Coronavirus Lockdown Sends Migrant Workers On A Long And Risky Trip Home–NPR

    Over the past week, Indian men and women of all ages, including families and elders, have been migrating out of the urban centers of Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai. Hundreds of thousands are walking back to their villages due to the Covid-19 lockdown throughout India. It is the largest migration of Indians since 1947 when the British colonial power divided British India into India and Pakistan.  

    Because the trains, buses and most ways to move oneself fast are on lockdown, these women and men are walking to their home villages. Walking hundreds of miles. These women and men are the masons, the builders, the wage laborers who have lost their jobs.  They are deeply embedded in the itinerant, precarious, informal labor economy. In one fell swoop, their livelihoods have disappeared; their rents are not payable and so they have been kicked out by their landlords. They have no way to eat, they say. It is horrific to see the videos, to read the articles, and imagine the desperation that is driving so many to walk at great risk to their families. Why are they going back? 

    Because there are deep ties of affinity, of reciprocal gift-giving, of mutual aid between these urban dwellers and their village roots, they are returning back, knowing they can eat and shelter there. One woman, Shiv Kumari, says, “We have been walking for the last five days.”  (See AP Photos: Indian Migrants Walk Hundreds of Miles to Go Home; and this BBC video for more details.)

     It is partly this gift economy that draws them back home. Without government support, they know that they can count on their village relatives to take care of them until they can take care of themselves. The gift economy is a concept we are little aware of as we are ensconced deeply in our more familiar commodified economy, where exchanges of goods and services are mostly traded through the circulation of money. But what do folks do who do not have money to buy their food or pay money for their rent?  They go back home to help their relatives there through their labor, so they, in turn, can be fed. They can help out on the farm; they can contribute somehow to the functioning of the hopefully larger household and be, in turn, cared for. 

    It is the gift economy that the poor rely on when the state fails, when the market economy falls apart, when the monied classes abandon them to their fates. The solidly middle classes who have jobs for somewhat longer, though intensely overworked with their wage jobs, still feel their own delicate, economic, unspoken precariousness.  They may be thinking now as we approach the end of the first month of lockdown of where their gift economy may lie, if the job runs out and the money, too, runs out, as they, too, may have little emergency savings to get through this kind of unprecedented crisis. The excessive monied classes escape to their beautiful, rural retreats with hardly a care or concern, preoccupied with their intense solipsistic focus on their own boredom or even bragging about how much they are enjoying their enforced leisure, of how much time they have to do all the tasks they had put off for so long. Money is abundant around them and they cannot imagine otherwise.  

    We all must begin to revalue the gift economy that surrounds all of us, and yet is invisible from the point of view of the market economy, as we may need to depend on it more and more as well. The gifts of neighbors, the gifts of friends, the gifts of food. Of mutual aid in that old sense, of holding each other up, together.  Look tomorrow, to who you can pass on a gift of time, of work, of food, to help others get by, if you are in the class that has more than enough. See the new film, The Gift, which came out last fall  This film was inspired by the brilliant, classic book, The Gift by Lewis Hyde (1983), a rich exploration of creativity, the artist, and the gift economy. 

     The same pandemic, yet different classes have different experiences, fates and possibilities. Let us watch out for each other. Let us rediscover “our own home village,” both literally and metaphorically, where we can care for each other. 

    In similar ways, the Green New Deal, which we need to enact as soon as we can, is a way to blend our gift economy and our monied economy more deliberately so that all of us are cared for adequately, with green jobs, with green innovations, with green science, with green economies designed with all of us in mind, not just the few of us with too much money and time in our hands.