This a continuation of the Labour Notes South Asia (LNSA) dispatches | We also hope to build a partial archive of posts from the original LNSA mailing list (2000 to 2019) (see list URL) | See archived posts 2004-2005 | [the full webarchive of the list is now unavailable as it has been permanently removed by yahoo on Dec 2019]
Territories and borders
demarcated by nation-states are most authoritative but they are not the
only borders that exist. There are other invisible borders that belong
to communities
Udayan Das
Published 21.06.23, 07:55 AM
A view of Katchatheevu island in Sri Lanka.
An uninhabitable 163-acre island called
Katchatheevu in the Palk Strait comes to life every year for a couple of
days in March. This Sri Lanka-administered island hosts the annual
festival at St Anthony’s Shrine, the revered patron saint of the
seafaring communities belonging to India and Sri Lanka.
However, Katchatheevu is not emblematic of
cross-border socio-religious bonhomie only. It also lies at the heart of
a festering dispute between India and Sri Lanka. Every year, an
increasing number of Indian fishermen are arrested and their boats
seized by the Sri Lankan navy on account of the violation of the
maritime boundary. The same is also true for Sri Lankan fishermen in
Indian waters.
Katchatheevu is a legacy of the Empire that
was handed over to India and Sri Lanka. In 1974, the median line was
followed to settle maritime boundaries between the two nation-states;
Katchatheevu was marked on the Sri Lankan side. India’s decision then
to settle the boundary dispute and accept Sri Lankan sovereignty over
the island was seen as a befriending gesture for a more stable and
favourable South Asian environment. In 1976, a second agreement defined
the nature of sovereign rights and exclusive jurisdiction along this
settled boundary.
Why then does the fishers’ dispute continue?
In this case, the maritime boundary, which is an extension of the state
territory, disrupts a more traditional fishing ground of the seafaring
communities.
Territories and borders demarcated by
nation-states are most authoritative. But they are not the only borders
that exist. There are other psychological, invisible borders that belong
to communities. Conflicts often arise when the edges of these borders
do not overlap. Take, for instance, clandestine migration in South Asia.
Despite hard borders, migration continues because traditional routes of
kinship among communities precede and bypass state demarcations. For
the fishermen, the state boundary is an imposition, preventing them from
accessing territory that is part of their history, culture and
livelihood.
How does this mismatch of boundaries lead to
border violations? First, fishermen often go beyond the maritime borders
without knowing where the borders actually are. Maritime borders are
characteristically different from demarcated land borders. Second,
resources are fluid and agnostic to political boundaries. Often, Indian
and Sri Lankan fishers cross territorial waters while chasing a good
catch. Third, domestic politics in both countries play a role in not
putting the maritime boundary into practice. The politics of Tamil Nadu
fiercely supports the cause of coastal seafaring communities. The Indian
government has also incentivised mechanised bottom trawling techniques
for a higher catch. The Sri Lankan side has rich fishing grounds and the
preoccupation of the fishers from northern Sri Lanka with the long
civil war allowed the Indian side to intrude into Sri Lankan waters. As
Sri Lanka recovered from the civil war and fishing became active in its
northern waters, vigilance against Indian fishermen increased, resulting
in incidents of seizures, arrests, and killings.
Settled political boundaries do not
necessarily resolve conflicts until they are legitimised and put into
practice by the stakeholders. In this case, the maritime boundary has
not been accepted in principle by the fishermen; neither has it been
effectively realised through practice. Regularising existing joint
working groups, creating awareness among coastal communities, and
securing their livelihoods without incentivising a scramble for
resources could help resolve the issue. A big mistake on the part of
both governments would be to look at the problem as an instance of
trespassing boundaries that needs to be dealt with militarily.
Udayan Das is Assistant Professor, St Xavier’s College (Autonomous), Calcutta
After The Coromandel Train Wreck: Unemployed, Young Migrant Workers Struggling With Health Costs & Lost Wages
KAVITHA IYER 21 Jun 2023
From
speaking to passengers who survived the 2 June 2023 Balasore train
accident in Odisha, a picture emerges of India’s migrant labourers: Many
are young, often school dropouts, who travelled long distances to find
menial jobs because there was no work at home, on farms or otherwise.
