In Italy, Punjabi Farmworkers Are Treated as Expendable
After decades working the fields in Italy, Balvir Kumar “Birra” was still paid barely five euros an hour. Killed in an accident last month, his story shows how little value Italy’s vast food industry puts on its workers’ lives.
Migrants workers and their bicycles are seen at the fields of Bella Farnia near a coastal city south of Rome on July 1, 2021. (Filippo Monteforte / AFP via Getty Images)
For the second summer in a row, I find myself writing about Punjabis in Italy under the urge of a tragedy. In 2024, it was the horrible death of Satnam Singh, the farmworker left to die by his employer in Latina. This year, it is the July 18 road accident that took the life of Balvir Kumar “Birra,” who was run over by a car while cycling to the fields where he harvested the same zucchini that arrive so cheap and fresh on our tables.
The case last summer had triggered widespread outrage, both due to its bloody details (Satnam suffered severe wounds after an accident with an agricultural machine) and to the cruelty of his employer (who dumped Satnam’s body in front of his house instead of taking him to the hospital, which resulted in his death). It attracted international attention, being featured on global news and inspiring waves of protests, demonstrations, and police interventions in the area and beyond. Birra’s death, in contrast, passed almost completely unnoticed — dismissed quickly as yet another fatal accident on the Via Pontina, “the most dangerous road of the Lazio region.”
Like Satnam, Birra met his death in the Latina province, south of Rome, where the death rate in road accidents increased by 47 percent from 2019 to 2023, and where agricultural labor is mostly performed by migrant workers, a large share of them Punjabis. Yet Birra’s death — rather like Satnam’s — should not be ignored as a mere accident: it could have been avoided, if only the employers and the state assumed the responsibility of protecting their most vulnerable and essential workers.
Dying for Work
In 2024, I had moved to the Latina province for a few months to conduct my doctoral research on the Punjabi community in Italy. The scarcity of public transportation in this rural setting forces most residents to travel either by car or bike. The main roads are heavily trafficked, with large trucks and cars driving fast, not enough space for passing and no speed checks.
On both sides of these roads, countless migrants cycle to and from the fields where they work (too many hours, for too little payment), day and night, in all weather conditions; they travel without helmets, on the tiny space between the white lines edging the roadway and the fields, protected only by the bright reflective jackets that the local labor unions distribute among them for free. Driving daily to collect interviews and surveys with Punjabi migrants in the area, I remember feeling a constant terror of getting in a road accident with one of them.
Birra was one of the first Punjabi workers I interviewed in the area, though I only got to know his full name after his death. Just six days before he died, I received prasad (sacramental food) from his hands while attending the Sunday liturgy in the temple where he lived and volunteered, cooking and serving food for the community of devotees. Birra was sixty-one years old, came from the village of Salempur near Hoshiarpur in India’s Punjab state, and was married with two children.
He had arrived in Italy at the age of thirty-three, in 1998, simply “kam karan lei” — to work. He was the first of two brothers and five sisters; his father worked as mason, his mother was a housewife. After marriage, his brother-in-law convinced him to go abroad to earn money and helped him pay for the trip. Like many other Punjabis at the time, Birra arrived in Italy “donkey” style — meaning, from India to Russia by air, and from Russia to Italy by road, after paying some thousands of euros to various agents to take him across borders. He had some friends in the Latina province and headed there, where he ended up staying and working in agriculture for the next twenty-seven years.
“Zucchine, in serra: pianto, lego, quando cresce poi raccolgo,” (“Zucchini, in the greenhouses; I plant them, tie them, then when they grow, I harvest them,”) he explained, in the few Italian words he knew despite his long-term residence in this country. He had lived without documents for the first four years until, in 2002, he managed to get regularized. Employers demand that Punjabi migrants like Birra pay large fees simply to get a job contract and the proof of dwelling needed to obtain a residence permit, and make them pay their tax contributions from their own pockets.
