India: Kavitha Iyer on Social & economic costs of Balasore train accident on Unemployed, Young Migrant Workers

 https://www.article-14.com/post/-after-the-coromandel-train-wreck-unemployed-young-migrant-workers-struggling-with-health-costs-lost-wages-64926411039fd

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. 

What drives millions of young Indians to these migration corridors is the search for sustainable employment, evidenced by, among other things, the continuing pressure on the farm sector—from 42.5% as per the 2018-19 Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) of the ministry of statistics & programme implementation, agriculture employed 46.5% of the total workforce in 2020-21, dipping marginally to 45.5%, in 2021-22. 

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 14 reported, 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. 

For Families, The Tragedy Continues

Soft-spoken and still hopeful then, Shaikh Zakir Hussain from 24 South Parganas in West Bengal was interviewed on 3 June by journalist Tamal Saha. 

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.) 

 

 

India: Migrants & long Distance Trains - Editorial in The Times of India, June 6, 2023

 The Times of India

Migrants’ ride: Long-distance trains like Coromandel Express are especially vital, they carry millions travelling for jobs

June 6, 2023, 8:08 AM IST TOI Edit 

TOI Edit

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.

India: West Bengal Migrant Workers’ Welfare Board assistance for families of migrant workers in case of a tragedy | Edit in The Telegraph

 The Telegraph, May 29, 2023

Some relief: Editorial on West Bengal government’s initiative for wage labourers

The initiative will be supervised by the West Bengal Migrant Workers’ Welfare Board and will offer financial assistance to the families of migrant workers in case of a tragedy

The Editorial Board 

The crises faced by India’s migrants were brought to the foreground by the Covid-19 pandemic. But the plight of this constituency is much older. Wage labourers migrate to cities in search of better employment opportunities, greater remuneration, and frequent work. But they have to put up with poor — often inhuman — living conditions, the lack of social securities and weak bargaining rights. This powerless­ness of migrant labourers makes the West Ben­gal government’s intervention offering a host of amenities worth examining. The initiati­ve, dubbed first of its kind in the country, will be supervised by the recently-constituted West Ben­gal Migrant Workers’ Welfare Board and will offer financial assistance to the families of migrant workers in case of a tragedy. Regional offices would reportedly be opened in Maharashtra, Delhi and Kerala — the hubs where migrants travel to for work from Bengal — along with round-the-clock assistance centres. The scheme also seeks to introduce a portal for migrant workers to register their names. This is an important step in enumerating migrant workers and is in line with the Centre’s long-term plan — a plan that has not materialised beyond the rudimentary e-Shram portal — to create a national database for migrants.
But the initiative is quite likely to face several challenges. Bengal — not quite the richest of states — must make sure that adequate funds are available for the proper implementation of this programme. Moreover, Bengal’s workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act are yet to receive their dues from the Centre on account of alleged irregularities. This delay is likely to increase the rate of migration from Bengal to other states. So the welfare scheme for migrant labourers should be prepared for an additional burden of beneficiaries. The persistent plight of migrant workers is, however, indicative of a larger problem — the State’s shift in focus away from the stipulations of social welfarism. This worrying trend has been echoed by the prime minister, Narendra Modi, who has derided welfare schemes intended to benefit the poor as ‘rewadis’. What compounds the problem is the uneven economic development of states: the largest proportion of migrants hails from poorer states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal. Equitable, inclusive development, yet another pledge of the prime minister, remains elusive, lengthening the march of migrants.

No proper data on migrants misery in digital india

Migrants’ Misery in Digital India, the Government is Groping in the Dark Without Proper Data

Thomas Mathew Kadavil

https://theaidem.com/migrants-misery-in-digital-india-the-government-is-groping-in-the-dark-without-proper-data/

COVID 19: Suddenly, India seems to have woken up to the plight of its internal migrants who work in the unorganized labor sectors

The Times of India

The crisis of the migrant workers in India

April 12, 2020, 11:27 pm IST 

 

by  Roop Sen

 

Suddenly, India seems to have woken up to the plight of its internal migrants who work in the unorganized labor sectors. It had occurred to no journalist or social media activist, politicians in opposition or those in power, state governments or the central government that an immediate nationwide lockdown would end up stranding Bihari service providers working in Delhi, Bengali carpenters and electricians working in Kerala, Chhattisgarhi brick kiln workers working in Uttar Pradesh or roadside vendors in Delhi whose hometowns are in Rajasthan. We did not read social media posts or read tweets from these hundreds and thousands of people because they do not have access to social media, it does not occur to them that what has been done to them is wrong and they have a right to protest and demand for repatriation services. While the rest of the nation was ‘staying home, staying safe’, these workers were, in effect told, ‘stay on the streets, you are on your own’.

Whose job is it to think of migrant workers, who migrate from their home states to other states for work? Whose responsibility should it have been to organize transport for them to have returned home with safety and precautions to prevent transmission? Is it the state government’s responsibility, or the Centre? Is it the responsibility of the sending state – where these migrants’ homes are, or the responsibility of the receiving state – where they work? Who should have taken the initiative to mobilize the workers, organize them, prepared for logistics and helped them return?