Without medical insurance and paid leave, they struggle now with health
costs and lost wages.
Young
men wait at Jabalpur railway station in Madhya Pradesh, in March 2023,
to board trains to Mumbai and Jalna in Maharashtra to work at factories
in these cities. At the station, they guard one another’s belongings,
make purchases of things they may need in the city, and calculate
expenses incurred on the journey./ KAVITHA IYER
Mumbai: More
than two weeks since he alighted from a derailed coach of the
Shalimar-Chennai Coromandel Express train and walked, dazed and
terrified, to a nearby school in the village of Bahanaga in northern
Odisha, Osman Shaikh, 27, said he couldn’t summon the courage to make a
fresh reservation.
“But I’ll have to board the very same train eventually,” he said, “because I need to resume earning a living.”
A
semi-skilled worker from West Bengal’s Purba Bardhaman district, Osman
Shaikh was preparing to eat a small pre-packed meal with younger brother
Ajijul, 17, in a sleeper class coach not far behind the ‘general’ coach
for unreserved passengers when their speeding train smashed into a
stationary goods train just after it had crossed Balasore station in
northern Odisha.
Their
coach was wrecked, as derailed coaches hit a passenger train on a
parallel track, causing some bogies of the latter train to derail too.
The 2 June 2023 tragedy was one of the Indian Railways’ worst ever, killing 290 people and injuring at least 1,000.
“It’s surprising that more people didn’t die,” Osman Shaikh told Article 14
over the phone from his home in Bhaidarpara village near Purbasthali
railway station, about 130 km north of Kolkata. He said he saw at least
120 bodies just hours after the accident, at the Bahanaga school that
was turned into a temporary morgue.
A rajmistry
(mason) who has worked at construction sites in Kerala’s Malappuram
district for nearly a decade, always taking the Coromandel Express to
Chennai and another train to Tirur in Malappuram, he said there would
have been about 400 people packed into the unreserved coach, almost all
of them migrant labourers from the eastern states of Bihar, West Bengal
and Odisha, heading to Chennai, other parts of Tamil Nadu and Kerala in
the south.
This
was the most inexpensive way for labourers to travel, squatting in
passages and pressed against scores of others for most of the 27-hour
train journey, he said.
The “general dabba”
or unreserved coach of the Coromandel Express was, in recent years, a
pipeline of men looking for work in southern India, bolstering one of
the country’s several well-established migration corridors for informal
labour. Older migration corridors for unorganised workers, many
similarly served by the Indian Railways, run from various districts of
Uttar Pradesh to Mumbai; south Rajasthan to Pune/Mumbai; Ganjam in
coastal Odisha to power looms in Surat, Gujarat; from Marathwada in
central Maharashtra for the sugarcane harvest to western Maharashtra and
Bagalkot in Karnataka; and from north Bihar’s flood-prone areas near
the Kosi river to farms in Punjab.
As per the PLFS, in the year 2017-18, the total employment in both organised and unorganised sectors was around 470 million. Of this, 380 million were unorganised workers, more than 81% of total employment in the country. By some estimates, 194 million workers are migrants, in addition to 15 million short-term or circulatory migrants.
Already, the union ministry of labour and employment has registered 289.3 million unorganised workers, only a little short of USA’s population of 331 million, on its e-Shram website,
a database of construction workers, migrant workers, gig workers,
street vendors, domestic workers, agricultural labourers, etc.
Despite
their large numbers, however, migrant workers were never offered
social, economic, or health protection at their places of work until the
Covid-19 pandemic highlighted their plight.
‘Better Than At Home’
The
ride on the Coromandel Express was to have been Ajijul Shaikh’s first
trip to Kerala—a fresh school dropout after failing his Class X exams,
he was to earn Rs 15,000 per month as a helper and cook for a group of
migrant labourers living together.
“We
work 12-hour days at construction sites, often in the heat,” said Osman
Shaikh, whose head and leg were injured from being flung against the
wall of the coach upon impact.
