Let’s not forget

A still from the film showing a migrant worker who lost his job in the pandemic

Working Peoples' Charter (WPC) process is an initiative to bring together all organisations working with, and organising people dependent on the informal sector. It's the lot that has been impacted most severely by the pandemic and resulting lockdowns.

Isha Pungalia

A documentary by WPC's national coordinator, Chandan Kumar, titled Nothing But Our Chains was made during and after the nationwide lockdown. Isha Pungalia, the director, says, "Kumar approached me to collate the footage of relief work done by WPC alliance partners during the lockdown. It included providing ration to out-of-work as well as migrant workers, finding them temporary shelter since many of them had been evicted from their homes, and arranging for transportation back to their home states. The inequality is more apparent now than ever, in how they are seen as dispensable by the dispensation, the middle class and the moneyed."

While it was initially meant to be a sort of archive or record of what had unfolded, to be accessed by anyone, anywhere, it soon became clear to her that this documentary needed context - how and why did the working class find itself in such a situation? Why has this level of vulnerability been normalised? "We changed the plan and decided that this film would discuss the living and working conditions of the working classes, their rights, and the policies that had stripped them of all economic support," she adds.

Several conversations take place in the film. Nirmal Gorana of WPC elaborates on how the central government failed during the pandemic. Gayatri Kotbagi, a psychologist who dived into relief work when she understood the need of the hour, shares screen space with Prabhat Patnaik, an economist, making sense of economic jargon. Ram Nalawade, a former union leader speaks of successful workers' movements he led in the eighties.

What: Nothing But Our Chains
Where www.youtube.com/watch?v= hw46lo9J0 YA&t=7s