The obvious response may be the Labor department and Ministry. Labor is a concurrent subject in our country, where the central government and the state governments both have jurisdiction to legislate and act. India has an existing legislation The Interstate Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1979, which has been one of the most poorly implemented legislations in the country. While the legislation has some good provisions on how the labor departments of each state can monitor and ensure protection from abuse and exploitation of migrants who are recruited, transported and supplied to employers in the unorganized labor sectors, the provisions have gone unimplemented for nearly 4 decades, resulting in lack of protection and safety of most vulnerable migrants in India.

India’s labor laws have often been criticized as being too complex, archaic and inflexible. The Central Government introduced a new bill called the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions in 2018 which aimed to subsume 14 of the existing labor laws into a single legislation, including the Interstate Migrant Workmen Act, 1979. The 2018 bill lapsed because of the national elections and was subsequently been re-introduced in the Lok Sabha on 23rd July, 2019 and after strong criticism from the opposition, the Ministry agreed to send the bill to the Parliamentary Standing Committee, headed by Bhartruhari Mahtab, for review. The Committee found that the bill is inadequate in its coverage of issues of interstate migrant workers, an observation confirmed by several state governments who were consulted by the Committee. One of the glaring gaps, for example, is – in its chapter on Safety, the lack of consideration of how migrant workers will be protected in the event of emergency or a calamity, how they would be supported in repatriation to their homes, or what the employers’ responsibility would be. The Committee challenges the exclusion of contract workers of the center and state governments and proposes to include all unorganized workforce under the purview of the code, which would mean extending the code to an estimated 50 crore unorganized workers including railway porters, construction workers and security guards, who do not come under the membership or purview of most trade unions. Trade Unions, which only work in the organized sectors account for only 8 crore workers. It also recommended streamlining and expanding government’s labor department to reach out to the unorganized sectors and bring such workers under the code purview.

Migrant workers from the unorganized sectors in India have no information or involvement in the making of this law, their exclusion from it. The India-Lockdown crisis has amplified the need for the Ministry of Labor and Employment to necessarily write a separate chapter for interstate migrant workers and include all workers from the unorganized sectors. The legislation needs to clearly lay down responsibility and accountability measures of state labor departments in jointly creating coordination systems that could respond to situations of crisis such as COVID 19. Interstate migrant workers are a group of most vulnerable workers in the country, where they end up feeling like in a no man’s land – in a situation of crisis, neither does the host state where they work think of them as their own people, and because they are far away from their home state, they are out of sight and out of mind even for an otherwise proactive state government. They are most vulnerable to not only overnight loss of income, but also homelessness, with no food or travel facility rendering young children and the old, to starvation and destitution.

 

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

India: Despite Covid-19, why did migrant workers go back? Tariq Thachil (April 03, 2020)

Hindustan Times, April 03, 2020

Despite Covid-19, why did migrant workers go back?

They live alone, in illegally rented rooms or on the street, and face hostile authorities. Understand the desperation

by Tariq Thachil

 

The Covid-19-induced migrant crisis has prompted several questions. Who are these migrant communities? Why did the lockdown prompt them to flee from the cities, and why did the Centre and states not anticipate this? How can the State’s reactive response be improved, for now, and the future?(Amal KS/HT PHOTO)

         