The whole regularization process remains opaque to them: as Birra admitted, “I don’t know the details, I don’t understand these things, they do it all by themselves.” With another Punjabi worker, he shared a room provided by his employer, in exchange for which he looked after the employer’s cattle and fields for €700 per month. Of this, he sent €500 back to Punjab to pay back his debts and sustain left-behind family: his daughter is currently pursuing a law degree in college; his son is also studying but wants to go abroad, too.
Birra said he did not want to reunite his family in Italy since the living conditions there were too harsh. He instead aimed to move back to India as soon as he had saved enough money to live comfortably. One year before our interview, Birra had left his flat in town — where he had lived for ten years — because his flatmate’s wife had moved from Punjab and he was told to search for another place. Facing the same housing shortages that all migrant workers in the area complain of, Birra finally found shelter in the temple, where he prayed and did seva (volunteering) daily, being very close to the Baba-ji (priest).
Birra was in fact deeply religious: he used to wear a turban in Punjab but removed it during the journey to Italy to avoid attracting attention, and since then had stopped wearing it. He described his routine thus: “I wake up at 3:30, I get ready, prepare some food for lunch, drink tea, then Baba-ji wakes up, so I pray with him and then at 5:30 I go to work by bike; we start at 6.”
It was indeed 5:30 a.m. when Birra was hit by a car on his way to work and breathed his last on the road; he was cycling, with three colleagues, on a main street perpendicular to Via Pontina, where so many cyclists before him lost their lives in road accidents (and so many more will, if nobody takes action). He was supposed to start harvesting at 6 a.m. in the field where he worked year-round for €5 or €6 per hour, under short-term contracts that declared far fewer hours than those he actually worked.
His coworkers say that he was worried about arriving late to work because the day before, he had left his e-bike at a repair shop and borrowed a regular bicycle to pedal to the field. Moreover, he had been exposed to toxic pesticides without protective gear in the zucchini field two days earlier, and the fumes had left him with breathing problems and high blood pressure. These two details did not emerge in the report, precisely because they make clear that his job conditions and marginal position in Italy played a big role in what happened — making it almost a workplace death rather than a road accident.
It’s Like That
Birra belonged to the Ravidassia-Chamar, a Dalit caste in Punjab, among the most disadvantaged in Indian society. When I asked him about his experience of caste, he replied simply, “I don’t see any difference between people, I believe we all are humans and we live, work, and eat the same.” However, in our wrecked world, it is clear that we do not live, work, and eat the same. When Birra dies on the road, the news mentions only that “a man of Indian nationality, maybe a farmworker, died in an accident.” His story, his character, his life are deemed unworthy of note and ultimately expendable. Nobody will compensate his family for the loss; if anything, his wife will have to pay a large sum to get his lifeless body back to Punjab, where he had hoped to one day return.
He is — according to the Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGIL) union active in the area — the one hundred and fifteenth bike-accident fatality in Italy since the beginning of 2025; many of these are migrants on their way to work. Given the conditions in which they work in the primary sector, with exhausting long days, no protective gear, no sick or paid leave, irregular contracts, low salaries, and abusive gangmasters and employers, their chances of getting into accidents due to fatigue and stress are huge. Who will seek justice for them? Who will prevent others from meeting the same end? Why do the — local, regional, national, global — state authorities systematically fail to protect the lives of those who reproduce life in the first place?
This article is my small testimony to Birra; he will live in the memory of everyone who met him and of his family back home, who now mourns his loss. I will never forget his smiling eyes; his clumsy, swaying walk; his contagious laughter and quick way of speaking, as if he was in a rush to end the sentence; his funny bhangra dance moves; and how he gave a €10 banknote to an eight-year-old girl on her birthday, equivalent to two hours of his hard work. One of his friends — who informed me about his death — remembers him by the few words they used to jokingly tell each other whenever they met: “edda hai” (“it’s like that”). It’s like that, Birra, but it shouldn’t be.