At
wages of Rs 800 to Rs 1,200 per day in Kerala and up to Rs 1,000 per
day in Tamil Nadu depending on their skill levels, tens of thousands
from Purba Bardhaman and other districts of West Bengal and Odisha make
the long journey and endure the hardscrabble life of migrant labourers
for the opportunities it presents.
From
the accounts of nearly a dozen passengers in the unreserved and non
air-conditioned sleeper coaches of the ill-fated Coromandel Express, a
picture emerged of this large segment of India's informal workforce:
Those with minor to moderate injuries lamented the cost of medical care,
not having health coverage from the state or their employers. Those
advised diagnostic scans paid Rs 6,000 to Rs 8,000 for these, for many
nearly a third of their monthly income. Each of them forfeited weeks of
income in the absence of any kind of paid leave.
Almost
all the men were less than 35 years old. Most were school dropouts,
having quit school to earn, then being forced to work in menial jobs
for want of educational and professional qualifications. All of them
boarded the train due to unemployment or underemployment in their home
state, some additionally burdened by the loss of farm income.
Menial jobs were still “better than at home”, said Osman Shaikh.
When
their mud house collapsed in a flood a few years ago, he took loans,
from a bank and from money-lenders, to build a pucca house. “We are able
to repay it only because I am working in Kerala,” he told Article 14. “There is no question of not going back.”
About
two decades ago, their farmland began to flood in the monsoon swell of
the Khari river flowing eastward into the Bhagirathi-Hooghly. That is
when Osman Shaikh’s father ventured out of the state, as far as
Bengaluru, to find work. “Now every district of Kerala is full of
Bengali workers,” he said.
Medical Expenses, Lost Wages Add Up
Osman
Shaikh spent Rs 10,000 on a medical check-up, blood tests and scans at a
private clinic in Kalna, a town located 25 km from his village. Until
the scans were completed, he was advised to get admitted to the clinic.
Shatrughan
Sika, 39, of Mohar village in Paschim Medinipur district in south
western West Bengal has worked for seven years at an iron and steel
factory near Tambaram, a Chennai suburb with an exports processing zone.
With a strained back from the derailment, Sika decided to return to
work anyway.
Two weeks without wages and
the unexpected additional journey home from the accident site—a bus to
Balasore, a train to Midnapore and another bus ride to his village— had
already set back the family’s finances. “I’ll take any ticket that’s
available,” he said. “It’s time to go back to work.”
Neither Osman Shaikh nor Sika had medical insurance or paid leave.
Salim
Shaikh, 26, also a mason, from Purba Bardhaman’s Bamsor village, was
travelling with his brother Rahim in a group of eight youngsters from
the same village, who eventually hired a private vehicle to return to
Bardhaman from the accident site in Bahanaga.
Salim
Shaikh of Purba Bardhaman district in West Bengal takes a selfie with
his brother and friends before boarding the Coromandel Express at
Shalimar station on 2 June. They were all headed to Kerala, to work in
Malappuram and Vadakara./ SALIM SHAIKH
A
shoulder injury from the derailment has left him house-bound for the
next two months, but the village was abuzz with excitement in the week
after the incident when Bardhaman-Durgapur member of parliament S S
Ahluwalia of the Bharatiya Janata Party visited all eight young men.
“He
gave me Rs 10,000, to help with expenses,” Salim Shaikh told Article
14. Having returned home on a short trip for a cousin’s wedding, he has
now already been without work for more than a month.
“I
can’t walk, I can’t stand up properly,” he said over the phone. He,
too, paid for a full body scan, and then handed over his medical
documents to a political party worker in the hope of seeking the
government-announced compensation for injured passengers. His brother
sustained injuries to the head.
There is no year-round work available in Bamsor or even in Bardhaman town, he said.
Belonging
to a family of landless labourers, their father used to work on
government road construction sites in the state. Three years ago, having
dropped out after high school, Salim Shaikh got in touch with a labour
contractor who regularly hired labourers from Paschim Bardhaman for work
in Malappuram district and in Vadakara, in coastal Kerala.
