‘40% of kids from migrant families don’t go to school’

More Likely To End Up Working, Getting Exploited: Unesco

Eighty per cent of migrant children across seven Indian cities did not have access to education near worksites even as 40% of children from seasonal migrant households are likely to end up working rather than being in school, facing exploitation and abuse, according to the Unesco’s 2019 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) report. In the period between 2001 and 2011, inter-state migration rates doubled in India. Further, an estimated 9 million people migrated between states annually from 2011 to 2016. But many people are also moving for seasonal work. In 2013, 10.7 million children aged between 6 and 14 lived in rural households with a family member who was a seasonal worker. This is particularly common within the construction industry. A survey of 3,000 brick kiln workers in Punjab found that 60% of kiln workers were interstate migrants. The Unesco report also urges policy makers to strengthen public education for rural migrant children living in slums. The report shows that the scale of seasonal migration has a significant impact on education. Among youth aged 15 to 19 who have grown up in a rural household with a seasonal migrant, 28% identified as illiterate or had an incomplete primary education. India, along with China, is home to some of the world’s largest internal population movements and the report highlights the steps India has taken to address it and challenges that remain. The report will be released on Tuesday. While warning of the negative impact on education for children who are left behind as their parents migrate, the report acknowledges the initiatives that India has taken to respond to the migrants’ education needs. The Right to Education Act in 2009 made it mandatory for local authorities to admit migrant children. National-level guidelines were issued, allowing for flexible admission of children, providing transport and volunteers to support with mobile education, create seasonal hostels and aiming to improve coordination between sending and receiving districts and states. The report also notes how Indian states have responded to the issue. Gujarat introduced seasonal boarding schools to provide migrant children with education and collaborated with NGOs to begin online tracking of the children on the move. In Maharashtra, village authorities called upon volunteers to provide after-school psychosocial support to children who had been left behind by migrating parents. Tamil Nadu provides textbooks in other languages to migrant children. Odisha assumed responsibility of seasonal hostels run by NGOs and works with Andhra Pradesh to improve migrant well-being. However, challenges remain. The report notes that most interventions are focused on keeping children in home communities instead of actively addressing the challenges faced by those who are already on the move. Furthermore, not all initiatives are successful. Manos Antoninis, director of the report, said: “As the number of people living in and around cities continues to grow, we need to respond to the education needs of those in slums. Without the data,

Source: Times of India, 20/11/2018

The long march: on migrants march to USA

CaravanaMigrante puts issues in the U.S. mid-term elections in sharp relief

The winding caravan of more than 7,000 migrants from Central America through Mexico has become such a political hot potato that it is likely to thrust the immigration issue to the forefront of the U.S. mid-term elections, barely two weeks away. Already, President Donald Trump, who has not been shy about translating his conservative views on immigration into harsh policy measures, has fuelled fears that the caravan may harbour terrorists from West Asia; he has also attacked Mexico for not stopping the “onslaught”. This, besides the usual sloganeering around “illegal immigration” that will purportedly steal American jobs and threaten the security of an otherwise peaceful American society. In truth, most members of this caravan, not by any means the first of its kind but certainly one of the largest in recent history, are either economic migrants seeking escape from grinding poverty in places like Honduras or fleeing persecution, trafficking or gang violence in the region. Unlike previous such caravans, whose members numbered in the hundreds and which dissipated along the way or upon reaching the border, this one has gathered momentum from sheer media attention and support from advocacy groups. It is not going away any time soon. This puts candidates from both the major parties in the U.S. in a tricky position. Democrats are wary of committing too much political currency to the caravan or undocumented migration as a phenomenon, given the prevailing mood in the country. And the Republican mainstream harbours concerns about the strident anti-immigrant rhetoric against the caravan, and what it stands for, emboldening far-right groups associated with racism and Islamophobia.