We have all seen disturbing images of migrant workers trying to walk back to their villages after the sudden India-wide lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic (Covid-19). In response, some state governments arranged buses to ferry them from designated urban depots to their villages. But the subsequent overcrowding in these depots defeated the purpose of social distancing, a prime motive of the lockdown.
This Covid-19-induced migrant crisis has prompted several questions.
Who are these migrant communities? Why did the lockdown prompt them to flee from the cities, and why did the Centre and states not anticipate this? How can the State’s reactive response be improved, for now, and the future?
It is tempting to view this crisis purely as a consequence of the challenges of Covid-19. The virus has flummoxed governments around the world, including those with far more resources than India. The coronavirus poses daunting questions of how to balance public health concerns with the economic fallout. Yet it would be a mistake to view the migrant crisis as an unintentional by-product of the pandemic.
My seven-year-long research on internal migrants shows that the government’s missteps were built on deeper, systematic inadequacies in its treatment of these communities. Internal migrants in India are a vast and heterogeneous population. The subset of migrants we are now talking about are marked by three traits. One, they predominantly migrate from villages to cities; second, they are low-income populations who work in the informal sector; and third, they have not permanently relocated their families to the city. Instead, they circulate between villages and cities several times a year.
There are three structural inadequacies in public understanding of circular rural-urban migrants.
The first is an inability to recognise the size and importance of these communities. For example, the National Sample Survey found the all-India rate of short-term migration to be 1.7% in rural areas, and less than 1% in urban areas. Yet many scholars think these figures are an underestimate and do not match with other data sources. For example, circular migrants dominate employment sectors such as construction labour. At present, 35 million workers are registered under various construction welfare boards, a number which by itself is nearly 3% of the population. While some construction workers may not be migrants, many migrants are not registered with these boards, and this is only one employment sector.
Our inability to correctly count short-term migrants is not surprising, given the informal conditions in which they live and work, and their shuttling between their villages and cities. These traits reduce the chances of accessing migrant respondents through standard residence-based surveys. This inability has real costs, rendering governments ill-prepared to anticipate the responses of migrant communities at crucial moments. Policymakers were unprepared for the speed and desperation with which these migrants attempted to return home following the lockdown order.
A deeper understanding reveals that this desperation is neither irrational nor surprising.
I conducted a survey with 3,018 circular migrant construction workers in Delhi and Lucknow. While this sample was limited to only male migrant construction workers, the survey’s findings are still instructive.
They reveal that migrants have few reasons to stay in their destination cities, and many reasons to leave.
The majority of those surveyed (63%) had no family members living with them. In the city, they lived in cramped and usually illegally rented rooms (52%); or slept on footpaths (25%). Less than 3% held ration cards registered in the city. Finally, they earn low wages, and remit most of their savings, leaving little to cushion them if work stops. This precariousness is furthered by the hostile treatment they receive from urban authorities, especially the police since they sleep in public streets, squares, and footpaths.
Remarkably, 33% of my survey respondents of migrants in Lucknow had experienced violent police action within the past year in the city, while fewer than 5% had ever done so in their home villages. They also live and work near urban elites, who frequently pressure local governments to act against them.
The survey also revealed that on average, these migrants made 2.55 trips each year to their home village, but also spent on average upwards of six months a year within the city. Further, over half had been engaging in circular migration for at least eight years.
Without addressing these conditions, it will be hard to deal with the current crisis or prevent future ones. While highly transient, a proper response can only begin with the recognition of circular migrants as part of India’s urban population.
Recognising migrants as part of our cities might compel authorities to at least consider how proposed policies might impact these communities. At present, such ex-ante awareness would have allowed the government to decide whether to target scarce resources towards enabling safe return or keep migrants in destination cities. Ex-post, we see government actors oscillating between these two strategies, thereby enacting policies at cross-purposes.
A policy centred on getting migrants home should prioritise dedicated transport options to prevent overcrowding, especially along high-intensity migration corridors. It will also require a set of protocols within villages for isolating migrants in a manner that is neither unsafe nor stigmatising, particularly as many migrants come from disadvantaged castes or minority faiths. Keeping migrants in cities can include direct cash transfers, as some states are trying through construction welfare boards.
Civil society organisations such as the Aajeevika Bureau have called for relaxing the restrictions that prevent migrants from accessing vital benefits such as food rations in their destination cities. Experts, including Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee, have called for repurposing available spaces, such as sports stadia and empty hotels, for migrants to stay in safely.
We must understand that such short-term measures cannot address old structural problems. For example, construction welfare boards cannot channel benefits to many migrant workers since many are not registered with them. There must be a registration drive to expand this net. Reconfiguring the domicile-centric public distribution system can help migrants. But most important, states must soften their view of migrants as a law and order problem, an attitude that has been all too clear during this crisis.
Worryingly, some of the directives from the ministry of home affairs order on the “restriction of movement of migrants” may only entrench repressive enforcement over compassionate accommodation. Unless migrants are afforded their rights, and dignity in the cities they build, these unresolved issues will bedevil us again in the future.
Tariq Thachil is associate professor (Political Science), Vanderbilt University
The views expressed are personal

India’s coronavirus mass migration: How we’ve misunderstood the Indian migrant labourer | Sugandha Nagpal, Vatsalya Srivastava

LSE Blogs

Sugandha Nagpal

Vatsalya Srivastava

April 3rd, 2020

Long Read: India’s coronavirus mass migration: How we’ve misunderstood the Indian migrant labourer

On 24 March, in a bid to stop the spread of Covid-19, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a complete lockdown of the country. In response, millions of migrant workers left their jobs and began to return to their home villages – but why? Here Sugandha Nagpal (O.P. Jindal Global University, India) and Vatsalya Srivastava (O.P. Jindal Global University, India) argue why most interpretations of their motivations to head home maybe wrong.

