From covid lockdown to war crisis: Bihar migrants face another forced exodus

Annai Restaurant and Bakery, a vibrant eatery with a 4.2 Google rating, on the Salem-Madurai Road in Karur, Tamil Nadu, began turning customers away in early March. It signalled a crisis that India is grappling with amid the ongoing US-Iran-Israel war. Its kitchen was running out of cooking gas. By mid-March, the glass-fronted display shelves stood empty of cakes, cookies and pastries.

The owners told the workers, more than a dozen of them, to go home. The crisis was unfolding far away, but its rippling effects were being felt in their lives. “We will call once the cylinders start coming in,” the owners told them.

For Bablu Paswan, 27, of Barhi village, a panchayat near the India-Nepal border in Bihar’s Madhubani district, it felt like the replay of a six-year-old ordeal. A cycle of disruption loomed, leaving little time for him to decide. “Us time bhi bhaage the, is time bhi bhaagna padega (We had to run then, and we have to run now too),” he thought, recalling the covid years when he had walked back home through a locked-down nation. At least the trains are running this time, he muttered to himself. With some of the ₹4,000 he had saved, he booked a seat on the Barauni Rapti Sagar Express to take him from Erode in Tamil Nadu to Samastipur in Bihar.

On 20 March—almost six years to the day India had gone into lockdown to prevent the spread of covid-19, forcing millions of migrants to walk home—Bablu joined hundreds of migrants making their way to Erode junction. At the platform, he saw policemen wielding batons to force queues and discipline the overflow of passengers, again a throwback to the covid years.

For three days and two nights, he stood in a crammed coach. He ate, slept, drank and rested while standing, as the train rumbled across 3,000km on one of the longest railway routes in India.

He had found this job two years earlier, after his life was upended by two prolonged waves of coronavirus in 2020 and 2021. His job was to chop vegetables. The restaurant paid him ₹500 for an 8-hour shift, more if the hours stretched. Food and shelter were provided by the owners. By doing overtime, Bablu managed to earn ₹20,000 a month.

This reporter met him on 23 April, exactly a month after he reached Ward 15 of Barhi village, where he lives with his family. His house is a three-room set-up, its floor plastered with mud, walls of clay, and a roof of alvester cement sheets, painted bright blue. Ward 15 is a settlement of nearly 100 homes, belonging largely to Paswans and Mallahs (traditionally engaged in fishing), a few Mandals, and two Laheri Muslims who traditionally worked as bangle sellers. Most families come from Scheduled Castes and Extremely Backward Castes.

The current crisis has rendered him and 30 other migrants here jobless. All of them returned in March and April from different parts of the country. Bablu explains that each day without work means two things: either he borrows or he cuts down consumption. His wife, Rekha Kumari, does the latter. She uses just half a spoon of mustard oil for meals as it has become the most expensive item at ₹190 a litre. Masalas are running out. Arhar dal is ₹100 a kilo, and rice has nearly doubled to ₹3,000 a quintal in this region.

To complicate matters, their son Aarav, 6, has fallen sick twice in the past month, forcing Bablu to take a loan of ₹10,000 for treatment in the nearest town, Jaynagar.

Bablu already has a debt of ₹80,000 from the pandemic years, with interest of ₹4 on every ₹100 piling up each month, amounting to ₹3,200 in monthly interest. “But wages remain the same, before or after corona,” Bablu says. When he goes back to Tamil Nadu after this current crisis has passed, he doesn’t plan to return to the village till the debt is paid off. “But this will mean he misses Aarav’s 7th birthday, our daughter Kriti turning 4, and our 10th wedding anniversary,” Rekha interrupts. “And all the festivals along the way.”

YEARS OF MIGRATION

Bablu’s mother, Gulli Devi was only 12 when she was married to 16-year-old Biltu Paswan in 1972, the son of a landless Dalit couple who worked in the fields of local landlords. For their labour, they were paid 2kg of rice at the end of each day.

Gulli’s gauna (when a bride moves into the husband’s home) came six years later, when she turned 18. Within two years she was pregnant with her first child. Biltu packed his bags for Assam chasing work for his growing family, and did not return for eight years.

Gulli has no knowledge of what kind of life he lived there. “He went missing. He later said he worked at a paan shop,” she says. Gulli gave birth to a daughter, Shobha, and toiled alongside her in-laws, moving through various roles thrust upon her—a mother who birthed six children, a caregiver, a labourer, and the left-behind wife of a migrant man.