At the heart of the shrill debate on immigration is the weight of history. Americans can never get away from the fact that they are and will probably always be a nation of immigrants. As President, Barack Obama took a hard line on undocumented worker deportations, whose number soared through his two terms in office. But he sought to toe a moderate line when it came to delaying the deportation of childhood arrivals, and policed borders with a relatively light touch. Mr. Trump, contrarily, has made every effort to deliver on his radical campaign promise to ban Muslims from entering the U.S., although he faced numerous legal setbacks in that mission, and then made even immigration hawks squirm over his decision to separate undocumented child migrants from their families. Ultimately #CaravanaMigrante will seek to cross that line in the sand which Mr. Trump and his supporters hope will one day become a high wall. Liberal-progressive Americans who hope that these asylum-seekers will not be rudely rebuffed at that point will have to regroup and focus their energies on the November campaign and use any newfound power they win in Congress to chip away at the immigration agenda of the Trump machine.

Source: The Hindu, 25/10/2018

Lip service to labour rights

The exodus of migrant labour from Gujarat highlights the indifference of States to their well being and rights

Gujarat is one of the top States in India that receive migrant workers, largely temporary and seasonal, on a large scale. In Gujarat, they work in unskilled or semi-skilled jobs in a wide range of activities such as in agriculture, brick kilns and construction work, salt pans and domestic work, petty services and trades (food and street vending) as well as in textiles and garments, embroidery and diamond cutting and polishing, small engineering and electronics and also small and big factories.

Scant data

These workers are from Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and even from as far as Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Assam and Karnataka. Employers send contractors to distant unexplored places to gather labour at the lowest possible wage rate. For example, a new township in Gujarat being promoted by a large industrialist is to be built with workers from Assam. Surprisingly, the Gujarat government has no data on/estimates of migrant workers coming to Gujarat. Informally, the figures are estimated to be between 40 lakh to one crore.

Segmenting the labour market and creating a separate labour market for migrant workers — who are easy to exploit — has been a common strategy of employers across India. The pathetic conditions migrant workers face have been widely documented. They earn low wages, work very long hours without any overtime benefits, and are almost without any leave or social protection. Lakhs of unskilled and migrant workers live on worksites in makeshift huts (usually made of tin sheets) or on roads, slums and in illegal settlements not served by municipalities. They are neither able to save much to improve their conditions back in their home States nor save enough to live comfortably in Gujarat. They go back home only once or twice to celebrate festivals. Semi-skilled workers with some education and skills (such as those in diamond cutting and polishing units, power looms and factories) get slightly higher wages and earn some leave. However, these workers are also exploited in multiple ways and are mostly unprotected. Factory owners, employers and traders are only too happy with such a situation as they earn huge profits from wage labour exploitation.

Embers of resentment

Local workers resent the presence of migrant workers who they feel take away their jobs in factories and other places on account of being cheap labour. The recent attacks on migrant labour after an incident in Gujarat late last month, involving the sexual assault of a 14-month-old girl, allegedly by a migrant labourer from Bihar, appears to be have been a consequence of this resentment. Many migrant workers have now rushed out to their home States out of fear despite several local people having been taken into custody on the charge of inciting violence against migrant workers. There have been reports of an estimated 60,000 to more than a lakh workers leaving the State. Those who have stayed back now live under constant fear.

The exodus is cause for concern as it is bound to impact Gujarat’s growth and create resentment among factory owners and other employers, especially at a time when the general election is drawing close.

Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani has blamed the Opposition for inciting locals to push out migrants while the latter have accused him of not stopping the migration. Some have even demanded his resignation. The anger on both the sides is essentially more out of fear that losing cheap labour will be at the cost of Gujarat’s prosperity than out of genuine concern for the welfare of migrant workers. The signals from the top leadership of the Chief Minister’s party are “to bring the situation back to normal”. This would also avert a crisis in the migrants’ home States which would have to cope with an army of the unemployed.

All this shows the utter indifference of States to the well being of migrant workers and their rights. The Gujarat government wants normalcy to return so that migrant workers can toil for the prosperity of Gujarat, while the Bihar government, which is at its wit’s end trying to manage the sudden inflow of returning migrants, wants migration to Gujarat to continue as before. It is not surprising that Uttar Pradesh has lauded the Gujarat government “for handling the situation well”.

