Four hours' notice: the lockdown migrant worker crisis

What happened

On 24 March 2020, the Prime Minister announced in an 8 p.m. televised address that the entire country would enter a strict lockdown from midnight — four hours later. Rail, bus and air transport were suspended. Tens of millions of migrant workers in cities lost work and wages overnight, with no transport home and, for many, no means to pay rent or buy food.

What followed was the largest movement of people in India since Partition: workers and their families walked, cycled, or hitched rides on trucks across hundreds of kilometres. Deaths mounted along the way — from exhaustion, starvation, and road accidents, including 16 workers killed by a freight train near Aurangabad in May 2020 as they slept on the tracks, and migrants run over in bus and truck crashes. Special “Shramik” trains to carry workers home began only on 1 May 2020, five weeks into the lockdown.

What the official record shows

The Supreme Court, acting on its own motion in In Re: Problems and Miseries of Migrant Labourers, directed governments to provide food, shelter and free transport to stranded workers. In September 2020, the Ministry of Labour told Parliament that it had no data on how many migrant workers had died during the lockdown, and that the question of compensation therefore “does not arise”. Independent researchers and media trackers documented hundreds of lockdown-linked deaths during the exodus.

Where it stands

The crisis is an established part of the pandemic record: a lockdown of unprecedented scale imposed with four hours’ notice, without provision for the tens of millions of workers it would strand. It prompted the creation of the e-Shram national database of unorganised workers — an implicit acknowledgement that the state did not know who or where its migrant workforce was when it locked the country down.