Our inability to view the migrant labourer as a multifaceted human being with complex needs and demands is not novel to the present crisis in which, the Indian government’s lockdown in response to Covid-19 has left migrant labourers stranded and vulnerable. It characterises much of the Indian state’s response to internal migrants, who have been engaged with through the lens of poverty rather than a comprehensive view of their social, economic, cultural and political lives. Even in the ongoing response to swarms of migrants trying to make it back home, the knee jerk reaction has been to provide them food, money and shelter. There is little acknowledgement that much like all of us in the time of such uncertainty and unrest, the migrant labourer may be motivated to seek solace with their families at home. The inadequacy of the government’s response and the urgency of the situation must lead us to revisit our assumptions about the migrant labourer. Only with a better understanding of their defiance of the lockdown can we expect to avoid a repeat of the scenes that have been playing out in cities across India.
The 2017 Economic Survey of India estimated that between 2011 and 2016 there were close to 9 million inter-state migrants. In 2011, the total number of internal migrants was 139 million. These numbers relay the scale of the present crisis and the number of people that may be affected. Most internal migrants come from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar followed by Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir and West Bengal.
Over the last ten days, the national media has been reporting heart-wrenching stories of migrant labourers trying to walk hundreds of kilometres to their home states, mostly from the states of Delhi, Gujarat, Punjab and Haryana. Just a few days ago images of migrant labourers swarming to the Delhi bus terminal went viral. These stories paint the image of vulnerable migrants that were left high and dry by a sudden lockdown. Initially, most media accounts cited this movement as stemming from a loss of work. But in the last few days a more nuanced view of this reverse migration has emerged.
It is not only the loss of work that these migrants are concerned with, they are also worried about being separated from their families in this difficult time. In Gurdaspur, Punjab, despite being given assurances of food and shelter, a reported 5,000 of the city’s 15,000 migrant labourers have walked to their homes in Bihar and UP. Some have emphasised that they need to go back to take care of their family, others are returning to assuage their family’s fears. With the virus being seen as an urban problem brought in by the more privileged international migrants, villages in the migrant-sending states are thought of as being safer than cities and many simply want to go to a safer place. Others still, want to avoid the possibility of not being able to return home at all. They fear that if they do not return now and contract Covid-19, they may never be able to return home due to the stigma around the disease or the chaos that is likely to ensue in the coming months.
The Indian state appears to have been caught off guard by the resolve and number of migrant labourers who want to return home. The state’s uncoordinated and hasty response has primarily been driven by its understanding of what poor labourers need and want. This response has been concerned with two things: providing the migrant labourer with some food, temporary shelter and preventing them from returning home, lest they spread the virus in the hinterland. The initial assurances by some state governments to provide food and ensure rent-free accommodation did little to assuage the concerns of migrant labourers, who in the past rarely had any reason to trust state promises. They continued to try to get home any way they could. Some congregated at places like bus stands hoping to get some transport, others simply started walking. In response, some state governments arranged buses to shuttle migrants back to their home and even made provisions of food. Those who could avail of this temporary availability of transport arrived at their destination. Those who could not, have been locked behind sealed borders and set up in temporary shelters.
On 31 March, the Supreme court mandated the provision of food, shelter and medicines for humane treatment of the migrants that were stranded. While the Supreme Court judgement recognises the anxiety and fear of the migrants, and even recommends making counselling services available to the affected, the unfortunate aftermath of the initial government response continues to play out. Reports from Bihar and UP indicate that upon returning to their home villages, migrant labourers are being barred from entering their villages due to fear that they may be carrying the infection. In a stark example of government action that might exacerbate social discrimination: returning migrants were hosed down in chlorine solution by the district authorities of Bareily in UP. This treatment of migrant labourers is in contrast to the treatment met out to Punjabi international migrants, who despite being some of the initial carriers of Covid-19 in the state continue to reside in their villages and in many cases violate home quarantine measures.
The Supreme Court’s judgement with its emphasis on improving provision of food and shelter by the state is an extension of the state’s long-held position of treating migrant labour through the category of the poor. The Indian state has historically viewed internal migration as an economic problem to be addressed through employment generation programs like MGNREGA. The primary focus of such a program being to mitigate the circumstances thought to drive out-migration, by generating employment in rural areas and bridging wage differentials. This framework constructs internal migration as a problem that emerges only due to low levels of development in sending communities and states. It overlooks the social, political and cultural dimensions that underlie decisions to migrate, as well as experiences of migration. Anthropological studies on migration indicate that migration is often tied to ideas of modernity, progress, social mobility and in some cases becomes an important component of local cultural norms.
The lack of acknowledgement in the current crisis of the migrants’ desire to be with their families echoes a narrow construction of the migrant actor through the lens of their economic impoverishment. However, this approach not only overlooks the agency of the migrant actor, it is also short-sighted in ignoring that simply locking down people in temporary shelters, away from their social support systems is not sustainable. It is unreasonable to expect that large numbers of restive people can continue to be housed in temporary shelters. Many will try to find ways to escape their confinement and any instances of strong-arming by the state will probably worsen the situation.
A more sustainable way to manage the problem will have to take cues from the anthropological approach to migration and understand the crisis as one of thwarted aspirations and the fear of being stuck in limbo. This will require appreciating migrants’ choice to go home in poorer states, knowing that these states have promised less economic support and have fewer medical facilities. The policy intervention that will emerge from this holistic understanding of migrants can aim to facilitate their return home in way that manages the risk of migrants carrying Covid-19 into their villages.
One way of doing this is to ensure speedy and efficient testing of migrants housed in temporary camps. The urgent need for ramping up testing has been much much talked about, but nowhere is it more urgent than in these camps. Even if the shortage in testing kits persists, it would be prudent to prioritise these camps and the homeless, the others can still escape the worst by being locked in houses. Once it is established that the person carries no risk, arrangements for travel can be made via trains to the capitals of their respective states. These arrangements must be made by the central government to avoid any inter-state haggling. With plenty of spare railway capacity at their disposal, this should not be very difficult to arrange. Once in their state capitals, state governments can make arrangements for people to get back home. These measures will have to be supplemented with wide-spread information campaigns in the states of Bihar and UP, where most of these migrants will be returning to assure the people residing there that everybody who is returning has been tested.
These suggestions do not preclude the necessity of economic support but serve to point out that managing crises also involves developing a deeper understanding of the populace and their needs. While it is possible that the process of returning migrants home might create other problems such as determining who should be tested first, it is crucial to engage in these difficult decisions with the knowledge that at the present time there are no good outcomes only less bad ones. If a country like India, with its poor health infrastructure and limited state capacity, is to have any chance in the fight against Covid-19, it cannot be fighting its citizens. India’s hope lies in strengthening its weakest link and giving it the best chance to survive in the face of this growing threat.

This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the South Asia @ LSE blog, nor of the London School of Economics.