Only on paper

Under the Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act and other labour laws (for unorganised workers), migrant workers in Gujarat are legally entitled to all their basic labour rights. These include minimum wages, regular wage payment, regular working hours and overtime payment, and decent working and living conditions which include taking care of the health and education of their children.

Under the same Act, the governments of the States from where migrant workforce originate are expected to issue licences to contractors who take workers away, register such workers and also monitor their working and living conditions in other States. But most State governments remain indifferent to these laws. Gujarat has taken a few steps but these are far from adequate. In the political sphere, there has been hardly any mention about protecting the legal rights of migrant workers in India. The political impulse has been to maintain status quo — the continuation of the situation where migrant workers are exploited.

The Gujarat government passed a rule in the 1990s making it mandatory for industries and employers in Gujarat to give 85% of jobs to local people. This rule was never really implemented in reality, but watered down by the State government in its subsequent industrial policies, as new and large investors coming to the State did not like any such restrictions. Now there is a move in the State to introduce a law for industries and investors in Gujarat which reserves 80% of labour jobs for State domiciles and at least 25% for local workers. But those behind the idea are perhaps fully aware of the futility of such a move. As long as there are huge surpluses from the labour of migrant workers, employers will have no incentive in hiring local workers. The objective of such a move is to perhaps contain the anger of local workers — at least till the 2019 election.

A way out

In the end, the real solution to this issue would be to enforce all relevant labour laws for migrant workers so that segmentation of the labour market becomes weak, and workers (local and migrant) get a fair and equal deal in the labour market. This will also weaken unfair competition between local and migrant labour and enable migrant workers either to settle down in the place of destination or to go back home and make a good living there. But are State and Central governments genuinely interested in improving the conditions of workers in the economy?

Indira Hirway is professor of economics and Director, Centre For Development Alternatives, Ahmedabad, Gujarat

Source: The Hindu, 22/10/2018

A new Other

In Gujarat, violence against migrants represents a reconfiguration of the state’s ideological repertoire.

The rape of a 14-month-old child in Gujarat’s Sabarkantha district, allegedly by a migrant from Bihar, has led to threats and mob violence on Hindi-speaking north Indian migrants in the state. It is widely believed that the promotion of nativist sentiments through a speech by Alpesh Thakor, a Congress party MLA in Gujarat and convener of the Gujarat Kshatriya Thakor Sena (GKTS), played a role.

While the Gujarat High Court has appointed a judge to fast-track the trial of this rape case, at least 50,000 migrants, mainly belonging to Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, have left from various parts of Gujarat but mostly from northern Gujarat districts of Sabarkantha and Mehsana. In the last couple of weeks, the police has arrested more than 300 people for mob violence.

This escalation of aggressive nativism relates to economic frustrations due to the job market. It exposes fault-lines in the state’s much-hyped economic model known for its “Vibrant Gujarat” summits, Special Economic Zones and its solid infrastructure facilities such as power and road transportation.

Vibrant Gujarat summits are not making adequate impact on the ground. While Memoranda of Understandings (MoUs) worth more than 20 lakh crore were signed in the 2011 summit, less than 10 per cent of this amount has actually been invested. The Gujarat government has stopped revealing the total investment figure. Not only have actual investments diminished, but they have not created many jobs. In the Socio-Economic Review of 2017-18 by the Gujarat government, it is reported that from January 1983 till July 31 2017, investments worth 2.75 lakh crore have resulted in only 11 lakh jobs through 6, 251 projects.

Over the last decade, the “Gujarat model” is generating more jobless growth because of the promotion of mega projects, which are capital intensive, at the expense of the SMEs, which are more labour intensive. This strategy has something to do with the rise of crony capitalism in the state, at the expense of its traditional entrepreneurial ethos, which the transition of the Patels from farming to industry exemplified in the 20th century.

