Livelihood and dignity of labour

 

This very emotive work, my favourite, was painted by P. Sampath Kumar during one of the four art camps organized at the Bangalore City station. He called it “Between the arrival and the departure”

It has been two months since the lockdown was enforced in India. A lot has been debated about the timing and extent of the restrictions. Various assessments abound of the economic cost the nation has paid and is going to pay. It perhaps still is early days to start putting numbers to the damages. In any case, I am no expert in these matters. I do feel that the lockdown was necessary and even timely. 

At the same time, I also maintain that the governments, all of them, whether central of state, failed to anticipate the issue of migrant labourers. It was the job of the governments to envisage the aftermath for they have all the means, machinery, information and the mandate to do so. The detractors of the government say that the central government has been absolutely callous about the livelihood and dignity of the migrant worker and that the state governments were saddled with all the responsibility; the financial purse strings were with the centre with very few tax resources left with the states. On the other hand, it is also true that the response of state governments has been very confusing. Did they want the workers to leave their states? Or did they want them to stay put? Were they willing to make arrangements for their meals and well-being? I would go even as far to say that the governments have still not realized the damage done to both livelihood and dignity of poor labourers even as the political slugfest continues.

While these debates rage, there is no denying that an unprecedented humanitarian crisis has been unfolding. Lakhs of poor workers walk and cycle on highways over unfathomable distances to reach home. Unscrupulous operators of trucks, trailers, containers and even tankers charge these hapless people a fat tariff merely for transporting them, standing or sitting huddled, at times with their families, among cargo. Figures vary but nearly 300 people have died in accidents, of exhaustion and other causes linked with this exodus.

In the initial weeks of the lockdown itself, food and money started running out for the migrant workers with hardly any succour from the respective governments. Directives were issued to employers to pay full wages and salaries during the lockdown but the reality is that a majority of the businesses hardly had the cash chest to do this with their revenues reduced to nothing. In any case, this relief would not be of any help to those who eke out a living in unorganized sectors. The food ration was doubled but unfortunately most of these workers were not enrolled in the PDS at the place of their work; the restriction has now been removed but it is already too late. Thirty five days into the lockdown, the government did what it should have done in the beginning itself; it announced that it would run special Shramik trains to allow migrant workers to travel home. What followed was utter commotion with befuddlement galore between Indian Railways (IR)  and state governments. Instead of simply running trains at the rate of a possible thousand a day, the issue was unnecessarily complicated with different narratives emanating from origin and destination states, sham medical certification, officious online registration, a daunting interface with police at both the ends and worse of all, devising a doomed system to charge fare from them. I have said earlier that even if railways transported a crore of workers, the recoverable charges would be in the range of mere Rs 500 crores. Chicken feed compared to the price we would pay due to the mayhem. At the same time, middle class Indians are being afforded air-conditioned travel after simply buying a ticket online. Subjecting the migrant labourers to all these appurtenances even as many of them were on the verge of serious level of hunger, it was nothing short of rubbing salt into their wounds.

Let us not be fooled by the empty roads in our cities as the highways are full of desperate migrants retreating or returning towards their villages. There is complete pandemonium even as they move on, uncertain about what they would encounter on the way and in their home states; they are stopped and herded by a domineering police force which deals with the matter with utter insensitivity. There are notable exceptions of positive and empathetic action by governments and Good Samaritans but by and large, the picture is one of utter despondence.

I am absolutely disinclined towards the communists, and by analogy the so-called leftists, as they represent a failed system but I am compelled to use these lines of poet Faiz on behalf of these ill-fated migrants; when will their pain be noted with empathy and  respect by the powers that be:

Shayad   kabhi  afshan   ho   nigahon  pe tumahri 

har sada varaq jo sukhan-e-kusht se khoon hai

Shayad kabhi us dil ki koi rag tumhen chubh jaaye

jo    sang-e-sar-e-rah   ki   manind    zuboon  hai

(Your eyes will perhaps see someday these blank pages which are bloodied with these moribund voices or maybe a day would come when the veins from the heart of those who are trampled like stones on the thoroughfare will incise your heart)

I recommend that we read Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi. He says that they were not fleeing the pandemic; they were fleeing us. They took one long, clear, searing look at us, identified us as the industrial strength ingratiates that we were, packed their bags and left.

https://www.dailyo.in/variety/coronavirus-pandemic-migrant-labourers-india-aurangabad-train-accident-lockdown/story/1/32884.html

The problem starts in how we categorize these workers as migrants fleeing to their villages. Are they migrants at all? Many built some kind of a home in the state they work in but they leave today as the city in particular and country as a whole has disowned them. As poet Syed Mehr says,

Dushman na yoon ho dost ne jis tarah se hamen 

ba-halat-e-tabah          gharib-ul-watan  kiya 

Ai Mehr ham ko charkh ne gardish se roz-o-shab 

manind-e-mehr-o-mah gharib-ul-watan kiya

(Our friends have so ruined and destroyed us, making us foreigners as no foe would do unto us, our misfortune that we are reduced to be wanderers like sun and moon, day and night.)

or many newspaper reports, a sample being this from the ToI: 

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/no-nod-from-karnataka-govt-1500-stranded-migrants-battle-hunger-and-thirst-in-mumbai/articleshow/75566376.cms

The country faces a grim situation of economic meltdown and hardship for a majority of citizens. There are no easy answers. In this economic revival jigsaw, what has got focused is the ‘medium and long term’; making Indian economy resilient and competitive. That is good news. But the important missing piece is  the ‘short term’. Numerous do not have jobs, so many have lost their small businesses and lakhs are on the verge of hunger. A direct transfer to the bottom of the pyramid, say about 15 crore of the populace, is a must although an initial payment of Rs 2,000 to about 8 crore underprivileged has been done. It is good to stipulate that people would work and earn but will they survive? The discussion on the economic package and stimulus is an engaging one with multiple standpoints but what I wished to talk about today was empathy and dignity of labour. I will underscore that alone today and now relate a small story from Bangalore division of South Western Railway which may ring a bell. 

