For Mumbai’s migrant workers, train journeys home are a reminder of past hardships — and the fear of their return
Hepzi Anthony
Prashant Nakwe
Migrants like Chandresh Gautam (center) carry memories of desperate, difficult and expensive journeys they made to their hometowns in trucks during the Covid lockdown
MUMBAI, Maharashtra: A long line of bags of all sizes and shapes snakes through the platform. Some of the people present have been here for hours. As exhaustion takes over, their bags replace them in the queue while they find places to sit. Fights erupt periodically as newcomers try to jump the queue, claiming to have arrived “long back”. Words lead to fisticuffs and the elderly intervene to keep the peace. The young males hold fort valiantly, but there are very few women in the crowd.
It is close to 10 pm and the crowd is gathered at the Bandra Terminus railway station in western Mumbai, where people flock every day to catch trains to northern and western states of the country. This particular crowd is waiting for the Avadh Express to Gorakhpur, and their fight has only just begun. They have a 37-hour journey ahead of them.
A bright light in the distance heralds the arrival of the train and the warring passengers get back in line, partly kept in check by a policeman who appears out of nowhere as the train draws near. Bags are picked up, family members checked on, children gripped by the hand or shoulder. As it grinds to a halt, the policeman keeps the doors closed for a few minutes before opening them.
Then, he quickly moves out of the way as the crowd makes a mad scramble inside and towards the nearest seat. The priority is to carve out a more comfortable space for the journey than the passengers getting on at Vapi, and keep it that way.
Among the passengers pushing each other for centimeters of space is Chandresh Gautam. The 35-year-old carpenter who usually works in Borivali in northern Mumbai is on his way to his native Basti district near Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, to claim a house that he is eligible for under the Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana. But Gautam still carries scars from a dark time five years ago.
Like many migrants who come to Mumbai to seek employment, Gautam was left high and dry when the pandemic hit, and the lockdown was imposed in 2020.
“My work had come to a standstill, and it was getting difficult to pay my rent. The same city where I have been making a living since 2003 became difficult to survive in, and I had to return to my family of seven brothers and three sisters back home,” he recalls.
This, however, came at a cost. Gautam had to shell out Rs 3,000 per head to get a spot aboard a truck going to Basti, along with 20 others. Even today, every time the news talks about the possibility of another pandemic, he can feel the nervousness hit.
For migrants, trains continue to be the cheapest, fastest and most reliable mode of transport to go back home, even if it means standing in long, endless queues to enter the coach
“There is no work at home. I am uneducated and don’t have enough work options. I don’t know what else I would do if another lockdown were to happen now,” says Gautam.
Prod him a little more, though, and he does recall something else. "Things were bad, yes, but there was a sense of camaraderie... we were all in it together. I remember drinking water and food being handed out for free all over the city," he recalls.
For many like Gautam, these train journeys, as crowded, inconvenient and suffocating as they may be, remain the cheapest, fastest and even most reliable mode of transport to their homes. This is a belief that has become stronger after the lockdown and the nightmares that they had to endure to get back home.
The lockdown saw train services completely brought to a halt from March 24, 2020, till services were partially restored from May 1 the same year, although with strongly enforced restrictions.
Migrant workers settle down in the general coach of a Gorakhpur-bound train from Mumbai’s Bandra Terminus
Munna Khan, who hails from Gonda district in Uttar Pradesh and has been staying in Mumbai for close to a decade, recalls paying Rs 5000 to get on a truck back home during that dark period. Today, he comments on the possibility of another such ordeal with seasoned resilience.
“Lockdown ayega toh tab ka tab dekh lenge (If a lockdown comes, we will deal with it then),” he says matter-of-factly.
Similar reactions are seen from most of the people at Bandra Terminus, some apprehensive, some indifferent to the frequent reports or rumour that percolate through WhatsApp groups and word of mouth.
