These are the sights of the people waiting for the government-arranged provisions for migrating back to their hometowns from the city due to their overhauled work during the COVID-19 pandemic. The exercise is happening over a week now. Workers living in the informal settlements in Goregaon and Malad here queue up every morning to be taken by the BEST buses to the railway stations from where they will board the trains that take them to their homeland. The drill is pretty rehearsed. Government personnel call the registered names and allow them entry into buses by giving them basic food supplies and making a headcount. All seats in the buses are filled up, I dont know what they really make of social distancing! The queuing public is anxious and often waits for long hours in the hot summer sun. They are being fed by the authorities, after which, the space is often left littered.
The sight has brought to me two things. I had always wondered of the mass migration of people during the partition. Only in documentaries I had seen and heard stories of people traveling miles of distances on foot carrying their children, belongings and homes all the way into faraway distances within the newly formed Indian mainland. I had never fathomed how a single human being could cover such long travels on foot. The current polycentered migration from cities back to the homelands seems like a rehearsal of 1947! We have all been reading reports since last month of the people who had already decided to walk back to their homes from the cities which had left them jobless and shelterless. To witness this sight first hand has also made me realize the sheer amount of people that the city externally depends on. They say that Mumbai has about three lakh migrants who oil it everyday. Across the country, there are about eight crore people who migrate from their base towns into cities to offer their labour.
The crisis of the hour has also helped me understand the state and city machinery. The pandemic has exposed the structure of governmental apparatus, the need and design of protocols and how they are mobilised on ground. These have often remained blurred for me due to several reasons. However, at the same time, we have also come to realize, that there is just so much ground for our administration to cover up simply for the smooth functioning of the system. And so much can be achieved so smoothly only in the wiser application of the mind and setting up of priorities. It's a pity after all, to see the number of deaths due to hunger and migratory pangs are unnecessarily adding up to the lives we are losing to the pandemic. The anxiety in the working class is real, for, they remain absolutely at the mercy of the state - a state that is trying to deliver double than its capacity. I wonder the fate of covid for India. Meanwhile, we wait and watch the dance of disaster from our windows, at a distance.
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