with a TV channel too has been arrested for giving the fake news that special trains will take the jobless workers to their native places. Indeed, with the kind of fake news circulating all over, like an epidemic of sorts, especially by the same TV channels compulsively, obsessively and without an iota or concern for media ethics, it is anybody’s guess why they are not being hauled up.

Surely, there are stories within stories. It’s a Do Bigha Zameen for the unwashed masses, yet again. Surely, in this Pather Panchali, the Song of the Road, there is neither melody, nor joy.

‘I Want To Go Back Home, Uncertainty Here Is Killing’

By LokMarg

Rameshwar Sahu, 29, lives in a tin shed with his wife Janki and one-and-half-year old child. A daily wage mason, Sahu is jobless since the Coronavirus lockdown was announced. Sahu seniors often go to bed hungry in order to feed the infant properly.

I belong to Bilaspur (Chhattisgarh) and want to go back home as soon as possible. But I am stuck here (Greater Noida) with my wife and our one and half year old child. It had only been six months since I got the job to work as a mason at a construction site here.

For the last three months, my wife and I were able to work consistently for 25 days a month. Together, we earned around ₹800 each day. We thought that we will work hard and save enough money for our child but our lives and dreams came crashing down with this virus outbreak.

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When the lockdown was announced, I wanted to rush home like many others. So I went to my contractor the next morning but he said he had only ₹1,000 to spare for me and advised me to buy ration by that money. Going home, which is too far, with merely ₹ 1000 in hand was not a good idea. Especially when we have a young child.

My family is completely dependent on local residents and police to provide us food. There are many like us who are stranded and queue up before community kitchen every day. Life of a daily wager is tough. Seemingly, we can earn `20,000 a month, but that is not a fixed income. We earn money for days we work. If the work is stopped for a day, there is no earning. Payments are often delayed.

ALSO READ: ‘Lockdown Has Turned Me Into A Beggar’

I am thankful to some groups of local residents who are helping us with raw and cooked food. But in the initial days, nobody was there to help and we faced hard time. We don’t know for how long this will go on and when we will resume our normal lives.

The uncertainty is killing. There are thousands who live in the shanties waiting either to restart their job or go home. The only thing that stops them from going home is donations from some local residents who always refill the ration after a week.

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People often ask why these labourers are going home. If they are so poor, what will they eat there? They don’t understand that we live in a close-knit society in villages. We have our own houses, small piece of land on which we grow vegetables. There is family and extended family members to help. But here, we live in cramped houses, with no food security and without any money. Without help from local apartment dwellers, we could not have even survived thus far.

Lockdown

‘I Wish To Work But Lockdown Has Made Me A Beggar’

By LokMarg

Mehtab Ali, 34, a construction worker, lives in a makeshift shanty of Greater Noida West. Jobless after the lockdown, Ali is forced to live on charity

I came to Greater Noida five years back with my wife and two children in search of better livelihood. Life was not easy in West Bengal. We migrated to Greater Noida with the help of a local contractor, who provided construction labour to several builders.

My only dream is to send both of my children to school and give them a respectable life. I don’t want them to become a labourer like me. Both my wife and I worked in the construction projects here towards that goal.

But as the market (real estate sector) dwindled, so did our income. Sometimes, projects were abandoned due to various reasons. We had little savings but were somehow making two ends when this lockdown was announced.

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In less than ten days, we had run out of ration and our savings. Many of our fellow workers had left on foot but we cannot imagine reaching our native place with two young children.

Now we are totally dependent on the doles from the well-meaning residents in nearby apartment, police and the government which are providing basic supplies to the poor who have stayed put.

We don’t want anything for free; we want to work and earn money; after all that is why we came here all the way from our hometown in West Bengal. There’s nothing more heartbreaking than watching our children go to sleep hungry.

There are some community kitchens providing food packets here but they don’t give more than one packet to one person. A family of four cannot survive in such a small quantity of food. We need ration and fuel to cook. That is all we need as of now.

ALSO READ: Stay At Home, Work From Home, Cook At Home

We don’t know what the future has in store for us. Will the contractors and builders give our jobs back after the lockdown? For how long will this lockdown will continue? The builders are rich people. We are the ones who built their projects with hard labour but in these difficult times they have abandoned us.

If we continue to live like this, we will be termed nothing more than beggars. We are labourers but we have self esteem. We don’t want free food. The government must think about people like us. There are thousands like me who are left with nothing after they become jobless in one stroke.

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When the strict lockdown was imposed, the police initially hounded some local residents who were trying to distribute ration. If the locals don’t help us fearing the cops, then who will? The situation is critical for us. We didn’t go home after the lockdown like thousands of daily wagers as we have small kids and our home is too far to be walked on foot. But if we are forced to live like this, we will have no other option than walking back home with our kids.

Who’s Afraid Of Lifting The Lockdown?