Micro, small, and medium scale enterprises have been the key provider of jobs in Gujarat employing more than 6 million people according to the NSSO’s 73rd round survey in 2015-16. While the Patels and Jains command dominance in the MSME sector with more capital-intensive units, communities like the OBCs — to which the Kshatriya-Thakors belong — have remained restricted to micro enterprises with lower capital. MSMEs, particularly the micro units, have been most hit by the Modi government’s economic decisions such as demonetisation and by the banking crisis resulting from the decline of the cooperative banks as well as the rise of NPAs.

The growth rate of its industry has made Gujarat one of the most attractive states for migrants from UP, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar. According to the Economic Survey 2016-17, net migration among the 20 to 29-year-old group to Gujarat, stood at nearly 3.5 lakh, which was one of the highest among Indian states. Migrants were prepared to work at lower wage rates and for longer work hours, the feeling of deprivation among the native Gujarati population grew as joblessness increased. Sections of the Patels are asking for the OBC status in order to have access to job quotas, but to no avail.

While violence against the migrants has started in North Gujarat, it has slowly spread to working-class colonies and factories in urban Gujarat at large and the most striking case has probably been Surat city, where a mill-worker from Bihar was allegedly lynched by a mob on October 12 (the police has contested this claim). According to the Migration and its impact on Cities report (2017) by World Economic Forum (WEF), Surat had one of the fastest population growth rates among Indian cities amounting to 55-60 per cent every decade from the 1980s due to internal migration. There are 6 lakh Odiya migrants working in the textile and diamond sectors for instance. From 2001 to 2011, Surat district’s urban population grew by 65 per cent which was a staggeringly high figure vis-à-vis Gujarat’s urban population growth at 36 per cent and the national average of 32 per cent.

The purging of migrants in Gujarat also reflects a transformation in the ideological repertoire of the state. Gujarat has had a strong regionalist tendency as evident in the Maha Gujarat movement which led to the separation of Gujarat from Bombay province on a linguistic basis in 1960.

In the 1980s-90s, the Narmada Bachao Andolan was labelled by both the Congress and the BJP as “anti-Gujarat” because it opposed a dam that would make the river the “jugular vein” of the state’s development. This strong regionalist identity acquired an ethno-religious flavour in the 2000s, when Narendra Modi coupled Hindutva with developmentalism in his definition of the Gujarati asmita. He then projected himself as the protector of the Gujaratis — mostly defined as the Hindus who spoke the local idiom — against both Pakistani Islamists and the UPA government dominated by the Nehru family, which, according to him had never done justice to the Gujarati leaders, including Vallabhbhai Patel.

In current times, regional pride has given space to the kind of nativism the Shiv Sena fostered against South Indians and then North Indians in Bombay/Mumbai. A few days before the rape of a girl child in Sabarkantha, Vijay Rupani had promised to bring a law that would have made it mandatory for firms to employ Gujaratis in at least 80 per cent of its total workforce. This policy — which would imply a definition of “Who is a Gujarati” — not only contradicts the nationalist commitments of the BJP but is also surprising given that the Gujarati community has settled in various parts of the world — such as Africa, UK, USA — for centuries for socio-economic mobility.

Alpesh Thakor is designing a new social coalition which, although it includes Muslims and Christians, rejects the “non-Gujaratis” — especially the Hindi-speaking migrants, who may or may not vote in the state. He is portraying the natives as the victims of development with the construction of migrants as their “other”, creating a new fault-line. In the past, the BJP had portrayed Muslims as the other and, in particular, as the enemies of the Dalits to bolster Hindu unity underpinned by the rising unemployment due to the closure of textile mills where Muslims and Dalits were labourers. Whether Thakor’s strategy will work remains to be seen. In 2012 the Kannadiga pride movement in Karnataka had led to the mass exodus of Northeast migrants from Bangalore without impacting the electoral process.

If the Congress needs an alternative to the brand of identity politics the BJP is exploiting, class may be sufficient, given the rise of inequalities in a state where the number of families living below the poverty line is increasing.

