In April this year, Gupath Bag, a migrant worker, hurried back from Chennai to Bagbahal village in western Odisha’s Kantabanji, a municipality that is also an Assembly constituency. His father, who was home alone, had a kidney ailment that had flared up. Bag and his wife’s return came with a set of conditions: two of their teenage daughters would stay back at the brick kiln, while their 16-year-old son had to go to Chennai to make up for the work the couple left behind.
Over the decades, the people of Kantabanji have been eroded into submission by middlemen, who subject women to sexual assault and have in the past cut off the hands of labourers demanding wages. Up to 60 workers have died outside the State, as per a reply tabled in the Assembly in February. Every year, about 2.5 lakh to 3 lakh residents of villages in western Odisha leave the State for work. Though there is no official data, this was the approximate number that returned during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bag’s return coincided with the announcement of Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik’s decision to contest from the Kantabanji Assembly seat, his second, after his traditional Hinjili seat in Ganjam district. The exodus of families had already become the most talked about issue in public discourse, so people were keen to understand what Patnaik’s stand on it was.