By Amit Sengupta

Is India ready for a withdrawal of the 21-day lockdown, perhaps a partial and phased out lockdown? Will the experts tell the politicians to go ahead with a withdrawal, or, will they ask them to continue the status quo because it is the safest comfort zone? Or, will the politicians call the shots finally?

Low on confidence, will Prime Minister Narendra Modi, high on hyperbolic monologue and populist, unscientific declarations, move one step forward and two back? Universally decried after the catastrophic botch-up of the nation-wide lockdown without an iota of preparation and taking all and sundry by surprise, besides compelling tens of thousands of poor, hungry, thirsty workers, their mothers and wives, and little children on unending highways, pushing the pandemic into the twilight zones of the hitherto untouched rural areas of the Hindi heartland, the prime minister, certainly, just can’t make another gigantic mistake.

Will the partial withdrawal be determined by factors of health, and social and psychological well-being, in India’s vast landscape, with no uniform human development index indicator? Or, will it be compelled because of the doddering economy and a massive crisis staring at its face, as warned by top economists, world economic bodies and the international media, including Raghuram Rajan, Nobel Prize winner Abhijit Bannerjee, Jean Dreze among others?

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As of now, barring the role model state of Kerala at the far-end of the map, which has mapped out its withdrawal from the lockdown in four phases already, and where the pandemic is actually flattening out (apart from Maharashtra, because of efficient testing and health care, and, ironically and, reportedly, in Uttar Pradesh, due to abysmal and transparent lack of testing and health facilities), a large chunk of the so-called ‘Bimaru states’ want to stick to the ‘comfort zone’ of prolonged lockdown and enforced curfew, because they really have nothing to show.

With allegations of data being controlled and fudged, as in the past, the BJP governments at the Centre and in states, do not really have a great answer sheet to prove their credibility in terms of prevention, control, care and future projections. Even in Pakistan and Bangladesh, there is more testing happening compared to India.

Indeed, Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan, unlike the prime minister who has not done a single press conference till date, is frank and candid with his regular briefings with the media, giving meticulous details about the health conditions of patients, the numbers inside quarantine, the success rates, the condition of migrants, the problems to be tackled and how the collective civil society with the government is trying to overcome them in the state in a decentralized manner.

Sources on the ground in Kerala, as in Bengal and Maharashtra, are confident that the lockdown will be lifted partially in the days to come. Only those states like UP, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Telengana and Bihar, whose report cards are not really shining, are reportedly pushing the envelope for the lockdown to continue. It is like when democracy is dumped in the garbage can, there is no option but to ‘indulge’ in a military clampdown and communication lockdown, as in Kashmir after August 5, 2019.

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There are several reasons why the lockdown should be partially lifted, as argued by top, well-meaning economists, and as whispered softly in the corridors of power and big business.

The harvesting season begins during the ‘auspicious’ season of April and goes on till July. With agricultural grown in dire straits, and almost static at 1 per cent plus, there is no option but to ease the lockdown in rural India. Indeed, there are two immediate and long-term problems stalking the agriculture scenario: huge buffer stocks of foodgrain which are still to be distributed, and the reverse migration of agricultural/landless workers back to their economically stagnant village landscapes.

For instance, where will states like Punjab and Haryana find the workers in the harvesting season with most of them having fled to the safety of their village homes in the face of the lockdown with stark economic and social insecurity stalking them in their destined places of migrations? Besides, according to Dreze, the foodgrain stocks might increase beyond a huge 80 million tonnes – with mass hunger and unemployment as a simultaneous and ironical factor among millions below the poverty line.

The urban economy has all but tanked. It’s a fact, and this was a process underway much before the pandemic. The construction and real estate industry is as starkly pessimistic as the empty high rise buildings on the Noida Expressway, and big industrial projects, still incomplete or languishing. This industry also employs the bulk of construction workers. The other big industries like Information Technology and manufacturing are not looking too good either. Unconfirmed statistics point out that the tragic scenario of joblessness, highest in the last 45 years, might have increased manifold post-lockdown, and this includes the urban educated youth.

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Demonetisation and GST has already broken the backbone of the small-scale industries, small business enterprises and trade. With civil aviation, railways and transport suspended indefinitely, India just does not have the mechanism to go for an extra push to its doddering economy, despite the optimism and vision displayed by the likes of Raghuram Rajan. Can the prime minister, his finance minister with no big feather in her cap, and his cabinet ministers push the card to its optimum best in the given circumstances?

This is a question that is stalking the central government currently. Several high powered cabinet meetings chaired by Defense Minister Rajnath Singh have reportedly been looking at possible and plausible options. For the first time, perhaps, state chief ministers have been consulted – who, truly, have been fighting it out on the ground with little or no help from the Centre.  Every day they are beseeching the Centre for more aid, PPEs, ventilators, insurance for health workers, basic health infrastructure and direct support. Surely, the central government is now reaching out to the states, with central funds, and pro-active measure. Another big financial package is reportedly on the cards.