All of 18 then, he started as a labourer carrying mud and digging pits, before learning masonry and painting.
The School Children On The Coromandel Express
It
was getting dark when the Coromandel Express slid off its tracks after
ramming a stationary freight train on the night of 2 June. As Coach S4
collapsed on its side, passengers began to cry for help, most of them
thrown to the floor in a heap.
One
group of children, 11 to 16 years old, all from Araria in northeastern
Bihar and travelling to Kerala, climbed slowly out of the wreckage
through a mangled window. The other members of their group joined them
and their two adult chaperones shortly afterwards, from the other
coaches. In all, there were 20 children including 12 girls.
“They
spent the night at a stranger’s house by the tracks,” said Mohammed
Kasim, also from Araria and the brother of one of the boys, over the
phone. The next morning, government officials assisted the group to
return to Bihar. “They attend school in Kerala,” said Kasim, who has
also worked in Kerala as a labourer.
The
students had taken a train from Araria to Shalimar in West Bengal, then
boarded the Coromandel Express to Chennai, from where they were to take
a third train to Kerala, nearly 2,500 km from home.
Tasnim
Arif, a social activist from Darbhanga in Bihar who has worked on
issues of gender and education in the Seemanchal region on the border
with West Bengal, said scores of students from impoverished Muslim
families in this region attended boarding schools in Kerala.
Arif
said educational institutions including madrasas in Kerala offered
students from Bihar, particularly the Seemanchal districts of Araria,
Kishanganj, Purnea and Katihar, attractive enrolment benefits, including
free education and boarding schools. “This is in addition to quality
education, particularly in Arabic and English, which are lacking in
local madrasas,” said Arif.
Seemanchal, a socio-economically backward region, has an average of 47% Muslims in each district, against Bihar’s statewide average of 17%.
“For
the very poor Muslim families here, Kerala is like the Gulf,” continued
Arif, who himself completed his master’s in social work from the
University of Calicut, Kerala, inspired by the Anna Hazare movement of
2013.
Thousands
of workers from Seemanchal travel to Kerala to look for work too, he
said. “And when they return, they’re able to do the things they couldn’t
otherwise, such as build a home or arrange a sister’s wedding, or buy
an asset.” According to Arif, better health and sanitation facilities
for labourers in Kerala, coupled with the better wage rates, made it an
ideal destination for migrant workers.
The Lure Of The South
Activists
said Odiya and Bengali workers were now very common in Kerala, among
naka workers and construction workers. The dihadi, or the daily wage
rate, hovering in the region of Rs 400 a day in Bengaluru, is Rs 800 a
day in Kerala. Some said workers also preferred Kerala on account of
lower discrimination against outsiders.
Long-time
labour rights activist Chandan Kumar of the Working People’s Coalition,
a collective of labour unions, said that in 2013-14, he and a group of
activists had found out through an application under the Right To Information Act,
2005 that the little station of Kantabanji in Odisha, which frequently
witnessed only 25 to 30 passengers on a daily basis, sold lakhs of
tickets in the months after the completion of the state’s Nuakhai agricultural festival, around September.
“The
station of Kantabanji is located strategically and is accessible to
workers from Nuapada, Rayagada, Bolangir and Kalahandi,” Kumar said.
“The data of the passengers on those trains going south from Kantabanji
was a testament to labour distress and migration.”
Just
as in those years the Railways could have added coaches to trains in
the months when migration peaked, data and enumeration can make a huge
change in providing social security to migrant workers across the
country, he said.
The e-Shram exercise of
creating a database of unorganised workers is incomplete, he added. The
schemes being offered such as a pension plan are contributory in
nature, and the central government should instead run an anchor social
security scheme for registered workers, Kumar said.
Launched in August 2021, the promised benefits
of e-Shram included efficient implementation of social security
services, portability of social security and welfare schemes, and a
comprehensive database that would be handy in times of crisis. In April
2023, the union government introduced additional features to capture
workers’ family details. Among the services available for e-Shram
registered workers are skilling, apprenticeship, a pension scheme and
connectivity to states’ schemes.