This is about the porters at railway stations whom the British taught us to call coolies. A much-maligned lot whom the Indian middle class likes to decry as ill-behaved vermin. We haggle with them for a handful of coins but absolutely fail to notice the ‘beast of burden’ walking next to us on railway platform. We feel vindicated when we bring down the tariff by ten rupees but the condition in which our precious luggage is carried does not touch any cord. As porters bargain to have three instead of two of them carry your heavy baggage, we come apart at seams but do not squirm when we see three tier of bags riding on a human neck which is bending at break-point.

Typical scenes of manual porterage at railway stations

The issue always bothered me but not because of any empathy for the porters. I thought that they presented an ugly sight and something needed to be done to give our stations a more modern look. I found the Divisional Railway Manager (DRM) at Secunderabad division, where I was posted as Additional  DRM, amenable to do something about it. We purchased ten expensive airport style carts and placed them at platform no. 10 of Secunderabad station. The idea was that passengers would use them free of charge just as at the Indian airports. The porters saw to it that the carts were destroyed within days as they saw it as an attack on their livelihood. We gave up the idea and that was not that. I resolved to address the issue when I got an opportunity as a DRM.

Four years later I got the chance when I found myself as the DRM of Bangalore division with four major passenger stations in the city itself, Bangalore City, Bangalore Cantt, Yeshwantpur and Krishnarajpuram. This time I knew that, 1) half-hearted partial measures would not work and we had to provide a large number of carts at a station to obviate any head loading 2) we had to build up and improve the infrastructure for movement of carts like smooth passages and working lifts for moving from one platform to another through the subway 3) it could be done only with the support of the porters and certainly not in the face of opposition from them and 4) it was more important to uphold the dignity of labour of these poor porters and neither to pander to the convenience of nor  gratification for the miserliness of the travelling middle-class.

Arranging carts, more than 300 of them for four stations, meant an expenditure of Rs 50 lakhs. It  was not easy as railways had no fund for this. I used my goodwill with corporate sector to arrange as many a possible through their CSR; while there was no provision for Indian railways to accept CSR spending at that time, I could do it as this was for the upliftment of the porters, not well-paid railway employees. Later some banks came forward and donated carts. As for the infrastructure, It was well within my capability as a DRM to arrange. But the main issue was not this; it was about winning the confidence of the poor and mostly illiterate porters.

The outreach programme we carried out with the help of some capable staff was phenomenal. We first visited them at the station and talked to them. They were obviously very suspicious of our intentions. Scorned that they were for ages by travelling public and railway officials alike, it was inconceivable for them that the DRM and his cronies were trying something for their good. As it is, with a majority of passengers switching to strollies, their clientele had reduced impacting their earning potential drastically. Provision of these airport type carts would be the last straw, they thought. 

The first thing was to convince them that there would be no change in the fare they charged the passengers and the only difference would be that they would carry the baggage in carts and not on their heads or their arms. I went a step further and told them that the carts would belong to them, to be kept totally in their control. They had two leaders, both old enough to have retired long back but in their life, there was no retirement; it was either work and daily bread or nothing. No, Mr. Gratiano, do not say, “with mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.” (The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare); their wrinkles had come through decades of backbreaking labour and contempt from travellers. 

I tried hard to strike a rapport with these old porters. It was not going to be easy to win their trust quickly; it was only gradually that they began to have confidence in me and my team of commercial officials. I remember holding two meetings in DRM’s chamber with more than fifty porters sitting of standing in the room which was unprecedented. Porters would hardly feel welcome in the divisional office at the desk of a clerk let alone hold a meeting in the room of the DRM. I had to go with Shakespeare’s Othello because, "How poor are they that have not patience? What wound did ever heal but by degrees?” Even as carts started arriving, we decided that we would do a pilot first at Bangalore City station as there was no point in counting our chickens before they hatched.

But eventually our patience paid off and the porters, barring some mischievous elements, agreed to switch over to carts. They saw merit in head loading being banned. Much to their bemusement and even resentment, the Station Superintendents were detailed by me personally that once the cart service starts, any head loading at the station by a porter would reflect on their incompetence. The initial lot of carts was handed over to the porters directly by the sponsoring organizations. While launching the cart service I assured the porters that should there be any threat to their livelihood, we would immediately rectify the system in consultation with them. As expected the journalist present at the launch asked me as to what benefit this would be to the travellers if they continued to pay the same fare. I told them the benefit is for the country. A country which did not have empathy for those who gave away their blood, sweat and tears, a country which did not afford due dignity to its labour force, can hardly march proudly in the twenty-first century.

 Airport-style hand carts in 4 stations of Bangalore division in 2011

When the scheme took off, it was win-win for everyone involved. Our stations became the first on IR rest to have implemented something which even today is a distant dream for all stations while the porters realized that we did mean what we said. The respect I and the team got from them flowed from their hearts and it was not the grudging reverence so common in feudal set ups. 

Rest is history written and overwritten. Written because within months we had this service of carts at all the four major stations in Bangalore and the system was soon working beautifully. Overwritten because within months of my leaving the division, things started slipping back to the old normal, and today we can see the same porters keeping their noses to the grindstone with heavy head loads even as the line up of carts withers away. Perhaps because of my inability to institute a sustainable system, or because the time for the idea had not yet come, and has not yet come, which in itself is shameful but that is how it is. Or maybe simply because we only run trains, albeit that too not too well, and the rest does not matter.