Over 44,000 factories to restart in Maharashtra but where are the workers?

MUMBAI: The state government’s decision to ease the lockdown restrictions for industries has received a huge response with 44,474 manufacturing units self-certifying online to resume operations. However, there is a hitch. Of the total requirement of 9.6 lakh workers, only 5.3 lakh workers have reported to work so far. This, even as the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy pegged unemployment rate for Maharashtra in April at 20.9%.
A Anbalgan, MIDC chief executive officer, said so far 20,000 units have started operations and he is optimistic that many would return to their work sites.
Shweta Damle, foundermember of Habitat and Livelihood Welfare Association which has been helping migrants, said the standing crop back home and school vacations have been reasons for the reverse migration every summer, but now coupled with the lockdown, workers are desperate to reach their villages even if it means on foot.
“Many are deeply traumatized by the indignity that they have been subjected to—thrashed and abused by cops—each time they stepped out. Their living conditions compel them to come out of their matchbox tenements. In fact, the makeshift shelters have been running to half the capacity because these people already had rented tenements with cooking infrastructure. All they needed was assured rations which the government failed to provide,” Damle said.
An office-bearer of the Thane Trans Creek Industries Manufacturing Association said 70% of the workers are migrants living in slums within the estate. “If the government allows industries to resume operations, we could shift them into larger areas ensuring social distancing and sanitisation as against the cramped 10x10 tenements they live in,” he said, adding that the long files of migrants trying to leave the city could be stopped if economic activity is revived in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR).
Across the state, relief shelters till recently housed nearly six lakh migrant workers. Not all of them are keen to stay back though. Balraj Dharmgiddha, an activist, said around 30,000 people from his community (Dalits from Telangana and Karnataka) are spread across MMR and Pune and at least 10,000 are keen to go back. “Most are in construction industry and in road and railway construction work. Many are being pressured by family back home to return,” he said.
MNS chief Raj Thackeray has proposed to the government to publicise the jobs now available and hire locals for the same. “But it remains to be seen if locals will want to take up these jobs in factories,” said an official.