• “Were We Not Promised To Be Free?”
• Divya Subramanian (bio)

Last May, a five-minute BBC Hindi video went viral in India. In the clip, the journalist Salman Ravi interviews a group of migrant workers walking back to their home villages during the Indian government’s nationwide COVID-19 lockdown. Fighting back tears, one of the men recalls being beaten by police along the route. His two young children, groggy from hunger and the heat, sit on a broken bicycle attached to a cart that holds the family’s possessions. When another man, barely in his twenties and holding a sleeping toddler, admits that he is barefoot because his sandals had broken, Ravi gives him the sneakers off his feet.

The journey from Ambala in Haryana, where the migrants in the video set out, to their home villages in Chhatarpur district, Madhya Pradesh, is over 460 miles—roughly the distance from Washington, D.C. to Boston. It takes approximately two weeks to cover on foot. Without food, water, or adequate footwear, it would take much longer.

Images of migrant workers trekking home defined India’s coronavirus response. The government instated the lockdown order on March 24 with only four hours’ notice. To avoid starvation in the cities, hundreds of thousands of migrants packed up and left. Railways were closed, so their only option was to walk in the punishing heat, carrying children and their possessions, their blue surgical masks often the only new item of clothing they wore. While repatriation flights were chartered for migrants abroad, including some of the 8.5 [End Page 157] million Indian workers in the Persian Gulf, it took more than a month to set up special rail services for domestic migrant workers, and many were charged full-price fares— a cruel joke to those who had already exhausted their savings to survive. When the villagers reached home, they faced harassment as potential carriers of disease as well as a stagnant rural economy, with the promise of relief work under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act curtailed by the lockdown.

Two days after the lockdown began, the Modi government introduced a $22.6 billion relief package to provide food, cash, and cooking gas to low-income Indians. The stimulus plan was designed to supplement by 50 percent the existing food grain rations handed out under the Public Distribution System (PDS). Meanwhile, the Food Corporation of India’s excess grain stocks continued to grow, reaching 87.8 million metric tons by May 2020, almost four times the required level of reserves. The Food Corporation is subsidized by the central government; because this subsidy only appears in the budget once the stocks are released, the government keeps the grain in storage to avoid running a fiscal deficit. As a result of this budgeting quirk, more grain spoiled in the four months from January to May 2020 than was distributed in April and May through the government’s COVID-19 relief package. India’s system of welfare provisioning fell short at a moment of acute need, leaving the country’s estimated 100 million migrant workers particularly exposed.

Migrant workers in West Bengal, India, rest at an airport after their flights were canceled following the imposition of a COVID-19 lockdown. (Photo by Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP via Getty Images)

Much of the PDS grain stocks are produced by farmers in Punjab and Haryana. During the Green Revolution in the 1960s, the development of high-yield rice and wheat varietals made these two northern states India’s most productive agricultural region. Thanks to government subsidies established in 1933, farmers are able to sell their crops at a fixed price, shielding them from declining wages and prices caused in part by stagnating yields. Last September a new set of laws were passed that effectively dismantle this subsidy system, leaving crop prices vulnerable to the open market. In response, another type of...

• “我们不被认为是免费的吗？”
• Divya Subramanian（生物）

去年五月，五分钟的BBC印地语视频在印度流行开来。在剪辑中，记者萨尔曼·拉维（Salman Ravi）采访了一群印度政府在全国范围内实施COVID-19封锁期间返回家乡的农民工。其中一名男子回忆起眼泪，以抗击眼泪，沿途被警察殴打。他的两个孩子因饥饿和高温而昏昏欲睡，坐在一辆破损的自行车上，这辆自行车被固定在装有家庭财产的手推车上。当另一个才刚刚二十多岁并抱着一个熟睡中的小孩的男人承认自己是因为凉鞋坏了而赤脚时，拉维就把他的运动鞋脱了下来。

从视频中的移民在哈里亚纳邦的安巴拉出发，到他们在中央邦贾塔普尔区的家乡的旅程超过460英里，大约是从华盛顿特区到波士顿的距离。徒步大约需要两个星期。没有食物，水或适当的鞋类，将需要更长的时间。

迁徙到家的外来务工人员的图像定义了印度的冠状病毒反应。政府于3月24日发布通知，仅发出了四个小时的通知就宣布了封锁令。为了避免城市中的饥饿，成千上万的移民拥挤而离开。铁路是封闭的，所以他们唯一的选择是在炎热的天气中行走，带着孩子和他们的财产，他们的蓝色外科口罩常常是他们唯一穿的新衣服。包机回国是针对国外移民的包机，其中包括8.5的一些[结束页157]在波斯湾，印度有数百万印度工人，花了一个多月的时间为国内农民工建立了特殊的铁路服务，而且许多人都被收取了全价票价，这对那些已经用光了积蓄以求生存的人来说是一个残酷的笑话。当村民回到家中时，他们面临着作为潜在疾病传播者以及农村经济停滞的骚扰，根据《全国农村就业保障法》的承诺，救济工作将受到封锁的限制。

封锁开始两天后，莫迪政府出台了一项226亿美元的救助计划，向低收入的印度人提供食物，现金和炊事用气。刺激计划旨在将公共分配系统（PDS）下发放的现有粮食配给量增加50％。同时，印度食品公司的过量谷物库存持续增长，到2020年5月达到8780万吨，几乎是所需储备水平的四倍。食品公司由中央政府补贴；因为这种补贴仅在库存释放后才出现在预算中，所以政府将谷物保留在仓库中，以避免出现财政赤字。由于这一预算怪癖，从2020年1月至2020年5月的四个月中，变质的谷物数量要多于4月和5月通过政府的COVID-19救济计划分配的谷物。在迫切需要的时刻，印度的福利供应体系不足，使该国估计有1亿的农民工特别暴露。

在实施COVID-19封锁后，印度西孟加拉邦的移民工人的航班取消后，他们在机场休息。（照片由Dibyangshu Sarkar /法新社通过Getty Images拍摄）

PDS的大部分谷物库存是旁遮普邦和哈里亚纳邦的农民生产的。在1960年代的绿色革命期间，高产水稻和小麦品种的发展使这两个北部邦成为印度生产力最高的农业地区。多亏了1933年建立的政府补贴，农民们才能够以固定价格出售农作物，从而使他们免于工资和价格下降（部分原因是单产停滞）。去年9月，通过了一系列新法律，有效废除了该补贴制度，使农作物价格容易受到公开市场的影响。作为回应，另一种...