Different people remember the lockdown for different reasons. The death and the strife were bad enough but even the other aspects of their lives went haywire. Like in the case of 54- year-old Tufani Prasad Sahani from Gorakhpur, who grew up in Mumbai and now works as a sofa maker in Khar.
Tufani Sahani had to postpone his daughter’s marriage celebrations and finally conducted it with a trimmed guest list
A father of three, his eldest daughter's marriage was all set to be held with all the pomp and splendour you'd expect from a doting father. However, the lockdown was imposed on March 23, 2020 and it had to be postponed for two months, during which period they were quarantined in the local school. When it was ultimately held in May, the guest list had to be trimmed down from the 300-odd guests that were expected earlier to just 50.
The passengers aboard the Bandra Terminus – Patna Superfast express have similar tales to tell, both about the lockdown and the current railway travel scenario. Many of them are from Vapi, having come to Mumbai to catch some space in the general comparment before it fills up at later stations.
Lugging a blue drum filled with clothes and even eatables within, Ramvriksh Rajvanshi, 38 recalls how relieved he was that he was already at his native Bihar when the lockdown hit. Had he been in Vapi, where he works with a private firm, he would have been stranded like the thousands of others.
Prince Singh, on the other hand, saw the darker side of the pandemic. The 30-year-old works in the pharmaceutical industry, which helped him get a travel pass. Within three months of the lockdown, he was out of the streets, overseeing the transport operations of medicine deliveries. The experience has made him fatalistic. “Jo hoga dekha jayega (We shall deal with whatever happens),” is his only reaction.
Anshu Ali, 26, is a little more verbose. “If a lockdown does come, there is nothing I can do about it. Planning is for those who have the money for it. What can you do if you’re living day to day and struggling to make ends meet? What is it I can do differently in a lockdown?” asks Ali, who is on his way to his native Patna.
“Right now, for example, I can’t even afford a confirmed ticket for Rs 745. The unreserved ticket at Rs 440 is all I could manage,” he adds, jostling for space in the general compartment. Ali is the eldest of seven siblings and earns the most in his family. His father runs a small grocery store in his native place to help with the expenses.
The complete shutdown of rail services across the country, failed to hold desperate migrants spread across various metros from reaching their homes in trucks, bikes, cycles or just walking
One out of five migrants in Mumbai is from Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state. During the lockdown, about 11 lakh migrants left Maharashtra, most of them being daily wagers involved in trades like labourers, loaders, drivers, construction workers etc, impacting essential services in the city.
The same Bandra Terminus where migrants now fight tooth and nail for inches of space aboard outstation trains had become the hub for migrants trying to get home.
For the first time in India's recorded history, the vast Indian Railways network, often called the nation's lifeline, came to a complete halt. As the country entered a nationwide lockdown to contain COVID-19, all passenger train services were suspended, an unprecedented move in a system that had withstood wars, natural disasters, and political upheavals. Freight trains continued to run, ensuring the transport of essential goods, but the unprecedented halt left over 12,000 passenger trains idle across the country, stranding millions of migrant workers and daily wage laborers in urban centers without means to return home. The stillness of the railway platforms, the deserted tracks, and the eerie silence of stations that typically saw millions pass through daily marked a moment of collective paralysis that one still associates with the COVID 19 pandemic.
However, following massive public pressure, the government started special Shramik Express trains from May 1, 2020. Between 2020 and 21, the Railways ferried over 63 lakh migrants through 4621 special Shramik train services.By December 2020, the Railways were operating about 1100 special services along with 110 regular train services for passengers across the country.
This may seem like a huge number, but it was still only a fraction of the 3,634 passenger train services that used to operate daily before the pandemic, carrying 76, 740 lakh passengers in 2019-20. During Covid, the footfall fell to 9, 850 lakh passengers in 2020-21.
The desperation to get on to a Shramik Express was so bad, however, that the police and railways would keep the timings confidential to prevent crowds from surging at the stations. The situation was so dire that a television journalist was arrested after he reported about an upcoming train, which led to to thousands of people flocking to the Bandra Terminus, and the police had to resort to a lathi charge to disperse the crowd.