About the author

Sugandha Nagpal

Sugandha Nagpal is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the School of International Affairs at O.P. Jindal Global University. Her research is in the areas of migration, gender, education and rural development.

Vatsalya Srivastava

Vatsalya Srivastava is an Assistant Professor of Economics in the School of Government and Public Policy at the same university. His research is in the area of microeconomics of governance.

'... the essential role migrants play in functioning of Indian cities' - Tariq Thachil | Sushant Singh, IE April 2, 2020

The Indian Express

An Expert Explains: ‘A silver lining of the lockdown will be highlighting the essential role migrants play in functioning of Indian cities’

Tariq Thachil's surveys found most migrant workers live in cramped rented rooms or sleep on the footpath, lack documents to access benefits such as rations in the city, do not have family members in the city, and have few savings to draw upon.

Written by Sushant Singh | Updated: April 2, 2020 11:10:50 pm

Migrants who comes from different part of India being shifted to their native place from Shelter home after note their names and addresses at Awadh Shilp Gram in Lucknow (Express photo by Vishal Srivastav) Tariq Thachil is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. His current research focuses on understanding the political consequences of rapid urbanisation and internal migration in India. He spoke to The Indian Express about internal and circular migrant labour in India.

What is unique about the migrant labour in urban areas of India, compared to other countries and societies?

Tariq Thachil

Migrant labour in Indian cities, and the vast majority of workers currently in the news, are marked by three traits: internal migration, informality, and circularity. First, these migrants come from within India, unlike international migrants who often dominate the study of migration. Second, they are low-income workers who are informally employed, meaning they lack formal contracts. Many migrant workers perform daily wage labor (such as beldars on construction sites), or are self-employed (for example street vendors). Such employment is obviously precarious and day-to-day in nature, with no protections in the event of an abrupt cancellation, as has happened with the lockdown. Third, most of these migrants do not permanently relocate to the city. Expensive and inhospitable urban environments compel them to move without their families. Instead, they circulate between city and village several times a year, and remain deeply rooted within sending villages. Each of these factors is important in understanding why migrant workers have been so eager to return home since the lockdown was announced.

This circular and informal labour is contrasted with the more permanent and formal labor that characterized the urbanizing transition from farm to factory in wealthier economies during the Industrial Revolution. However, it would be wrong to say circular migration is unique to India. Internal migrants outnumber international migrants by a three to one ratio, and many internal migrants observe circular migration and are informally employed. Informal circular migrants are important populations in countries ranging from Bangladesh to Mozambique. What makes India’s migrant crisis unique is not the nature of its migrant workforce but the abruptness of its public policy.

What is their contribution to the Indian economy? Has it been recorded and acknowledged properly and accurately?

Quite simply, no, for two reasons. First, the informal nature of employment makes it hard to collect reliable data even on the size of this population, let alone its economic contributions. That said, we can gain a sense of these contributions by considering sectors in which employment is dominated by circular migrants. More fine-grained studies have revealed circular migrants are influential, and in some cases, the predominant forms of labor in industries ranging from construction, brick manufacturing, mining and quarrying, hotels and restaurants, and street vending. Many of these sectors are integral to the Indian economy, and comprise a significant share of our national GDP.
Circular urban migrants perform essential labour and provide services that many people want but are unwilling to provide themselves. Beyond official statistics however, there is a broad societal reluctance to acknowledge the contributions of circular migrants. Circular urban migrants perform essential labour and provide services that many people want but are unwilling to provide themselves. Yet too often this work is not received with gratitude by municipal authorities or more privileged urbanites. The migrants I have spoken to repeatedly offer examples of their harassment and mistreatment by urban employers, middle-class shopkeepers and residents, and local police. Perhaps one silver lining of the lockdown will be that the exodus of migrants renders visible the essential role they play in the functioning of Indian cities.

What are your estimates about the number of migrant labourers in urban India? What is their general socio-economic and educational status?

This is a simple question with a complicated answer. Unfortunately, we lack a consensus estimate of the size of our circular migrant population for a number of reasons. Many official data sources use definitions of migration that fail to capture the transient and itinerant patterns observed by circular migrants. For example, India’s landmark National Sample Survey (NSS) collected specific data on migration in its 64th round, and found the all-India rate of ‘short-term migration’ is between 1 and 2 percent. This rate would roughly suggest a population of between 13 and 26 million short-term migrants. Yet the figure is likely to be a dramatic underestimate.
The NSS defines a ‘short-term’ migrant as one who stays away for up to 6 months during the last year, but many circular migrants spend most of the year working in cities, returning home for festivals, harvests, or to see family. Further, the fact that these migrants live and work in informal conditions in cities, and circulate between village and city, makes them especially difficult to access through standard residence-based surveys.
Most studies agree the vast majority of circular migrants are economically disadvantaged. Alternative data sources suggest India’s circular migrant population is substantial. According to the national census of 2011, more than half of all rural residents live off the earnings they make through unskilled labor, many of whom are likely to do so in cities. Some scholars have drawn on employment figures from migrant-dominated sectors like construction to estimate the number of circular migrants is nearly 120 million. The truth may lie in the middle, but either way we are talking about tens of millions of people.
There is greater consensus on the average economic status of circular migrants. Most studies agree the vast majority of circular migrants are economically disadvantaged. My own surveys of circular migrants aligned with this consensus. I surveyed 3,018 circular migrants working as daily wage laborers and 1,200 migrants working as street vendors across Delhi and Lucknow. One important finding from this survey was that circular migrants were uniformly poor, but diverse in caste and faith. 27 per cent were from Scheduled Castes, 44 per cent from the Other Backward Classes, 18 per cent from the upper castes, and 12 per cent were Muslims. Yet the average income of migrants within each of these social groups was practically identical—and 75 per cent earned less than $2 per day. Also, 77 per cent had no secondary education, and 74 per cent had no household electric connection in their home villages. Over half of them had ongoing debts they had to pay off. Such homogeneity across caste and religious divisions sharply contrasts with rural sending communities, where economic well-being varies sharply across caste and religious groups.