However, as Article 14reported,
workers’ experience with e-Shram has been marked by difficulties in
linking their original Aadhaar-linked phone numbers, technical and
language barriers leading to over-reliance on the common service centres
(CSCs) and confusion in the absence of clearly defined social security
measures to be rolled out to this database of workers.
“E-Shram
was meant to give portability for entitlements,” said Kumar. “The
government now has bank details, Aadhaar details of workers. They can
easily enrol these workers in social security programmes.”
Additionally,
social security programmes run by state governments are often not
accessible to outsiders, whether it is through the requirement of a
domicile certificate to avail a free bus ride for women workers or
accident insurance schemes denied to workers from outside the state.
These were anti-migrant policies couched in nativist politics, according
to Kumar.
In a study sponsored by the National Human Rights Commission in October 2020, the Kerala Development Society, a non-profit, found that
65% of interstate migrant workers surveyed in Gujarat, 61% in Haryana
and 69% in Maharashtra reported non-provisioning of entitlements as per
government schemes; while 51.2% in Delhi, 53% in Gujarat, 56% in Haryana
and 55% in Maharashtra had poor access to available schemes due to
language barriers and the lack of information.
He
was in Bahanaga, at the school turned into a morgue, searching for his
nephew and brother who were missing, Meraj Shaikh and Abdul Majid
Shaikh. Trained masons, they were headed to Chennai.
On
his way to Bahanaga, Hussain met Noorul Huda Shaikh of Kakdwip, also in
24 South Parganas, who was looking for his brothers Shamshul and
Asmaul, also migrant labourers going to Chennai. Together, the men
spent hours searching the site of the accident, the ambulances and other
vehicles coming to the school, then repeatedly checked all the bodies
lined up on the floor in a hall.
By 6 June, Hussain was alone, but still searching. Around 8.30 pm, he was outside the Kalinga Institute of Medical Sciences
in Bhubaneswar, his phone nearly discharged, waiting to be let into the
morgue. On 7 June, he was asked to give samples for a DNA test—he could
not identify his relatives among the dead, nor were they in the
hospitals.
On
5 June, he had also been to a business park in Balasore “where bodies
were kept on ice”, alongside passengers’ belongings from the train
wreckage.
After
giving samples for a DNA test, Hussain retraced his steps to check once
again at the earlier locations, and found Meraj’s body at the Bahanaga
school.
“I spent eight days there,
and only the last two nights I got shelter in a government office. I had
no food and no place to sleep,” Hussain told Article 14. He had
returned home with one body, that of his nephew, in his late 20s,
married less than a year ago. “His wife is pregnant with their first
child,” he said sadly. “Not finding my brother’s body is equally
terrible.”
On 17 June, there were still 81 unclaimed bodies in Bhubaneswar.
On
18 June, the toll rose to 292, two weeks after union minister for
railways Ashwini Vaishnaw reportedly said rescue operations were
complete and the final number of casualties was 233. West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee had said the death count could rise.
DNA
tests on relatives claiming bodies should have been done from the
start, Hussain said, to prevent bodies being mis-identified,
particularly in the rush to claim the government compensation cheque.
His brother had never left the state to look for work earlier, and was
accompanying his nephew for the first time, pushed by adverse financial
circumstances. The men were travelling in the general coach.
“The
money I have spent just going to all these places during these days,”
Hussain said, “will be a waste if I eventually don’t find my brother.”
For First Generation Migrants, A Chance At A New Life
At
18, Ashish Bain of Murshidabad in West Bengal uses the data services on
his mobile phone to watch YouTube videos, download Bollywood songs to
replace his caller tune, and update his social media status.
Having
cleared his class 10 board exams a little over a year ago, he decided
that higher education was not for him, and decided to pick up a skill
instead. For six months, he worked in Kolkata, 200 km south of his home,
as an apprentice at a carpentry unit.
“Then
I heard from friends who had gone from Murshidabad to Kerala that there
is more money to be made there,” he said. Having worked at a
large-scale furniture manufacturing unit in Calicut, Kerala for the last
nine to 10 months, he visited his hometown for a wedding in May and was
returning to Kerala with two prospective co-workers on 2 June.