Jaffrelot is senior research fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s India Institute, London. Laliwala is an independent researcher on Gujarat’s politics and history based in Ahmedabad.

Source: Indian Express, 22/10/2018

Indiscriminate discrimination

The tools of prejudice, once unleashed, do not differentiate one community from another

U.S. President Donald Trump, in his address to Congress, may have denouncedthe killing of Indian engineer Srinivas Kuchibhotla in Kansas, but it is hard to ignore that his own polarising presidential campaign has directly led to the current intolerant climate in the U.S.

On the surface, this killing may seem like a case of mistaken identity. In a misguided stab at self-preservation, some NGOs have recommended to the Hindu community in the U.S. that they should appear more “assimilated” or highlight their identity. But doing so would be to ignore a crucial lesson from this tragedy: the tools of prejudice, once unleashed, can be indiscriminating in choosing their targets.

Historical persecution

The first Indian migrants to reach the U.S. understood this lesson well. Arriving in the beginning of the 20th century, they faced severe persecution and bigotry. For decades before their arrival, American society had been perfecting the mechanisms of oppression against various communities: the Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, African-Americans and Native Americans. Now these tools could be turned against the Indians.

The first wave of Indian migrants to the U.S. was a few thousand in number, consisting mostly of unskilled farmers from Punjab and former soldiers of the British empire. Making their way via Canada, these migrants first arrived in Washington where they found work in the lumber industry. Just months after their arrival, they became the target of resentment from white workers who were afraid of cheap Asian labour. On September 5, 1907, a mob of several hundred white people rounded up about 700 Indian workers and forced them to leave the town of Bellingham. Two months later, 500 Indian workers were similarly driven out of the town of Everett. Indian workers in Tacoma were attacked by another mob, although in this case they managed to fight back.

The total number of Indians in Washington could not have been more than 2,000, which was hardly an economic challenge to the state’s population of over one million at the time. Yet the xenophobic mob was quick to act and could do so with impunity because it was an established practice in the state for over two decades. It had begun in 1885, when 500 Chinese workers were similarly driven out of Tacoma.

Marginalisation of Indians was widespread. They were not allowed into local unions or churches. In many towns, local real estate agents refused to sell them property. Collectively referred to as Hindus — although most early migrants were Sikh — they were mocked by the media. Several local politicians and officials openly endorsed violence against them to keep “the East Indian on the move”. Immigrants from other parts of Asia had been facing such persecution for many years; Indians were just added victims.

By the turn of the decade, most Indians had been driven out of Washington. Along with new immigrants, they made their way to California, where the Indian population reached close to 3,000. However, here too, the forces of racism greeted them. A pre-existing ‘Japanese and Korean Exclusion League’ was quickly renamed as the ‘Asiatic Exclusion League’ and its members trained their guns on Indian immigrants. “Wholesale landings of large number of Hindoos” was widely decried.

Racial theories

At first, Indians proved to be a challenge to the half-baked racist ideologies prevalent at the time. South Asians were believed to be of “Aryan descent”, the same as Europeans. But this obstacle was quickly overcome. Racist propaganda admitted that the Americans were distant cousins of northwestern Indians. However, “our forefathers pressed to the West, in the everlasting march of conquest, progress and civilisation. The forefathers of Hindus went east and became enslaved, effeminate, caste-ridden and degraded,” one exclusionist leader wrote. Partly due to such propaganda, by 1917, immigration from India and other Asian countries was practically barred.

These absurd racial theories reached their crescendo over the struggle for naturalised citizenship. In 1922, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that “white persons” eligible for American citizenship had to be of the Caucasian race. The decision was aimed at excluding the Japanese. Indians, hoping to circumvent the ruling, made the case that “high-caste Hindu, of full Indian blood” were, in fact, Caucasian. In 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that intermarriages between Aryan invaders and “dark-skinned Dravidians” over the centuries had destroyed the purity of Aryan blood in India. Hence, Indians could not be considered as “free white persons” and given American citizenship. In 1926, the Indian central legislature banned Indian citizenship to American citizens in response. However, it was little more than a symbolic gesture.

