Revision summary
Ethical issues were dignity, abandonment after a freeze, invisible urban labour, unpaid wages, and a lottery of district mercy. A care-giving State is a duty-bearer: food without a local card, planned transport, wages, health and information in the worker’s language. Civil society runs kitchens, compiles lists, gives legal aid and records abuse. It watches the State and must not be asked to replace trains and the treasury. The lesson is to count and house the migrant before the next emergency order.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
The people who built the city were told to freeze, then discovered they had no city. The ethic is dignity, non-abandonment and justice to invisible labour. A care-giving State feeds, moves, pays and treats along the road. Civil society runs kitchens and watches — it does not replace the State.
Body
Stakeholders
- Migrant workers and the families waiting in villages, including those who needed to harvest rabi.
- Origin districts, destination cities, and the dusty stretches in between.
- Employers who held back wages; contractors who vanished.
- District Disaster Relief Force, police, railways, and health workers.
- Civil-society kitchens, gurudwaras, and volunteers.
- The rest of the public that wanted both a lockdown and a quiet pavement.
Ethical issues in the migrant crisis
- Dignity: workers were treated as a viral load to be cleared from a metropolis, not as citizens with names, language and a right to stand in the shade.
- Non-abandonment: a lockdown without trains, wages or food is an order to a person without the means to obey except by walking. That is abandonment dressed as epidemiology.
- Justice to invisible labour: urban welfare (rations, PDS portability, shelters) had long assumed a local, documented poor. The circular migrant was the exception the city lived on and did not count.
- Sudden livelihood death: loss of wage overnight without notice proportional to the harm, while capital and salaried classes logged in from home.
- Family and harvest: the rabi anxiety was not a rumour; it was a peasant calendar the lockdown did not read.
- Uneven district response: some corridors fed and housed; some pushed people to the next border. A Union lockdown with a lottery of mercy is an equality failure (Article 14) as well as a compassion failure.
- Health along the route: COVID risk was real; so was heat, hunger, accident and labour. Ethics does not choose only the virus.
- Communication: orders in a language and a medium (smartphone, e-pass) that the worker did not own.
- Stigma: calling the walker a super-spreader as a class, while needing him back when construction restarted.
- Federal buck-passing: origin, destination and transit States each hoping the column would become someone else’s file.
An ethical care-giving State
- Care-giving here is not a charity slogan. It is the State as a duty-bearer that keeps people alive and unhumiliated when a public order makes ordinary life impossible.
- Food: cooked meals and dry ration without a local ration card as the only key — portability, camps, and schools as kitchens.
- Transport: planned shramik movement, rest, water, and toilets; walking is not a policy. If movement must stop, the stop is housed and fed where the person already is.
- Wages: enforce held-back pay; use disaster funds and, where the law allows, a living stipend so that a worker is not punished for the lockdown the State chose.
- Health: screening without beating; medicines, ORS, maternal care, and no dumping of a positive worker in a ditch.
- Information: loudspeakers, labour-union and contractor lists, a helpline that answers in Bhojpuri and Odia, not only in a PDF.
- Shelter in the destination city as the first default, so that a twelve-hundred-kilometre walk is not the only “choice.”
- Aftercare: return to work when safe, with travel and a job that still exists, not a second abandonment.
- The care-giving State is therefore logistics plus rights: disaster management as if the migrant were a member of the household of the republic.
Civil society — help, do not replace
- Kitchens, water, shoes, phone-charging, and shade on the highway — the immediate body.
- Data: lists of who left which basti, who is missing, who is pregnant; feed the Collector, do not hoard for a grant.
- Volunteers who speak the workers’ language; legal aid for wages; a camera that records a lathi so that the State can be held, not only fed.
- Watch the State: RTI, public hearings, and naming a district that closed a border without a camp. Civil society’s highest ethic here is witness, not a parallel government.
- Do not replace: a langar is necessary and still cannot run a railway. Demanding trains and wages from the government is part of seva.
- Do not communalise care, and do not treat the migrant as a prop for a brand.
- Unions, student groups, and local traders’ associations can keep a payroll honest when the contractor has left.
Lessons for a District Disaster Relief Force
- Count migrants before the next order; register clusters; pre-contract buses.
- Never announce a freeze that implies “go home” without a homeward machine.
- The ethical success is a worker who did not have to walk, or who walked only inside a cared corridor.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD LD[Lockdown] --> MIG[Migrants stranded] MIG --> DIG[Dignity] MIG --> NAB[Non-abandonment] MIG --> JUS[Justice to invisible labour] ST[Care-giving State] --> FTW[Food transport wages health] CS[Civil society] --> KIT[Kitchens data volunteers] CS --> WAT[Watch the State] WAT[WAT] --> ST[ST]
Conclusion
The migrant crisis was a failure of dignity, non-abandonment and justice to the labour the city hides. An ethical care-giving State owes food, transport, wages and health along the route and at both ends. Civil society cooks, counts, translates and watches; it does not become the republic.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Case study. An apparel manufacturing company having a large number of women employees was losing sales due to various factors. The company hired a reputed marketing executive, who increased the volume of sales within a short span of time. However, some unconfirmed reports came up regarding his indulgence in sexual harassment at the workplace. After some time a woman employee launched a formal complaint to the management against the marketing executive about sexually harassing her. Faced with the companies' indifference, in not taking cognizance of her grievances, she lodged an FIR with the police. Realizing the sensitivity and gravity of the situation, the company called the woman employee to negotiate. In that, she was offered a hefty sum of money to withdraw the complaint and the FIR and also give in writing that the marketing executive is not involved in the case. Identify the ethical issues involved in this case. What options are available to the woman employee?
Next question on this syllabus topic (2019 · Q7). View answer →
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Was the lockdown itself unethical?
A lockdown can be a public-health duty. Ethics judges whether the State supplied food, shelter and movement so that the poorest could obey without a death-march.
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Should NGOs have run the entire response?
No. They should feed and witness. Trains, wages and police restraint are sovereign duties. Replacing the State lets the State hide.
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