“I make Rs 20,000-Rs 25,000 in a good month,” Bain said.
His
income depends on the size of contracts his employer bags from large
furniture stores that retail cabins, beds, almirahs and tables,
requiring supplies in bulk. The furniture is mostly made of acacia wood,
with many hand-crafted parts.
“Here
in the village, I would not be able to earn even Rs 5,000 a month.” Not
even in Kolkata could one earn Rs 20,000 a month, said Bain.
In
Murshidabad, the only work easily available is on the farm, and that is
seasonal labour. “If I work for one month, there will be no work for
the next two months,” he said, about paddy cultivation in the region.
His grandfather and father were both farmers, and Bain was the first in
the family to explore work avenues outside the state.
The
18-year-old sends his savings home by bank transfer each month. It was a
simple life in Calicut, but not as frugal as in the village. For a
shared living space that costs Rs 1,500 in rent, and for food and
entertainment expenses, he sets aside Rs 9,000 a month.
A minor leg injury from the accident has already healed, Bain said. “I’m ready to set off again.”
(Kavitha Iyer is a senior editor with Article 14 and the author of ‘Landscapes of Loss’, a book on India’s farm crisis.)
Invitation to Women’s Organisations, progressive movements,
Activists, Academics, Advocates, Friends, Students, Domestic Workers
organisations and Workers Unions to participate and extend solidarity on the INTERNATIONAL DOMESTIC WORKERS DAY on 16th
June 2023 between 11:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m at the Freedom
Park, Bengaluru.
*********************
Karnataka Gruha Karmikara Vedike(KGKV) is a Platform of all the Unions and Organizations who are
working with Domestic Workers in Karnataka. KGKV is affiliated to National
Platform for Domestic Workers, New Delhi, and it is commemorating “International Domestic Workers Day” all
over the country on 16th June 2023.
On 16th June
2011, the International Labour Conference of the International Labour
Organization adopted a Convention concerning Domesticworkers, which is also referred as “Decent Work forDomestic
Workers - Convention-189 which offers specific protection to domestic
workers all over the world. It lays down
basic rights and principles, and requires State to take a series of measures
with a view to making decent work a reality for domestic workers. 12 years have
passed but the Union Government of India has not yet ratified this convention.
Therefore the National
Platform for Domestic Workers and its affiliated organisations from all the
States have resolved to continue to fight and pressurizing the Governments in addressing
and ameliorating the precarious conditions of domestic workers. Several Hundred’s of women
workers and worker leaders would join in the Public Meeting at Freedom Park, and demand the Government of India
ratify ILO C-189 and the State Assembly passing a resolution to this effect.
On
the 16th of June 2023 the Unions, Civil Society Organisations and
concerned public in Bengaluru urge the
Government of Karnataka to declare, that this Day should be considered as a
“Domestic Workers Day” and declare this day as a Holiday in Karnataka, in
recognizing specifically womens economic contribution since the paid Domestic
work is one of the supporting pillars of today’s market economy and it is
inherently tied to the process of informalisation.
Domestic workers leaders
from Bangalore will articulate their issues and demands. Leaders from various progressive movements, Feminist
leaders, Central Trade Unions Leaders will address. We have invited The Chief Minister and
several other leaders from the State Government to address the workers and
receive our Memorandum and pressurize them to evolve appropriate action in
ameliorating the precarious conditions of Domestic workers in Karnataka.
Kindly we invite you to come to
this programme and give a message of solidarity from your respective
organisations pressurizing the Union Government in order to ratify ILO
Convention C-189 as well other demands.
Thanking you in Anticipation.
Dr.RUTH MANORAMA BRINDA ADIGE KEMA
DEVI
State Convenor, KGKV Co-Convenor,
KGKV President,
KGKV
They
may have been elevated, in terms of politically correct vocabulary,
from ‘servants’ to ‘maids’, and now as ‘domestic workers’. However,
despite high-sounding intentions and some hesitant calls for progress,
much remains to be done to improve the lot of this neglected and
vulnerable workforce. Accurate numbers, an acceptable legal definition,
protection by state enforcement agencies, and other such key ingredients
for effective policy making remain elusive for this workforce, which
has been chronically afflicted by official apathy.
