No Jobs In Villages, Bihar’s Migrants Are Returning To Cities -Parth MN and Umesh Kumar Ray

-IndiaSpend.com

Patna: Balmiki Kumar’s previous and current jobs are vastly different. For five years, Kumar, 33, taught geography at a private school in Hilsa, a town in central Bihar’s Nalanda district. He now works as a plantation labourer under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). That, however, is not the only difference. In his earlier job, he got paid.

“The school shut after the lockdown in March and I lost my job,” Kumar told IndiaSpend on a recent October day in his village of Balrampur, 5 km from Hilsa.

The countrywide lockdown imposed on March 24 to contain the spread of COVID-19 resulted in large-scale job losses in both the formal and informal sectors. Economic activity came to a standstill, triggering an exodus of migrant workers from employment hubs in urban India to their villages. Bihar alone accounted for 14.3% of over 10 million migrant workers who returned to their home states.

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