We need many Good Samaritans to transform this nation

What started as a health crisis in the wake of Covid19, has now catapulted to a major humanitarian crisis, where thousands of migrant workers (guest workers), scarred by an economic shutdown that has left them jobless, hungry and penniless, are struggling to return to their villages and families. Images of our migrants trudging across hundreds of kilometres over scorching roads and railway lines are still afresh in our minds. 

As a community, it is our responsibility to take care of our own people. More than the Government, it is the community engagement and involvement that can lift our poor and the downtrodden to a life of hope and dignity. We need to place the poor, the sick, the disabled, the immigrant, the prisoner and all who are marginalized at the center of our social and political agenda. That’s our vision. That’s our dream. That’s our passion. That’s the reason we need civil servants, political leaders, business leaders, religious leaders and social leaders with ‘new values’ at this time of ‘new normal’

Rampukar Pandit, who became a snapshot of India's migrant tragedy with his photograph speaking on the phone on a Delhi roadside, is back in Bihar, broken at not being able to meet his son before he died and despairing about the future."We labourers have no life, we are just a cog in the wheel, spinning continuously until we run out of life," said the man, his name unknown but his face by now familiar to many thousands of people across the nation, according to PTI

The powerful image of the distraught man, struggling to reach home in Begusarai, almost 1,200 km away during the nationwide lockdown, was widely shared across all media, becoming a defining image of the trauma of lakhs of migrant labourers stranded away from home. Many have lost their lives because of accidents, starvation and other calamities. And it seems like their struggles have not yet ended

The society has failed the poor in India . We have collectively failed the more vulnerable stratum of the society – the poor, the migrants, the backward classes, the disabled and the uncared for. 

The most impressive example of the universal spread of care for the sick and dying was the founding of the Red Cross by the Swiss humanitarian Henri Dunant, who was honoured with the First Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. The religious influence of Dunant’s pious parental home in Geneva and the shocking impression he received on the battlefield of Solferino in June 1859 led him to form the Red Cross. 

We need many such Good Samaritans to transform our land to a land of compassion and care.