Include migrants in plans

There is an impending crisis at the intersection of the coronavirus pandemic, urban India and migration. In the war against COVID-19, the migrant crisis is, without doubt, the biggest, challenging the idea of India as a common market. In the wake of the seemingly unstoppable virus, it is seriously testing interstate coordination and migration management, while creating an unprecedented stranded-ness hitherto unknown, from an economic, social and humanitarian perspective. The disruption of the mobility of labour across state borders, the socio-economic impact on the well-being and livelihoods of millions of individuals and households, and the downward spiral in India’s development trajectory that it signals must not be underestimated. Migrant workers remain among the most vulnerable groups affected by the COVID-19 lockdown and are at risk of stigmatisation. This is particularly poignant because the low productivity, low wage work they are compelled to do is often the only means of livelihood for the families they leave behind, and contributes significantly to India’s national income.

Now that there is an exodus of migrant workers who are traversing long distances, across the length and breadth of the country, the states -- of origin and destination alike -- need to respond on a war footing to prevent, detect and respond to health threats along the migration corridors. This must be done ensuring migrant-inclusive approaches that minimise stigma and discrimination. Migrant workers and their reverse migration pose challenges -- risk exposure, large numbers, and rapidity -- to cross-border disease control. Especially since the migrants require to be quarantined in camps or collective sites, the need to adopt systemic and multi-sectoral responses is immediate, if only to negate the high risks of the spread of the virus in the rural hinterland. Rural India will be far more vulnerable, owing to poorly prepared health systems and assistance mechanisms to respond at scale. For these fragile contexts, state government responses that presage anticipatory action will be paramount. The focus of interventions -- migrant camp coordination and camp management, displacement tracking and migrant health protection -- must ensure effective surveillance, isolation and treatment, where necessary.

Migrants affected by the coronavirus crisis, particularly those required to be quarantined in camps or collective sites, will face specific challenges and vulnerabilities that states must consider when planning for receiving the returning migrants. The states of origin would do well to adhere to the broad principles contained in the WHO technical guidance for COVID-19 strategic preparedness and response plan: limit human-to-human transmission, including reducing secondary infections; identify and provide optimised care for infected patients early; communicate critical risk and information to all communities, and ensure protection remains central to the response. In particular, it is important to ensure that the migrant workers are not stigmatised, are provided timely information and assistance, and are incentivised, through wage transfers, for instance, to fully participate in the response plans. Their most urgent need that we must all help meet is cash in hand for daily necessities.

The scope of the states’ responses must now expand to deal with the substantive migrant populations requiring mainstream attention. The measures that states must initiate include: First, a camp specific epidemiological risk assessment to determine the risk of the transmission of the COVID-19 as a result of the return migrants or the migrants’ camp conditions, despite quarantining. This must be based on the state’s risk assessment, the epidemiological situation of the area where the camp is located, the travel and trade connections between the camp location, its host communities and the surrounding areas reporting COVID-19 cases that can turn as amplifiers of transmission.

Second, specific COVID-19 outbreak readiness and response plans need to be developed for each collective site, in alignment with the state government’s response plans, and based on the prevailing risks, capacities and gaps that the state encounters. The state-level multi-disciplinary outbreak response team needs to be on red alert to respond to a camp-based outbreak. To implement a coordinated response, roles and responsibilities and lines of communication and reporting need to be clearly defined. The District Collector needs to play the first-among-equals and ensure the team responds at its best. Should a team already be in place in the district, it needs to be re-oriented to COVID-19 response, especially to ensure a gendered response. This means including women in decision-making for outbreak preparedness and response and ensuring women’s representation in camp management and COVID-19 community engagement spaces. Special arrangements need to be developed in relation to site-specific potential transmission amplification events, such as food distribution and logistics. Community engagement approaches will be important to facilitate the implementation of measures to reduce the risk of virus transmission.

Thus far, the state, the market, and the community have responded unitedly to face the coronavirus threat. The spectre of zoonosis has changed us -- our perceptions about ourselves, our neighbours and the migrant workers who are an inseparable part of our daily lives. But, perhaps, the profound long-term change that it has wrought, a change that will last long after the coronavirus, is to compel us to look at how we live our lives -- that humankind is but a small part of the greater population that inhabits this planet. It might yet offer us the opportunity to live our lives with epistemic humility, and a little less material greed. To paraphrase John Maynard Keynes “The pace at which we can reach our destination of economic bliss will be governed by four things – our power to control population, our determination to avoid wars and civil dissensions, our willingness to entrust to science the direction of those matters which are properly the concern of science, and the rate of accumulation as fixed by the margin between our production and our consumption; of which, the last will easily look after itself, given the first three.” This is the lesson that we must learn. Else, we will have failed our children.

(The writer is Director, Public Affairs Centre, Bengaluru)