Were you surprised by the mass exodus of migrant labour after the lockdown was announced by the government? Could it have been prevented?

The exodus of migrant workers is far from surprising. In this respect, I disagree with the Supreme Court’s recent observation that the exodus was caused by irrational panic triggered by misinformation. Unless they have some concrete data to back this claim that I am not privy to, the exodus is best viewed as a highly rational response. Any ‘surprise’ from observers is due to our own lack of information regarding these communities. Specifically, observers are unaware of how rooted circular migrants are in their sending villages, as well as how inhospitable the conditions are under which they must live and work in their destination cities. My own surveys found most migrant workers live in cramped rented rooms or must sleep on the footpath, lack documents to access benefits such as rations in the city, do not have family members in the city, and have few savings to draw upon. They also face considerable harassment from police and middle-class elites, who view them as unclean, nuisances, or criminal. The lockdown takes away their only reason for enduring such hardships: work in the city. Moreover, given the nature of the novel coronavirus, it would be completely plausible for migrants to be unsure about when work opportunities might actually resume in cities. Why then would they stay in harsh conditions away from their families?
Migrant workers returning to their homes in UP sleep at a shelter home in Lucknow. A more effective and humane response would have first considered how an abrupt lockdown might affect transient populations. Given the lockdown order required everyone to stay at home for a prolonged period, it is especially important to consider those populations who are often forced to work far away from their homes. Second, a more effective response would have decided whether to prioritize keeping migrants in place in destination cities, or helping them safely reach home. Currently the policies enacted by governments at various levels are swinging back and forth between these two strategies, preventing the chance of either being successful. If the goal was to get migrants safely home, resources should be targeted to ensure safe and clean passage, and a feasible local quarantine strategy for migrants in their home regions. If the goal was to keep them in the city, resources should target keeping them healthy, housed, and fed (including by enabling them to pay our pause rent, and access PDS benefits in cities).

What is the response of the villages when these migrant labour go back? Are they welcome there usually, leave alone in a health crisis?

In my own travels with migrants back to sending villages, I found the typical reception to be warm within their families. Of course, there are always variations in experience. One migrant I grew close with complained his family treated him ‘like an ATM’ when he returned, only interested in the cash he brought home. More serious variations were underpinned by caste and class hierarchies in the village. For example, Dalit migrants I spoke to complained of harassment from upper castes in their village, especially if they returned with any sign of newfound prosperity (new clothes, or gifts for family).
Migrants queue at Peetol checkpost on NH48 in Gujarat’s Dahod district, on the state’s border with Madhya Pradesh. Clearly the pandemic has produced certain specific responses, such as disturbing images of migrants being rounded up and sprayed with harmful chemicals. Yet these responses are hardly divorced from longstanding patterns of marginalization. If anything, these images show how fears stoked by a viral pandemic are especially amenable to being channeled through longstanding systems of classification, purity, and stigma based on caste, class, and occupation.

Why is the response of the Indian State and society so radically different to the labour which migrates abroad to the one that migrates within India?

I am sure your readers can guess the answer here. Whether in times of crisis or normalcy, states respond to citizens who are economically powerful and politically organized. The striking difference in how we treat international and internal migrants is particularly apparent if we think of wealthy international diasporas, such as Indians residing in the United States. Survey data indicates Indian-Americans have higher median household incomes than any other major ethnic group, including non-Hispanic whites. These diasporas are celebrated for their accomplishments and remittances, and feted at events such as the Howdy Modi rally held recently in Houston. The power of these groups fueled significant efforts to expand their standing and political rights, including the establishment of new categories of citizenship (such as the Overseas Citizens of India).
Migrants sitting atop a bus as they leave from Lucknow. By contrast, I know of no systematic efforts to celebrate and acknowledge the contributions of poor circular migrants. Further, there have been no efforts to think through how to expand their political rights in destination cities. Efforts to provide them with city-based identification documents to help them secure rental properties, PDS benefits, or redressal from mistreatment from urban employers are few and mostly spearheaded by civil society organizations. Instead, city authorities tend to view migrants through the lens of enforcement rather than accommodation. Circular migrants experience considerable police repression in the cities they work within. This attitude remains apparent in the reports and images of police violence towards migrants during this current crisis, and the language of enforcement that pervades recent government orders. Take for example the move to convert sports facilities into ‘temporary jails’ for those found outside during the lockdown, many of whom are likely to be populations like circular migrants without reliable access to permanent shelters.

