CVs SUPPORT MASS MIGRATION

With migrant labourers leaving for their abode amid lockdown, CVs have come to support their journey amid numerous challenges.

- Deepti Thore

The story of two youths on a truck from Surat to their home-village in Bihar made news when they were forced to desert the truck after one of them took ill and passed away in the lap of his friend. Trucks and buses have been supporting the mass exodus of migrant labourers from across the industrial and urban regions of India as they make their way home to villages in rural belts in the absence of employment and an ability to make a living. In the absence of recent data on the movement of migrant labourers in the country, the data from 2011, which put the number at 45.36 crore (roughly 37 per cent of the country’s population) should provide an idea. With doors of houses in lower-middle-class localities in urban centres like Mumbai and Surat flaunting padlocks, bylanes after bylanes and lanes after lanes, the mass exodus of migrant workforce has been termed as the most intense human movements after independence.