Over the next decade, the U.S. government used the Supreme Court ruling to strip citizenship of many Indians who had been naturalised. The ruling was reversed only in 1946, allowing a hundred Indians to immigrate to the U.S. every year. But it was not until 1965, when American immigration laws were reformed, that the second wave of Indian migration to the U.S. could begin.

Tools of prejudice

The hostility that early Indian migrants to the U.S. faced was not due to their actions or the history of their country of origin. It was a mechanism already in place, actively oppressing other communities for decades. Given the circumstances, it was almost natural that the hostility would turn on Indians when they reached American soil. It is ironic that discrimination, when choosing its victims, can be highly indiscriminate. In early 20th century U.S., the same forces of oppression that targeted Indians were also persecuting other communities. It is this history that’s in a way, tragically, illuminating today.

Sandeep Bhardwaj

Sandeep Bhardwaj is with the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi

Source: The Hindu, 6-03-2017

The Centre must make social benefits portable to help migrants

The story is old but worth retelling. Every year several thousand tribal families from south Chhattisgarh are forced to migrate to cities in Andhra Pradesh (AP), thanks to the ongoing battle between the Maoists and the security forces in the state. When they land in AP, they are picked up by contractors and made to work at salaries way low the legal minimum pay because they are not from that state. This, however, is not the only challenge. These poor people also have no access to food via the public distribution system (PDS), schools and health system because these rights are not portable yet in India. The same is the fate of the thousands of others who move from one end of the country to another in search of employment. These migrants depend either on their employer or labour contractor for food provisions or purchase food in the open market. This significantly increases their cost of living and reduces the additional earnings they might hope to remit to their families, say experts. The latest Economic Survey (ES) points to a dramatic spike in internal migration with Delhi and the NCR being the top destinations. Between 2011 and 2016, close to nine million migrated between states annually, up from about 3.3 million suggested by successive censuses, says the survey.But the long sufferings of migrant workers in India could be a thing of the past if the government accepts the recommendations of a panel that looked into the working conditions of migrants. In its report, submitted last month to the ministry, the panel headed by Partho Mukhopadhyay, senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, has pushed for portability of the PDS benefits across the fair price shop system, affordable housing options and setting up of a migrant helpline to provide information about protections and benefits available to them. Under the PDS, ration cards are invalid in their work state. The panel has recommended “expanding” and “accelerating” portability of the PDS as well as healthcare benefits within states with appropriate technology and universal coverage. The panel was set up by the housing and urban poverty alleviation ministry.This report should be the first step towards making rights portable. People should be allowed to access their social entitlements — the PDS grain, etc — from anywhere in India. This shouldn’t not be difficult to put in place with the help of technology.

Source: Hindustan Times, 20-02-2017

Migrants could get a job in any state as domicile quotas may go

Cut off from subsidised ration. Deprived from welfare schemes. Harassed and assaulted for just being “outsiders”.

But the long sufferings of migrant workers in India could be a thing of the past if the government accepts the recommendations of a panel that looked into the working conditions of millions of people who move to other states in search of better opportunities.

In India, migrants constitute approximately 29% of the workforce but are often cut off from government schemes including the benefits of subsidised ration in fair price shops.

Besides, they also face harassment in many states such as Maharashtra where strong anti-outsider sentiments have led to attacks on migrant workers over fears of them usurping job opportunities of local residents.

In its report submitted last month to the ministry, the panel headed by Partho Mukhopadhyay, senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, has pushed for portability of public distribution system (PDS) benefits across fair price shop system, affordable housing options and setting up of migrant helpline to provide information about protections and benefits available to them.

Under the PDS, ration cards are invalid in their work state. The panel has recommended “expanding” and “accelerating” portability of PDS as well as healthcare benefits within states with appropriate technology and universal coverage.

The panel was set up by the Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation ministry.