In this Issue Brief, Neetha N., Professor, Centre for Women’s Development Studies,
New Delhi, contextualises the reasons behind the continued neglect of
India’s domestic workers. She draws attention to the socio-economic
equations that result in an asymmetric balance of forces in this unique
relationship between employer and employee, where the workplace is the
former’s home and the latter’s workspace.
This imbalance is further aggravated by a form of patron-client
relationship in employment, where other factors, such as caste, gender,
vulnerability, internal work hierarchies, and weak or non-existent and
unenforceable contractual obligations, are embedded. Consequently, the
indispensable role played by domestic workers in the smooth functioning
of many a household is matched by a persistent devaluation of the very
nature of the job. Mere laws and policies, she emphasises, will remain
statements of intent — and further evidence of state neglect — unless
they draw from stakeholder consultations and lessons gained from the
ground. Read More...
Times of India’s Edit Page team comprises
senior journalists with wide-ranging interests who debate and opine on
the news and issues of the day.
In 2017, GoI’s annual economic survey sprung a
surprise. For long, the debate on migration within the country was
headlined by the puzzling phenomenon that it was rather slow-paced. The
decennial census, which represents a snapshot at the end of every
decade, didn’t quite capture what was happening. The economic survey
used unreserved railway travel as a proxy for economic migration between
2011 and 2016 and concluded that annual average inter-state migration
was close to nine million, way more than what the census had captured.
Buried in that dataset was another message: trains have a bigger impact
than what’s conventionally measured.
Trains are the lifeline for a bulk of India’s poorer economic
migrants. Their ability to move and improve their economic prospects
have a positive impact on their home states through remittances. GoI’s
annual jobs data in 2020-21 (PLFS) tried to gauge the cause for
migration. For men, an overwhelming 43% of migrants said it was linked
to employment. While the railway data showed that traditional magnets
for migrants such as NCR, Maharashtra and Gujarat continue to exert a
strong pull, the emerging flows are from north and east to the south.
Long distance routes such as the one served by Coromandel Express play a
vital role here.
When seen in isolation, railway finances are an example of messy
cross-subsidisation between different revenue sources, common to other
government-controlled areas such as electricity distribution. However,
this view understates the larger economic impact that railways have by
providing a cost-effective mode of transport across long distances. If
anything, some of these long-distance migrant routes are underserved.
For example, economic historian Chinmay Tumbe estimated that Kerala,
before the pandemic, had about two million migrants from UP and Bihar.
In politics, language is a combustible issue. However, when it comes
to migration, the economic survey pointed out that language is not a
barrier. In that sense, railways play a unifying role that is rarely
acknowledged. Indian Railways has received considerable budgetary
support in the last few years. This positive development needs to be
backed by reorienting priorities within the railways. Enhancing service
in ‘migrant corridors’, backed by a greater attention to safety will pay
off in ways that cannot be captured by looking at railway finance in
isolation. India’s economic performance will be influenced by the
efficiency of its rail network. And its safety.
Since 2014, the poorest communities are earning less
Wage data
collected by the Centre for Labour Research and Action reveal a steady
decline in real wages of brick-kiln workers in the last 10 years.
Brick-kiln work is a fallback occupation for some of India’s poorest
groups.
In an earlier article (IE, April 13, ‘Wages of distress’),
I drew attention to recent evidence of a virtual stagnation of real
wages, based on Labour Bureau data. To illustrate, the real wages of
male agricultural labourers, non-agricultural labourers and construction
workers grew at less — much less — than 1 per cent per year between
2014-15 and 2021-22. Since the point created some interest, an update
may be useful.
Just-released Labour Bureau data reinforce the point: In 2022-23, the
growth rate of real wages was just 0.2 per cent for the first
occupation group, and negative for the other two. If we extend the
time-series to 2022-23, the trend growth rates from 2014-15 onwards are
as follows: 0.8 per cent per year for agricultural labour, 0.2 per cent
for non-agricultural labour and slightly negative for construction
workers (men only).