Barhi, spread across 15 wards, is home to 11,502 people, according to the 2011 Census. Gulam Das, sarpanch of Ward 15, estimates that the population has now risen to nearly 16,000.

“In the 1980s, about 100 men had migrated from the village. The ticket to Delhi was ₹65,” recalls Dhandev Paswan, a contemporary of Bablu’s father. He remembers migrating against the backdrop of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 to work at a nickel polishing factory in Moti Nagar, Delhi. Now, he says, about 80% of the village’s male population migrate for work.

In the past 46 years, Gulli has watched, up close, this disappearance of Ward 15’s men into India’s vast, informal migrant workforce. The chain began in 1980, with her husband leaving for Assam, then moving to Punjab as a seasonal migrant. The debt from Shobha’s marriage drove her fourth-born, Sudhir, to steal ₹200 from her and flee with a middleman to Delhi. “If we ate in the day, there was nothing left for the night. Sudhir couldn’t bear to watch this, so he ran away,” she says.

In 2003, Sudhir boarded a train from Jaynagar and reached Darbhanga, 50km away to catch the Shaheed Express, which further carried him to Old Delhi Railway Station. He was 12 when he first arrived in Delhi. “We were three boys who stitched sequins into a wedding lehenga. It would take a week for us to finish it,” he remembers his child labour days in Ghonda Chowk in the Capital. He worked there for four years before moving to Chandigarh where he washed glasses as a daily wage labourer in Sector 40.

During a train journey, between Darbhanga and Chandigarh, he befriended a contractor who offered him work at the air force canteen in central Delhi. There he made samosas and bread pakoras, from 6am to 5pm with Sundays off, for a salary of ₹8,000. He then moved to the Parliament canteen with the same contractor, and began cooking shahi paneer, dal makhani and koftas.

“Start at 6am, finish at 10 at night for ₹12,000. Winters, especially January, were harsh as Armed Forces from across the nation came for parade practice. Duty zyada, paisa kam (long hours, low wages),” he says.

In 2016, at the age of 17, Gulli’s fifth-born, Bablu, left Ward 15, becoming the third man in the family to migrate. He remembers leaving with a cloth bag stuffed with four pairs of trousers and shirts. Unlike in Sudhir’s time, Gulli was able to pack parathas and aloo bhujiya for his journey. From Darbhanga, he bought a one-way train ticket on the Pawan Express, which dropped him to Lokmanya Tilak Terminus, the last stop in Mumbai’s Kurla suburb.

Bablu landed a job as a vegetable chopper at New Sagar Bhojnalaya, a small hotel where nearly 10 workers from Bihar, Rajasthan and Jharkhand were employed. His salary was ₹8,000. His days began at 7am and ended at 11pm, broken only by 2 hours of rest in the afternoon.

Within a year of Bablu’s departure, his father died by electrocution at a wedding in 2017. The loss triggered Gulli’s youngest son, Bhola, then 14, to leave too. Sometime in the winter of 2019, he was packed into the back seat of a Scorpio alongside another worker, Kutumb, twice his age. The char-chakka gaadi, as they called it, had been hired by Ashok Kumar Shah, a native of Madhubani who ran an eatery in Arunachal Pradesh.

“We reached Guwahati, and were squeezed into a Maruti Alto and taken further into the hills.” Bhola recounts. Shah took them to Seppa, the headquarters of East Kameng district, around 160km from Itanagar. Shah’s small eatery stood on a hilly edge, selling samosas, chola bhatura, and roti sabzi. Bhola was the youngest of the three workers who rolled rotis. It was ₹6,000 a month for a 6am-6pm shift.

Meanwhile, Gulli’s life passed by, her standing in the landowners’ fields in Barhi—sometimes roping paddy, sometimes harvesting grain. The year Bhola left, the monsoon was especially brutal. The Kamla River, which flows through Barhi, broke its western embankment, causing catastrophic damage. Madhubani was among the worst-hit districts, with tens of thousands displaced. Gulli’s house got washed away. She rebuilt it, as she had done before during floods, alone. “To ka kare?” she says . (What else to do?) “Pardes (migration) swallows the men.”