The prime minister has cut a bad record and he has no option but to go for a national consensus with the chief ministers, and thereby try to learn a few lessons from Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Bengal and Kerala in terms of anticipation of a global crisis, the dynamic art of crisis management and practical and long-term solutions.

Clearly, there are suggestions to open certain sectors, with partial employment, keeping physical distancing and health precautions intact. This can very well happen in key public and private sectors like civil aviation, certain crucial industries like iron, steel, oil, IT, construction and coal, and find a balanced synthesis between work-from-home and actual professional activity at work stations. Also, there are suggestions to open the discourse to the professionals themselves – those who are willing to join the work stations should be allowed to do so with adequate precautions, health and life insurance, and safe mobility.

However, the harvesting season and the huge buffer stocks remain a cause of concern. Why the government should still continue to hesitate to push for free distribution of foodgrain among the vast masses remains a dark mystery. Indeed, if the farming community goes into a crises, this will be yet another epidemic of sorts, for an economy so dependent on agriculture.

In that sense, there seems logic in the rational argument that the lockdown should be lifted partially and in safe areas, away from the so-called ‘hotspots’, which are around 250 districts in the entire country, with high or low grades of the  disease spreading. Around 400 plus districts in India are still presumed to be safe.

With the pandemic flattening gradually, creative, brave and imaginative solutions are required. China has opened its transport and public spaces with caveats in Wuhan, the epicenter of the pandemic. So, will India move forward, or continue to stay in the comfort zone of an eternal lockdown?

Stay At Home

‘Stay At Home, Work From Home, Cook At Home’

By LokMarg

Lokmarg speaks to a vegetable vendor, a housewife, a security guard and a house help about how they are surviving during the Coronavirus lockdown across the country

Vipin, 32, a vegetable seller in Indirapuram, Uttar Pradesh

In the beginning, when the lockdown was announced, there was complete confusion and we didn’t know what was going to happen; if we would be able to get vegetables from the mandis. Thankfully, matters settled down in a matter of days. With the help of information from valid sources I came to know that we could resume essential work if we ensured social distancing. So many of us vegetable vendors in the area coordinated over phone and appointed different people for different tasks. Thus, only one person would go to the mandi. He would take bath on return and only then would we take vegetables from him. Different vendors sat near /inside the gates of various housing societies in the area so that people didn’t have to walk far. I am happy to say that people are dutifully maintaining social distancing while buying vegetables.

Our vegetable sales have increased because many people are now staying at home, working from home and cooking at home. I hope people become kinder and nicer to each other after Coronavirus. My family too stayed put and I didn’t send them back to my village because I don’t want to take chances with their health.

Raju Paliwal, 64, a housewife

While on one hand, I am happy at the peace and calm around us during this lockdown, on the other I find it difficult to spend my time at home all the time. I live with my son, and even though he helps me a lot with household chores, I don’t like to tax him since he is working from home. The sudden increase in household work at my age is a bit overwhelming. I cannot go to the temple, nor meet my daughter and her family even though they live in the same housing society. I do not belong to a tech-savvy generation, so catching up with friends also isn’t easy. To kill time and also stay active, I massage my legs multiple times a day. This helps in the absence of my daily walks. We have stocked up pretty well. I wish and pray this lockdown gets over soon and we can resume normal life and once again get to interact with one another, without being afraid of getting affected by a deadly disease.

Kundan, 32, a security guard

Our workload has increased a lot post-coronavirus, since we have to keep a hawk’s eye on who is entering or exiting the gated colony where we work. We let in people only after a thorough check and we have to keep the basic travel-related information of residents if they have returned from foreign travel. I live nearby, so commuting to work is not difficult. I have stocked up my kitchen well and will survive the lockdown period easily with my family. However, if the lockdown period gets extended, I don’t know what will happen. We haven’t been paid our salaries yet, but I am hoping we will get it by soon.

Many of the society residents have been proactive in taking care of us. They keep us supplied with food, chai, water, sanitizer, hand wash etc. Plus, they check on us to boost our morale as well since we are the frontline workers in preventing this disease from spreading. I am happy people listen to us when we remind them about staying at home and maintaining social distancing. I hope we find a cure to coronavirus as soon as possible.

Rukhsar, 22, a house help

I belong to Bihar but work in Ghaziabad (Uttar Pradesh) as a housemaid. After the government announced the lockdown, most of my fellow villagers, who used to earn their livelihoods in this locality, panicked and rushed home. I told them what my employers had taught me: take precautions and maintain social distancing. It was painful to see my friends and fellow villagers ready to walk on foot for hundreds of miles because of fear. Now the street where I live is a desolate place. My daughter lives in Bihar with her grandmother and the uncertainty of not being able to see my daughter is a difficult emotion to express. Most of the households where I work have given me full payment for this month, but there are doubts about what will happen next month. The loneliness and a feeling of being trapped in one’s home is telling. I hope coronavirus goes and never comes back.

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