Migrant Workers: The Wheels of Our Economy

Time to
reconsider our Policies:
The Third face of lockdown, due to COVID-19, has turned the daily wage
laborers in cities into refugees within the nation. They were without work from
the last 50 days. The workers are around 100 million to 125 million in number,
who left their villages, families, and homes for jobs and better income.

They are the backbone of our economy. Their hard-working hands help us in
cleaning streets, running factories, build roads, and construct our multi-stories
housing societies, making automobiles, and delivering newspapers, etc.

Now, these migrant workers don’t have any work in these metro cities. They
are feeling safer to move back to their villages. One of the reasons for this
crisis is the failure of our development model which centralized the
development in particular areas.

The uncertainties due to the pandemic have created a question on their

survival and their future. And in these hard times, poor migrant workers have
started their journey to reach their safe spaces, in their “home” in villages.

The reverse migration to villages can cause problems in finding labor in cities
once the pandemic is over and lockdown is lifted.  

To give immediate relief to the workers in the country the government has
launched the Pradhan Mantri Gareeb Kalyan Yojana, which includes
measures like free grains, an increase in MGNREGA wages, direct cash
transfer to Jan-Dhan women account holders.
Keeping in mind the long term interest of all sections of the Indian society, the
central government has announced ‘Aatma Nirbhar Bharat Abhiyaan’, which
aims at making India self-reliant and boost industrial growth. This will help in
generating millions of jobs in the coming future.

These are testing times for all the nations in the world. No one predicted a
crisis of this level. Human suffering in these times is unavoidable, but through
cooperation as a society and with the support of government we can work
toward easing the pain of the vulnerable sections of our society.