Major stations like the Bandra Terminus were witness to stampedes and police lathicharge during the COVID lockdown as migrants scrambled for a seat in the highly restricted rail services to get back home
Every day, the migrants, jobless, running out of money and out of options, would just sit on the ground at whatever railway station the latest rumour had named. More lathi charges would follow in the days to come. When the trains did arrive, only a small portion of the gathered crowds were able to make it on board. Others simply started walking on the tracks. As per anRight to Information (RTI) filed, 8700 people died in rail accidents in the year 2020 during the lockdown. The most gut wrenching of these deaths was at Aurangabad, Maharashtra on May 8, 2020, where 16 migrantssleeping on railway tracks were run over by a freight train.
“Even after it woke from the slumber and announced special trains to ferry the stranded and starving workforce to their homes, confusion reigned. Onerous paperwork and huge costs were heaped on these hapless citizens who manage to barely get by even in the best of times. States acted arbitrarily; courts intervened thoughtlessly. Hunger, humiliation and fear of the disease made thousands of these migrants so desperate that they ventured to walk thousands of kilometres to get home,” The Hindu reported in May, 2020.
Migrant workers, most of them from Uttar Pradesh, board 19037 Avadh Express at Bandra Terminus
But at the same time, State governments all over India, which witnessed the highest number of COVID 19 patients after the United States of America, sat up and took notice of their migrant populations. Jaiprakash Singh, executive president of the Uttar Bharat Sabha, an association of North Indian migrants recalls: “In the pre-COVID days, when most of the migrants were pretty much on their own in the cities completely ignored by their home State governments. During the pandemic, however, for the very first time, State governments reached out to migrants and got involved in their welfare. A proper registration exercise was undertaken where migrant workers were registered with details including the kind of work they did.”
After this exercise, the workers were given additional ration support, special vaccination drives - which was a major requisite for travelling and being able to work back in those days, and some even received monetary support. Coming as it did during their worst days, this support helped them at a time when lack of documentation had failed to get them state support in their states of work.
Most of the support was doled out on the basis of essential documents like ration cards, which these migrants were not able to provide since they lacked their own house in the states where they were working.
As a result, Uttar Pradesh promised to map its skilled workers and reassured that other States wishing to hire workers from UP would need to ensure their socio-legal-economic rights, States like Maharashtra spoke about introducing a permit system for migrant workers. States like Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, too, provided aid in the form of direct bank transfers to many migrants working in other states and even took care of their travel facilities.
Despite everything, though, it was a catharsis of sorts for the migrants.
Migrants like Jabbar Singh, a watchman from Badlapur, near Mumbai, still gets emotional when recalling the Covid lockdown when he couldn’t travel home to Etawah, Uttar Pradesh, with train services shut
“The pandemic helped bust the myth that metro cities are safer," says former Member of Parliament Sanjay Nirupam, known to be vocal for raising concerns of migrants in Mumbai. “The concept of cities as sources of wealth generation that offered a comfortable living, which had attracted migrants to metros like Mumbai, lay in tatters, when these migrants were shunned and rejected by the very cities they flocked to for their livelihood.”
He adds that this rejection was hurtful and cut off the emotional link that had bound them to their cities. While most of the migrants did return to the same cities, it was purely because their hometowns did not provide as many work opportunities.”
With road networks yet to be fully developed particularly in the rural interiors and air fares out of the question for the estimated one migrants based out of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), trains remain the cheapest, fastest and most dependable way to reach their families in distant homelands, lockdown or no lockdown.
The irony of this observation is not lost on us as we see the Avadh Express disappear into the distance. All that is left is the sudden emptiness on the platform, and the myriad pieces of footwear that the migrants left behind in their haste to catch a few meters of space on board the train.
Hepzi Anthony is an independent journalist based out of Mumbai
Prashant Nakwe is a visual storyteller, focused on documenting developmental issues
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