 The ongoing country-wide lockdown has serious consequences on the socioeconomic conditions of labourers, especially migrant workers in the informal sector. The migrant workers are still struggling to find proper means of transport to reach their homes across India. This is in addition to the exploitation they have been facing from their respective employees in terms of their wages and other support. With wages unpaid and hardly any relief measures from the government, migrant workers in Tamil Nadu are in dire need of help. These workers are depending on the relief materials from the political parties, trade unions and civil society groups to survive this lockdown period. News clips spoke to some of such volunteer groups in Chennai. I am standing in one of the labour camps in which construction workers who were employed inside the campus stayed. This small room that you can see, 15 people live here. During the course of our relief work in Chennai during the lockdown, we were alerted to the plight of 550 migrant labourers employed by the contractor DEC Infra, who had not been paid wages for the work they had done since the first week of March. From the first week of May, the contractor began threatening them that they would not be paid their pending wages and the food that they were given during the lockdown unless they get back to work. The contractor also hoarded rice, dal and oil that the Tamil Nadu government had given them to be distributed to these workers, thus treating them like bonded labourers. Despite our efforts talking to both representatives of DEC and IIT Madras, the issue has not been resolved till now. There are more ongoing construction projects inside IIT. We demand that IIT make public the details of pending wages owed to the workers in all these projects and compensate for the workers, compensate the workers for the injustice done to them by DEC. The response from the workers shows that they are in distress. We are crying for our wives and children. We have been asking for money from our contractor. Where will he give us money if we do not get money from the contractor? That is why we have not been able to send them home. We are waiting for them to return home. We do not know what will happen next. We are not aware of what will happen next. We are not aware of what will happen next. We are not aware of what will happen next. We are not aware of what will happen next. The Modi government has trapped us in lockdown and killed us. They have shut us off from the train and we have no time to go home. We have been sitting here for two months and we have not been able to get any salary to work. What can I do? News click spoke to another volunteer from Chennai Citizens Covid Fund for migrant labourers who helped the workers with their issues. We are part of a volunteer group called the Covid Labour Campaign. We are a multi-group of people who have been coming together on labour issues for a while. But on the specific crisis of the Covid pandemic and the standard migrants issue, we thought we would get into relief work. This was initiated mainly to address the immediate needs of migrant workers in terms of food and shelter. We started raising funds to address the needs. As we went forward, we realised that migrant workers were completely neglected by the state in so many ways. The government began putting forward schemes such as delivery of KG-Rise or KG-Dal, and all these relations with migrant workers. This was something on paper but in reality there was absolutely no delivery of any such ration. It was the volunteer groups who were acting as proxies for the government. Working with the government to ensure that some delivery was possible. When we talk about migrant workers in Tamil Nadu, we are talking about nearly, by the estimate of the government itself, there should be about 12-13 lakhs. And from the estimate of other unions and volunteer organisations who have been working with migrant workers, the estimate should be close to maybe 15 lakhs. The government of Tamil Nadu had permitted construction workers to resume in the third phase of the lockdown. Since the workers were not paid the wages for April, they held protests. And right now, with the lifting of the lockdown with resumption of economic activity, the line that the government is taking that if you go back to work, then your wages will be given. And the pending wages for the work already done would also be given only if you go back to work. And there is no necessity for the government to be taking care of you anymore because you are supposed to work and get your wages now and buy your essential supplies with those wages. But that is not happening at all. Even if workers consent to go to work, their wages are not getting released immediately and these are mostly small and medium-skinned industries which are talking about. So they have all sorts of excuses about lack of working capital, lack of protection, lack of sales, lack of export. So all these are used to simply make migrant workers and workers' life in general more considerable than it already was. And the state government seems to be playing along with it. At the end of the day, I think the priorities which are being shown here. For example, at the same time that migrant workers' shabby claims were supposed to be run, there was a parallel announcement to bring back expatriates from India from who are living abroad back to India. And the Tamil Nadu government itself has right now I think brought back quite a substantial amount of more than 25,000 expatriates have been brought back to Tamil Nadu. And this was done with such efficiency, with such meticulous planning and they are getting quarantined, they are taken care of to a certain extent better than anybody here. Any migrant worker here has been taken care of. So yeah, so there is a vast difference between the priorities that you are seeing and just the fact that the government, even without focusing on the migrant workers, wants to now move on, shift the goalposts to other sections of the population, shows how much they care for the workers, who are dying, who are walking, who are still walking. There are people who are still leaving Chennai and walking towards dark and en masse and to become a complete blind eye to all this shows the priorities of the government and the political building here.