Urmila breathed a sigh of relief when her phone lit up with a message from her bank notifying that Rs 1,000 was credited to her account. The 32-year-old, a migrant worker from Lakhisarai in Bihar who is stuck in Faridabad in Haryana with her two young sons amid the lockdown, would now be able to provide her children with food for at least the next few days.
Similar cash transfers for thousands of migrants from Bihar and Jharkhand stuck in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore during the countrywide lockdown have been facilitated by a former migrant worker from Muzzafarpur in Bihar, who initially started by helping out migrants from his village.
After his contact number was passed on to different migrant groups, his phone has not stopped ringing.
"I started getting calls soon after the lockdown began. They (migrant workers) were hungry and sometimes sick and called for help. Since I work with labour groups here, I contacted some of them and we arranged Rs 6,000 and transferred that to their accounts," said 32-year-old Sanjay Sahni, who worked as an electrician in Delhi before returning to his native village five years ago.
"After that my phone was inundated with calls from people stranded across the country who needed immediate help," he said.
The sheer number of distress calls to Sahni gave rise to an organised effort -- SWAN: Stranded Workers Action Network -- a motley group of around 80 researchers, students, civil society groups and labour leaders -- who formed a system by which Sahni would provide them with bank account details of stranded workers and they would contact people registered with them to directly transfer cash to these accounts.
"We have now grown to 73 volunteers who have interacted with 640 groups of stranded workers adding up to a total of 11,159 (people). Since March 27, around 6,940 people have received money through these transfers. We realised that the workers needed cash in hand to buy things according to their immediate needs. What these workers need is food and cash and not food or cash," said Sakina Dhorajiwala, Researcher, LibTech India, who is one of the volunteers at SWAN and also a co-author of a paper, "21 Days and Counting: COVID-19 Lockdown, Migrant Workers, and the Inadequacy of Welfare Measures in India."
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