India: 2020 Noida’s migrant worker exodus | Nilotpal Kumar and Ritanjan Das

Noida’s migrant worker exodus is more about their notions of ‘home’ than coronavirus: Study

Our research in Noida for the past two years shows many poor migrant workers do not think of city of work as their home. They are treated as outsiders and live in cramped spaces.

Nilotpal Kumar and Ritanjan Das 1 April, 2020

housands of migrant workers began walking home from Delhi and adjoining areas of the NCR within just a few days of the 21-day coronavirus lockdown, alarming the central and state governments. They ignored calls to stay put in Delhi— ‘their own home’. But many poor migrants do not think of the city of work as their home, which is a specific place of belonging and security.

We have been conducting field research on migrant workers’ experiences in Noida since 2018 and many of the findings help us understand the reasons for their exodus. [ . . . ]

https://theprint.in/opinion/noidas-migrant-worker-exodus-more-notions-of-home/392290/

India’s anti-COVID strategy is premised on a mistaken idea and a pretence | Sanjay Srivastava

The Indian Express

India’s anti-COVID strategy is premised on a mistaken idea and a pretence

Epidemics are social dramas whose plots are made from the bricks and mortar of local material. An understanding of this will tell us who lives, who dies and what kind of society emerges.

Written by Sanjay Srivastava | Updated: April 1, 2020 9:37:05 am

X

On Tuesday, the flow had almost ceased at the Gujarat-MP border that had seen a sea of migrant labourers for almost a week. (Express Photo by Gajendra Yadav) The odd thing about an epidemic is that though it might be global in nature, it is impossible to understand its impact without paying close attention to the local conditions within which it circulates. Calls for global solidarity in a time of crisis are well-meaning. However, epidemics are social dramas whose plots are made from the bricks and mortar of local material. An understanding of this will tell us who lives, who dies and what kind of society emerges in the wake of a calamity that no poor country is equipped to handle.
The most significant aspect of life in countries such as India is informality — of jobs, living arrangements, healthcare, mobility and much else. We know, for example, that around 90 per cent of the population works in the non-formal sector, around 20 per cent of Indians are internal migrants (the vast majority moving across district and state boundaries for informal employment) and that, in many of our major cities, as much as 40 per cent of the population lives in informal settlements. Informality is the state of life beyond regulation. It is also a condition of great helplessness, where the capacity to exercise choice over one’s destiny is limited. For the majority of India’s (and the world’s) population, informality is not a staging post on the way to formality. It is a persistent condition of life with no indications of a dramatic change.
Yet, in India, we seem to have decided to not address the context that is most relevant to the conditions of life that have the greatest relevance to the majority of the population. This is the population that has no choice but to stay outdoors, live 10 to a room and be mobile as a livelihood strategy. There can be no universal strategy — or computer simulation — that can provide solutions for the present crisis. For, there is no “universal humanity”. While we share biology, we are fundamentally distanced by the histories that produce the social and economic conditions within which we live. This calls for specific strategies for dealing with COVID-19.
Editorial | Exodus of migrant labour from cities is an enormous human crisis, and an impending economic one
First, the issue of livelihoods. This has, so far, been primarily addressed through an anti-virus strategy that is premised on the idea that India is primarily a land of formal offices, industrial establishments and hotels. Indian cities contain some 10 million street vendors and street vending — just one form of informal work — makes up approximately 15 per cent of the urban workforce. If we were to add the circuits of interdependence — family members and those part of the product supply chain — then, according to sociologist Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay’s estimates, street vending is second only to agriculture as a source of livelihood. Our cities are, then, spaces of intense and involuntary intermingling and a ban on such activity is a matter of further immiseration for millions. Should the government not have consulted bodies such as the National Hawkers Federation for policy measures that take account of the kind of cities we have rather than the imagined ones?
Second, while Indian cities are home to long-term rural migrants, these are not populations who have severed ties to their villages. They return home for a variety of reasons, the most significant being in moments of catastrophe such as slum demolitions, illnesses and job losses. And, of course, now the virus. The village is the hospice of the city. It provides treatment, rehabilitation and healing to the city’s underclass, returning them, without charge, to the city as an endless supply of labour. As might be imagined, circular migration is the highest among the poorest of urban populations and Muslims, Scheduled Castes and Tribes form the largest number of such migrants.
Opinion | At the stroke of midnight on March 24, India suspended ‘politics’. The effects will stay with us
Those who have no means of support in the city head home to the village in times of hardship. While some complain that circular migration holds back urbanisation, were it not for this extraordinary and constant to-and-fro movement between the city and the village, the former would be overwhelmed with the debris it makes out of the bodies of the urban poor. As the poor build the city (literally, since the construction industry is the largest employer of seasonal migrants), their key hope of relief from its misery is the ability to retreat to the village. Under current circumstances, they neither have the means of survival in the city nor are able to return to their villages. And those of them who have managed to scramble back will continue to live — for how long, who knows? — in the shadow of a virus they might carry. But they are out of sight of the broad-brush policy of lockdown.
Notwithstanding the persistence and overwhelming evidence of informality as a social and economic fact — across cities in particular — processes of policy-making and governance are based on the pretence that the model most suited towards administering people and places is one that borrows from an ideal-type. That is, while the actually existing conditions of urban life might call for methods of governance based on a localised understanding of actual conditions of life, what we invariably get is aspirational policymaking. Aspirational policymaking —we want our cities to become like Singapore and New York, so we think we can apply their policies at home — has little concern for the common good. It is based on the spurious idea of an India that must keep pace with the “global” world through acting “globally”. We build gated communities to keep problems out, rather than deal with them. Similarly, the consequences of aspirational policy-making are rarely considered. For, like much else, the task of dying and suffering is easily outsourced to those who can be locked out.