These estimates are based on semi-log regression of real wages (money
wages deflated by the Consumer Price Index for Agricultural Labourers,
CPIAL) on time. Others have replicated them without difficulty. Even the
finance ministry graciously requested my permission to use these
figures for a training session on macroeconomic diagnostics. For the
doubting Thomases, a spreadsheet is available on request.
If you don’t like regressions, you can take an average of
year-on-year growth for this period, the results are almost exactly the
same (see table). And if you don’t like maths at all, you can just
eyeball the graph of real wages, updated here — that is the most telling
clue.
My analysis focused mainly on annual all-India wage figures. These
figures are unweighted averages of monthly wages in about 600 centres,
distributed across states in rough proportion to their population.
Naturally, there are not many annual all-India figures (one per year per
occupation group), but they encapsulate a lot of data. It is possible
to unpack the dataset and look at more disaggregated figures, as I did
down to the state level. That would uncover areas and periods of
substantial growth in real wages, but it would not alter the overall
picture of sluggish growth in the last nine years.
Little time needs to be wasted on Surjit Bhalla’s rejoinder (IE,
April 25, ‘Wages are rising’). Bhalla has presented a summary table that
contradicts his main point, namely that real wages were rising fast
between 2014-15 and 2018-19. An attempt to replicate the table suggests
that some of the entries in the 2014-18 and 2019-21 rows are
interchanged. Incidentally, this goof-up created a glaring internal
inconsistency in the table. It is surprising that Bhalla did not notice
it.
In any case, the method Bhalla uses to estimate wage growth is
flawed. Briefly, he calculates state-specific, month-specific
year-on-year growth rates, and then aggregates them using unweighted
averages over months and population-weighted averages over states. This
might be called the “unpack-repack method”.
The inaccuracy of this method can be conveyed with a simple example.
Let’s say there are just two months in the year, Primo and Secundo,
identical in every respect except the wage rate. The daily wage rate is
Rs 80 in Primo and Rs 120 in Secundo in Year 1, and vice-versa in Year
2. What is the growth rate of wages between Year 1 and Year 2? Zero,
obviously. But the unpack-repack method arrives at a different answer:
8.3 per cent per year!
As this example illustrates, the correct approach is to put wages on
an annual basis before calculating annual growth rates. That is what I
had done. Based on this sound method, the growth rates for Bhalla’s
reference period (2014-15 to 2018-19) are as follows: 2.2 per cent, 1.4
per cent and 1.3 per cent respectively for male agricultural labourers,
non-agricultural labourers and construction workers. We might accept
this as evidence of a slight “hump” shape in post-2014 trends, with a
semblance of growth up to 2018-19. So what? The fact remains that real
wages are much the same today as in 2014-15.
The evidence of near-stagnation in real wages goes much beyond the
three occupation groups discussed in my earlier article (based on an RBI
summary of Labour Bureau data). As Bhalla rightly points out, the
original Labour Bureau series has data for many informal-sector
occupations: 25 for men and 16 for women. This dataset is being
continuously analysed by Arindam Das, Joint Director of the Foundation
for Agrarian Studies. In a forthcoming study, Das examines trends in
real wages for all these occupations between 2014-15 and 2021-22. For 21
out of 25 male occupations and 9 out of 16 female occupations, the
trend growth rate is below 1 per cent per year. It is above 2 per cent
per year for just two occupations (picking and horticulture, women
only), that too based on patchy data. The picture is likely to look
worse when the series is extended to 2022-23.
In short, Labour Bureau data clearly point to near-stagnation of
informal-sector real wages in recent years. A comparison with similar
data from agricultural wages in India
and the Periodic Labour Force Surveys would be useful. Meanwhile,
there is corroborating evidence from other sources. For instance, wage
data collected by the Centre for Labour Research and Action reveal a
steady decline in real wages of brick-kiln workers in the last 10 years.
This is all the more alarming as brick-kiln work is a fallback
occupation for some of India’s poorest communities. Nothing like this
has happened for a very long time.
The author is Visiting Professor at the Department of Economics, Ranchi University
