After turning their backs during lockdown, cities now want migrant employees back

Till the unique coronavirus break out and the following lockdown enforced by the government to curb its spread, migrant workers lived hidden from the general public look in the Garden City of India. The workers who had built the fast-growing city’s houses, apartment complexes, workplaces, and other imposing and instantly noticeable structures, and others who had actually operated in them, were mostly “undetectable” themselves. They lived in structures held up flimsily by tin sheets; these were packages that these builders called house. Like the Indian neighborhood in London in Salman Rushdie’s Hellish Verses, migrant labourers in Bengaluru were a “city visible however unseen”.

But when the lockdown was imposed and financial activity concerned a grinding halt, these employees emerged on the streets, requiring that they be enabled to go home. Without any public transportation to take them anywhere, and as they were abruptly left jobless and hungry, many chose to do what was unthinkable until then– walk to their towns and towns positioned as far as in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Jharkhand.

Seeing the humanitarian crisis unfold prior to its eyes, the Karnataka government then arranged Shramik unique trains to take the employees house. Since the beginning of May till June 24, around 4.6 lakh migrants, most of them operating in Bengaluru, boarded 284 Shramik unique trains to leave Karnataka. (The information does not consist of those who hitched flights or attempted to leave the city on foot.) Bengaluru is no longer under lockdown, however with a large section of its labour having left, the city discovers itself paralyzed.

Feeling the pinch

Throughout the lockdown, apartment or condos and domestic areas did not permit domestic workers into their premises. Numerous households selected not to pay their domestic employees their monthly wages. Now, with no indications of the pandemic abating, they have flung their gates open, but few are dripping in. WhatsApp groups of gated neighborhoods are flooded with messages seeking domestic employees. “Our domestic assistance was from West Bengal and has returned home. There is no warranty she will return. The search for a new aid has actually been not successful till now,” said Sapna Gowda, a citizen of an apartment building.

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