India: Beware of a lopsided lockdown | Jean Drèze (26 March 2020)

The Hindu
March 26, 2020 00:02 IST

Beware of a lopsided lockdown

  Jean Drèze

The poor seem to count for very little in the Central government’s curfew plan

“I am willing to go hungry if there is no other way to stop this virus, but how will I explain that to my children?” We heard these poignant words two days ago from Nemi Devi of Dumbi village in Latehar district, Jharkhand. Her son and husband, both migrant workers, are stranded far away. In village after village, many other women expressed similar worries. And that was even before the Prime Minister announced a drastic 21-day lockdown, from Wednesday.
The enormity of the coronavirus crisis is gradually dawning on India. For you and me, it is still in the future. But for many informal-sector workers and their families, the crisis is already in full swing: there is no work, and resources are running out. Things are all set to get worse as the privileged hoard with abandon and food prices go north.

Also Read

Dressing a wounded economy

 Hopefully, the Central government’s decision to impose a 21-day lockdown will prove right in due course. But the lockdown (a virtual curfew) is crying out for relief measures, including income support for poor families. As it happens, most of them already receive a limited form of income support: food rations under the Public Distribution System (PDS). Under the National Food Security Act, two-thirds of Indian families (75% and 50% in rural and urban areas, respectively) are covered. In most States, including the poorest, the PDS works — not perfectly, but well enough to protect the bulk of the population from hunger.

Use excess food stock

The PDS is the country’s most important asset in this situation. It is essential to keep it going, even to expand it, in terms of both coverage and entitlements. Fortunately, India has gigantic excess food stocks. In fact, it has carried excess food stocks (more than twice the buffer-stock norms) for almost 20 years, and this is the time to use them. Nothing prevents the Central government from, say, doubling PDS rations for three or even six months as an emergency measure. That will not make up for most people’s loss of income, but it will ensure that there is food in the house at least.
Some bold steps are required to make food distribution effective. For instance, biometric authentication (fingerprint scanning) is best removed at this time — it is a source of exclusion as well as a health hazard. Distribution needs to be staggered and tightly supervised, to avoid crowds and cheating at the ration shop. Dealers who are caught cheating must be swiftly punished. All this is well within the realm of possibility; the main thing is to release the stocks without delay.

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 Having said this, the PDS is not enough. For one thing, many poor people are still excluded from it. Large-scale cash transfers are also required, starting with advance payment of social security pensions and a big increase in pension amounts (the Central government’s contribution has stagnated at a measly ₹200 per month since 2006). Here, one possible hurdle is the payment system. Many pensioners collect their pension from “business correspondents” (BCs) – a kind of human automated teller machine (ATM), who dispenses money on behalf of the bank. The problem is, unlike ATMs, most BCs use biometric authentication rather than smart cards. And mass biometric authentication could accelerate the transmission of the novel coronavirus.

Payment arrangements

Ideally, biometric authentication should be abandoned for now. Even if it is not, many BCs may vanish for fear of infection (most of them are poorly-paid employees of poorly-regulated private entities). Under both scenarios, something has to be done to ensure safe crowd management at the bank. New payment arrangements are also possible. For instance, social security pensions could be paid in cash at the panchayat bhavan on a given day of the month, obviating the need for everyone to go to the bank: this has been done in Odisha for years, with good results. Cash could also be disbursed, with due safeguards, through anganwadis or self-help groups. Cash transfers need not be limited to social security pensions. Revamping the PDS and social security pensions would go a long way, but a significant proportion of vulnerable families are likely to fall through the cracks. Further, food rations may prevent hunger but people have many other basic needs; they will need money to cope with this spell of unemployment.
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There are several possible ways of extending the reach of cash transfers beyond pensions. For instance, money could be sent to the accounts of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act job-card holders, or Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) beneficiaries, or PDS cardholders. How these lists are best used and combined is a context-specific question, perhaps best handled at the State level (my sense is that in many States, the MGNREGA job-cards list is the best starting point).
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These are just some examples of possible emergency measures. Many other valuable suggestions have been made, relating for instance to midday meals, community kitchens and relief camps for stranded migrant workers. The first step is to make relief measures an integral part of the lockdown plan. Failing that, it may do more harm than good. For one thing, a hungry and enfeebled population is unlikely to fight the virus effectively. A constructive lockdown should empower people to fight back together, not treat them like sheep.
Finally, Centre-State cooperation is essential. Many State governments have already initiated valuable social-security measures, but they are far from adequate. The Central government, for its part, has been struck with inexplicable paralysis on this. Adequate relief measures require big money (lakhs of crores of rupees) from the Central government. Implementation, however, should be led by the States. They all have their own circumstances and methods. The Central government is unlikely to do better on their behalf. If it foots the bill, that will be a good start.
Jean Drèze is Visiting Professor at the Department of Economics, Ranchi University