The ongoing migrant crisis in major cities has made apparent some fractures that otherwise would’ve persisted in social oblivion and this crisis will debilitate if the lockdown is extended.
First and foremost the lockdown has been an utter policy failure- much like other major policies of the government. The only difference this time the state governments also joined hands with the Centre to support the rash decision making. While a lockdown was imperative, there should have been contingency planning and anticipation of such a situation. And it’s not even that the policymakers are unaware of its magnitude and feature. The 2017 economic survey has an entire chapter on internal migration in India, employs state of the art methods to estimate an internal migration of 9 million people annually. But only if one were to look.
The lapse on the part of state and central governments in foreseeing this merely reflects how disconnected they are from the reality of India we live in and how these surveys and reports are just mere theories without serving any practical purpose. At this time, I am reading posts from people who are trying to absolve the governments saying such a crisis could not have been foreseen. My only question is how not? Are the policymakers unaware of the sheer numbers of the urban poor migrants living at the bottom of huge cities or have their aspirational visions for the country conveniently excluded them? Aren’t there enough experts at the top to take advice from, or are all of them living in a make-believe world? One must also acknowledge that we got a fair buffer time to prepare given the virus onslaught in our country was fairly delayed. There was ample time to prepare, to observe what other countries are doing and what shortcomings are occurring.
Most importantly, it is clear that the migrants thronging en masse to return to their native villages don’t realise the grave danger they are becoming a part of. Yes of course they aren’t. But that their lack of awareness is not idiosyncratic to their genes, it is very much owed to the decades of policy failure that have held them entrapped in ineducation and irrationality. While to most of us in this time the trade-off between life and livelihood is clear, to them it is clearly not.
It is also a hard lesson for all of us, the relatively more privileged. The widening social and economic inequality becomes a zero sum game in difficult times like these, we must realise. The virus doesn’t discriminate between a rich or a poor carrier, it is amply clear that it can create its own level playing field. Thus we must know and understand that a government’s job is not only to deliver superior economic growth and ethnic propagandas, it is of utmost importance that it delivers equity in development outcomes.