THE LOCKDOWN YEARS

The years have all been difficult, she says, but the covid lockdown years stand out as the harshest. All three sons were stranded in distant cities—Bablu in Mumbai, Sudhir in Delhi, and Bhola in Arunachal Pradesh.

Each phone call from her sons was about rations drying up and money running out. “They needed money either to leave or to eat,” she says. So she did what the wives of migrant workers across Bihar were doing, borrowing from moneylenders at the highest interest rates and dispatching it to the stranded men.

Gulli borrowed ₹30,000 at a monthly interest rate of ₹5 per ₹100, meaning ₹1,500 of interest every month. A shopkeeper transferred the money to her sons. But there were six more mouths to feed at home—herself, Sudhir’s wife, his three children, and Bablu’s wife. So, she borrowed more. “It took some years to repay it all,” she says mildly.

In Mumbai, Delhi and Arunachal Pradesh, her three sons listened to news about the spread of the virus. The janata curfew was announced on 22 March 2020 but the brothers waited. “The owner told us it was only for a day,” says Bablu. “Then, just like that, it became a month. Till then the owner gave us shelter, then he too expressed helplessness.”

Sudhir, in the Parliament canteen in Delhi, received rations from officers, but help stopped a month into the lockdown. Soon, everyone began to leave. Sudhir found a companion in fellow worker Babu Yadav from Darbhanga. The duo set out with 2-litre water bottles at 6 one evening in the first week of May, walking 12km to Kashmiri Gate. He and Babu ran from one truck to another, searching for space. Prices were as high as ₹10,000-12,000 per person to stand or squat. After hours of searching, they found a truck willing to take them to Darbhanga for ₹4,000 each. It already had 80 passengers. “Police stopped us at each checkpoint. People were starving, children were thirsty,” Sudhir recounts of the 48-hour journey.

When Bablu heard that his brother had reached home, he grew restless. But it took 10 days before he was able to sneak out. He packed a bedsheet, two pairs of clothes, and left. His neighbour Dinesh from Barhi did the same. He describes the highway as a “long, long wedding procession”, people walking with bags slung over their shoulders, but it was a baraat without music.

“No one touched anyone. Food and water were thrown from a distance,” he says. They had to walk for a day and a night straight, until they found a truck bound for Darbhanga and paid ₹4,000 each for the three-day journey. Another night’s walk led them to a vehicle that agreed to carry them for ₹400 each to Jaynagar.

In Jaynagar, over 1,000 migrants were herded into a government high school. Bablu had spent five days in the isolation ward when he heard that his wife had delivered a boy. But the newborn had jaundice, forcing him to spend over a lakh on treatment. The debt continues. Once the child recovered, a feast had to be held, a mandatory custom in the village, leaving him a further ₹40,000 in debt.

DEBT AND DISRUPTION

The youngest in the family, Bhola wasn’t allowed to travel by Shah, so he remained in Arunachal until the second wave subsided. He returned home in late 2021, and by 2022 he was in Mumbai, where his brother-in-law had found him a job at Anna Purna Bhojnalaya in Borivali East, a north-western suburb.

He worked there until last year’s chhath, but grew deeply homesick. “I worked for 730 days straight without a day off,” he says. “At one point, I just wanted to come home.” He has no work in the village.

Sudhir and Bablu, meanwhile, return to the village whenever they are laid off. They take up jobs as labourers in Jaynagar, mixing cement for new houses at ₹300 a day, half of what they earn outside Bihar.

After the pandemic, both brothers headed south: Bablu to Tamil Nadu, and Sudhir to Andhra Pradesh. Bablu says the wages in Delhi and Mumbai remain the same even after working for five-six years, but in the south, one gets paid on a daily basis, without any wrangling, and the rates are “a little more”.

Once a cook, the pandemic demoted Sudhir to loader at a textile factory in Nellore district, earning ₹500 for a 12-hour shift. Within a year, a short-circuit sparked a fire that caused major losses and job cuts. Sudhir was among those let go. He left for Gujarat’s Vadodara to work as a loader in a plywood factory. There he hauls sheets, earning ₹500-700 a day.

The long-awaited call from Annai’s Bakery arrived for Bablu. He boarded the Rapti Sagar Express on 25 May, standing amid the migrants returning to the cities, and reached Erode on 28 May after four days of travel without a single meal. Bhola had booked a train for 18 May to Mumbai but postponed his travel to avoid the overcrowded trains. For Gulli Devi, everything and nothing seems to change.