In Bihar: migrant workers return as LPG refugees

For two weeks Balo Manjhi and nine other construction workers shifted to an unusual task: arranging firewood from nearby forests.

“Every third or fourth day, we’d set out as early as five in the morning. And by noon, each man would return carrying 10-12 kilograms of firewood,” says 55-year-old Balo, sitting on a cot near his house in Arpa panchayat in Bihar’s Nalanda district.

“We would manage to cook for three to four days for 10 people with the firewood we collected,” Balo says, “But, we would make only rice and pulse or vegetables. Because preparing three items meant burning more wood.”

He’s talking about his days working at a construction site in Tambaram, a major suburb of Chennai, Tamil Nadu.

This makeshift solution to the ongoing liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) crisis, devised by Balo and his fellow migrant workers lasted two weeks. “Finding firewood isn’t always possible,” he says.

On April 1, they left for their villages by train. An ordeal of a journey.

The general coaches were overflowing with passengers and for 24 hours they could not find a single seat to rest. Balo, a Dalit from the Musahar community, says: “For 24 hours, we ate nothing. How could we eat while standing?”

The fuel crisis unleashed by the US-Israel war on Iran has devastated migrant informal workers – especially daily wagers in highly industrialised urban areas dependent on fragile incomes to buy cooking gas from private suppliers.

The LPG shortage is forcing many workers to return to their villages – and face the extreme livelihood uncertainty that made them migrants in the first place.

Balo and others explored alternative solutions before leaving Tamil Nadu. None proved effective. For a week they bought LPG at 300 rupees per kg – three times the original price. “But later it was unavailable even at that price,” he says.

So they shifted to a local eatery, but that place soon hiked its prices.

Munna Paswan, 36, another construction worker from Arpa who worked with Balo says: “The chicken and rice that used to cost 90 rupees was suddenly priced at 160. So we stopped eating there.”

Their final way out was to cook over wood; however, in the eight-by-eight-feet room, which Balo and Munna shared with three other workers, that was strictly prohibited.

So they moved to the construction site, where they stayed and cooked over a wood fire for two weeks. Munna Paswan recalls, “We mostly found thorny branches. So while cooking, splinters would often pierce my hands, and the smoke from burning wood would sting my eyes.”

Now Paswan is waiting for gas supplies to resume so he can migrate again.

He says: “In Tambaram, I work as a mason and earn 1,100 rupees a day, but in the village, toiling in the fields fetches only 200-250 rupees. But for the past week, I haven't been able to find even that work.” Paswan is a landless Dalit.

“The entire family [wife and four children] runs solely on my earnings. I don't know how I’ll manage going forward,” a visibly tensed Paswan says.

For Balo Manjhi, migration became a must following the death of his 30-year-old and only son, Karo Manjhi, last year. The responsibility for Karo’s five children and wife fell upon his shoulders.

The government is yet to give Balo Rs. 4 lakh compensation due for Karo’s accidental death by drowning and Rs. 20,000 for his funeral. But strikes by district circle officers – or so he’s been told each time he visits – have held that up for nearly a year.

He had borrowed Rs. 1 lakh from a moneylender to cover expenses on Karo’s funeral rites and rituals. On which he pays Rs. 8,000 interest every month. In Chennai as a helper at a construction site, he earned Rs. 900 daily.

"Those days, I kept up with interest payments. Now, even the interest amount is piling up on my head. The entire burden of the household is mine. Whenever I think about all this, my head spins," says Manjhi.

He is anxious about his family’s food security. “I have to migrate, there’s no other choice,” he says.

But for now LPG, and not the migrants themselves, will decide their fate.