Yesterday, the Supreme Court of India declined a plea regarding transportation of migrant workers across the country, saying it can’t do anything if people have decided to take the road. How can we stop it?

Today, at least 24 people lost their lives in UP’s Auraiya after a collision between a truck and a lorry.

Which brings me to my point: Someone has to figure out that HOW. 

Before more lives are lost in these cruel journeys, before people forget where they even came from, before it’s too late.

At this point, some might say it is too late already. And that won’t be incorrect.

Right now, the migrant workers have been abandoned by the country which didn’t treat them very well in the first place.

The government isn’t doing enough and the lawmakers have raised their hands, putting the onus back to the states. 

Which is irresponsible considering what has happened so far.

What makes the situation worse is lack of empathy. Making a comment on the Aurangabad accident in which 15 migrant workers lost their lives after being run over by a goods train, the SC said:

How can anyone stop this when they sleep on railway tracks?

Let me give some perspective on this. 

You know what happens when you don’t have money to stay in a big city and no transport to go back home?

You walk. Hungry. Without sleep. In scorching heat. For hours.

You know what that does to people?

It weakens their senses, forcing them to sleep wherever they can. Even a railway track. 

They don’t weigh in the risks because they can’t. Also, when someone is constantly made to believe that their life isn’t important – they sometimes tend to believe it. Obviously nothing matters much then.

Not to mention the fact that they probably didn’t know that some trains were still running. They don’t have access to information because no one cares about communicating things to them.

But of course, the question comes back to that HOW.

Sad that we can’t even give our people dignity in death. That also somehow becomes their fault. It’s the price one pays for being poor.

In this connection, there has been one narrative often quoted by people in power: We are trying, they have to be patient.

Well, clearly they are not trying enough.

In case it is not known, one serving of khichdi received after hours of standing in a queue doesn’t qualify as a meal and roadside cannot be called ‘shelter’.

So ‘patience’ is an audacious choice of word here.

They are supposed to trust the government after this apathy? They are supposed to have confidence in law when it couldn’t protect them from being harassed?

They have no choice in the matter, which says something about a country which has been constantly bringing its people back from different parts of the world.

If those missions can be executed but migrants can’t be sent home within the country, then it must be impossible right?

Is it impossible?

Hunger, exhaustion, exorbitant ticket prices, diseases: These are just few of the many things migrants are fighting on a daily basis and often losing their lives to. 

And it makes me wonder how the government and the lawmakers will look at themselves in the mirror when all of this ends. HOW?