“Many argue that the provisions outlining domicile/minimum duration of local residence are required in order to protect local workers. But these arguments are ill-founded and mischievous…What is needed are strong regulations pertaining to wages and conditions at work, which would prevent all workers -- local or migrant -- from being exploited,” said Indrajit Roy, research fellow, Department of International Development, University of Oxford.

Roy, the principal investigator of University of Oxford’s study titled Lives on the Move said that some states are already ahead on the curve.

“For example, Punjab is one of the states to have instituted a migrant welfare board and Kerala inaugurated an inter-state migrant worker scheme, implemented through the Kerala construction workers’ welfare fund.”

The 2017 Economic Survey report has also recommended portability of PDS benefits.

“These migrants depend either on their employer or labour contractor for food provisions or purchase food in the open market. This significantly increases their cost of living and reduces the additional earnings they might hope to remit to their families,” Roy said.

The ministry is yet to take a call on the working group’s report.

“Implementing these recommendations is easier said than done. It is the states, which will have to implement them and they may not agree because of political pressures,” said a government official.

Source: Hindustan Times, 20-02-2017

A combination of aspiration and desperation is fuelling migration in India

The latest Economic Survey (ES) points to a dramatic spike in internal migration with Delhi and the NCR being the top destinations.

Between 2011 and 2016, close to nine million migrated between states annually, up from about 3.3 million suggested by successive censuses, says the survey.

Among the states that send the highest number of migrants to these places, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar top the list. They are followed by Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir and West Bengal.

In an interview to HT, Indrajit Roy, Principal Investigator of University of Oxford’s study Lives on the Move, talks about what triggers such high migration and why it is now absolutely critical to make social and political rights of citizens portable.

KD: India is on the move. Is it a good or bad thing?

IR: Well, the short answer is that ‘it depends’. What does it depend on? The circumstances and the nature of migration. Migration in general is to be welcomed and there are indications that migration in India helps people to exit from hierarchical social relationships. However, much of the migration in India, especially related to work and employment, is circular — which means people don’t find enough social and economic opportunities outside of their home localities and must fall back on these for sustenance. You have in India a perverse sort of mobility, an ‘immobile mobility’: Individuals are mobile but their households remain immobile.

Migration is good because it might improve people’s economic condition. More importantly, migration and mobility enables people to escape local oppression and lead dignified lives, further their social networks, learn new skills and disseminate social and political ideas. This is the reason that statesmen such as BR Ambedkar argued that Indians should be more mobile than he found them to be. Mobility, if motivated by a desire to exit caste hierarchies and to aspire to better lives, can be emancipatory.

It is often said that migration will disrupt the village way of life, thus destroying a civilisation. These fears are ahistorical. India’s so-called ‘village way of life’ was a product of colonial rule that encouraged the country’s ‘peasantisation’. Disrupting this ‘way of life’ only disrupts a colonial creation, not Indian civilisation.

Concerns about mobility are also motivated by a desire to keep ‘people in their place’. Look at the way migrant workers are treated in Delhi and Mumbai: They are almost considered to be ‘not human’. Bal Thackeray once said one Bihari brought with him a 100 headaches. I believe caste hierarchies inform elite suspicion of mobility and migration, especially by Dalitbahujans, in a major way. Anti-caste struggles over the last two centuries have weakened the caste hierarchy considerably. Migration is one of the ways of diminishing the hold of caste on people’s lives further.

However, if mobility is forced due to economic distress, civil unrest and political persecution, it signals a problem. One is not here talking only of physical coercion, but also extreme conditions of destitution and exclusion. In such circumstances, mobility is far from the panacea and might even exacerbate existing social and economic hierarchies.

In India, fragmented landholdings in the countryside make it imperative for people to combine agricultural work with work outside of that sector, the 2011 census reported an absolute decline in the number of cultivators across India. This might have been good news, except that the number of agricultural labourers increased during precisely this period .

Informal employment remains in the region of a whopping 92% .

To make matters worse, inequality is at an all-time high and we have a long way to go before the per capita incomes of the States even begin to converge, as the Economic Survey itself notes in the report (Chapter 10).

