By the time I had joined College in New Delhi in the early 1960s, the Malayalee-Tamil entrepreneur worker had made his firm place in Delhi. He was the manager of the Indian Coffee house in the Faculty of Science in Delhi, where I had classes. He was also the waiter there, handsome in his moustache, starched clothes, and stiff turban with its magnificent fan now associated with the headgear of the Prime minister when he unfurls the Tricolor at Red Fort every year.
Elsewhere at nearby Maurice Nagar, his kin ran the breakfast joint with India’s best fast food – the dosa. And in the Secretariat of the Delhi university, another cousin was a senior officer in the office of the Registrar. These, not counting professors, students and lab assistants, were among the many people employed at various rungs of the economic ladder in just one smack corner of Delhi, the university campus. Elsewhere they were a large corps of migrants, rubbing shoulders with similar groups from Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Mangalore, and Mumbai. The half century and more since then has been gentle to the migrant, or “guest worker” to give him a contemporary label.
India is not a small island in the Pacific. It is a subcontinent. And no one place, however large, can find within itself all the talent and muscle power it needs to run its homes and factories, schools, and civic services. And when its best and brightest leave for greener pastures in America or Dubai and Singapore, there is equivalent replacement talent from Chennai, Trivandrum, Patna and perhaps even from Srinagar.
It is therefore that the man who climbs up the coconut tree in my wife’s hometown Tiruvalla to trim its leaves, perhaps slice its flower stalk for toddy, and certainly to bring down the clusters of nuts is no longer a Malayalee of a certain caste, but a lithe youth from Orissa, doing the same job at half the wages.
These men and women are of the up to four crore of people who work in states other than where they were born, from the lower rung of illiterate manual labour to the highest. And barring perhaps the professors and scientists or engineers, most of them are in the unorganized sector, each left to his or her own device, running the gamut of risks and reaching the benefits of hard labour in equal measure.
Activists such as Advocate Sr Mary Scaria of Delhi and her team and their colleagues in other states discovered at the turn of the century how exploited Adivasi women were when they came to the Delhi-Chandigarh belt of well to do households where they were domestic labour. They were beaten up, semi-starved, made to sleep in the kitchen or bathroom, and if young, often sexually exploited. A few military and civil officers and businessmen were handed over to the police on charges of rape.
The magnitude hit us in the face during the covid pandemic when lakhs of migrant labour walked, drove, or packed into trains to go home as jobs closed overnight in the lockdown. Their plight is no locked in camera footage of independent journalists and human rights activists.
Researcher Asma Khan in a recent paper noted that India has a predominant share of internal migration, and is also the top origin country of international migrants. The 2011 Indian Census data calculated the total number of internal migrants accounting for inter and intra-state movement to be 450 million, an increase of 45% since the Census 2001.
Several crore workers from Bihar, Jharkhand and Orissa work in Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Haryana, Western Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Maharashtra, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu, and to neighboring states of Andhra, Telangana, and Assam. In Kerala and Tamil Nadu in particular, they almost totally replace the local labour which has been working in the Gulf countries at comparatively higher wages.
The Economic Survey of India 2017 estimated the inter-state migrant population as 60 million and the average annual flow of migrants between states was calculated at 9 million between 2011 and 2016.
Migration, thus ‘gives an optimistic livelihood strategy for migrant workers and their families, contributes to the economic growth of the destination state/country, while the origin state/country benefits from the remittances and the skills acquired during their migration ,“ says Usma.
The issue of the plight of migrant workers, both trained or specialized ones and manual labour, working in states away from home, however, is complex at the best of times. In times of crises, epidemics such as the recent Covid pandemic, natural disasters such as floods, and political crises and confrontations as in Kashmir, often in Punjab and even in the southern states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, also aggravate their situation. And often, they create a confrontational environment that can be stifling, if not entirely dangerous to life and limb.
Working conditions are hard. In Punjab, I learn from my sources, during the sowing and threshing or harvesting seasons, workers practically live on the field through much of the day and the night. They are vulnerable when sleeping in the midst of all that stubble and sheaves of grain and straw. It has been described as “a disaster waiting to happen.”
Political players wade in everywhere, from Kashmir to Tamil Nadu and Bihar to see how much of a splash they can make. The controversy in Tamil Nādu where the BJP is out to soil the reputation of Chief minister MK Stalin on the issue if Bihar labour, is but one of many controversies in almost every state of the Union.
Internal movement for work and personal reasons such as to improve the quality of life of the family and children, is guaranteed by the constitution of a federal country. Workers may or may not have political rights in their host states, including the right to vote which they certainly do not have unless they have settled down permanently, but they do have the right to life, to the minimum wage in the state and good working conditions.
It is on the political establishment and the administration of host states to ensure the security of guest workers if I may call them that. The other state in turn also has a role to monitor their health and working conditions and to protest to the host state government if anything is amiss.
Politically, I think state and national political parties must work towards empowering these guest labour. Unless they get political rights, including the vote in stage and municipal elections in the host states while they live there, they will not get the weight they deserve.
John Dayal is an author,
editor, occasional
documentary film maker and activist He lives in New Delhi.