This combination of aspiration and desperation results in internal migration in India, at least for employment at the poorer end of the spectrum, being ‘circular’: one estimated - reported in the Economic Survey (page 267) suggests there are 100 million circular labour migrants in India.

This means 100 million people traverse the length and breadth of India, seeking dignified lives and livelihoods, working for a few months at different locations throughout the year, and then returning because of limited opportunities.

Throughout this time, their families remain home - circular labour migration is a mostly male thing. Although economic remittances do contribute to migrant households being less dependent on local elites, the fact remains that at the end of the day, migrant workers and their families remain rooted to their villages.

During their iterations, migrant workers have no access to their social entitlements or their political rights.

Thus, India today is witness to both impulses. On the one hand, people seek to exit oppressive social hierarchies and lead dignified lives as equals. On the other hand, poverty and inequality continue to blight the lives of an overwhelming majority. People trying their best to lead dignified lives and exit social hierarchies. But there are simply not enough opportunities for them - either in their ‘source locations’ or their ‘destinations’.

KD: Your ongoing research in migration is based in Bihar. What’s triggering migration from that state?

IR: Our research shows that the quest for dignified livelihoods is an important motivating factor for people leaving Bihar. I want to insist on ‘dignified livelihoods’: there is employment available locally, but many labourers, the majority of whom are Dalitbahujans, will refuse to work for farmers or landlords who practice caste discrimination.

Our research assistants tell us of labourers who, during the 1970s and 1980s, fought with local employers because they were not being paid on time or because they faced caste discrimination. Refusing to tolerate continued oppression, they left for dignified work as far as Punjab when agricultural opportunities were available. But more than incomes, people justified their going to Punjab on the grounds that they were treated with respect and dignity there: “Sardarji sits on the same cot as us” or “We are offered food in the same utensils that everyone else eats in”.

Remember this was the time the Bihar socialists had been really campaigning along themes of izzat and samman. Under Lalu Yadav’s regime, migrant workers felt confident that local landlords (the dabang people) would not harm their families.

Over the last few years, Punjab’s popularity has declined and people look to Delhi and the southern States for work. A recent survey we did in 10 districts of Bihar reveals that while 40% of all migrant workers flock to Delhi for work, as many as 22% seek work in the southern States. Clearly, economic opportunity is important - but not the only thing they are looking for- for example, there was not a great deal of enthusiasm regarding Gujarat and Mumbai, the hubs of economic growth although - yes - Delhi is deemed as welcoming.

KD: What kinds of policies are required to ensure a better life for migrants?

IR: Social and political rights in India are based on the assumption that people are sedentary. Under the public distribution system (PDS), people’s ration cards are invalid in their destinations of work. These migrants depend either on their employer or labour contractor for food provisions or purchase food in the open market.

This significantly increases their cost of living and reduces the additional earnings they might hope to remit to their families. The only social support their families possess is the compensation offered by the state in case of death at work. Because migrant workers are mostly in informal employment and dotted across several sectors and industries, they have little organised space to voice their grievances or articulate complaints.

Migrants’ voting rights are also restricted to their villages – what the census calls their ‘usual place of residence’ (UPR) – despite the fact that they give the best part of their working lives to the city. On the one hand, this reduces their ‘value’ to the destination locality’s politicians, who do not need their votes to win elections.

And on the other, it sees them excluded from the electoral process when they are unable to go back to their homes during election time to cast their votes. A study conducted by the NGO Ajivika and their partners revealed that over 60% of itinerant migrants were unable to cast their votes in at least one election for the simple reason that they were away from home.

Taking cognisance of this mobility, the state should consider making social and political rights portable. People should be allowed to access their social entitlements - the PDS grain, etc - from anywhere in the country. This government loves digital technologies and should use such technologies to serve the circular labour migrants who build India.

Moreover, NRIs are being the given the right to vote, irrespective of where they live. Surely, the Indians who labour to construct, manufacture and service India deserve that right no matter where they live.

Source: Hindustan Times, 7-02-2017