TOP MIGRANT-FRIENDLY INDIAN STATES

The Interstate Migrant Policy Index 2019, prepared by Mumbai non-profit India Migration Now, ranked seven states on the basis of equitable policies for residents and migrants in labour policies, housing, social security, health, sanitation and political p

KERALA

MAHARASHTRA

PUNJAB HARYANA pay rent. Living in cities became untenable. As Kundu points out, “Forty-five per cent of them share one room among five. Nearly 40 per cent use community water. The lockdown confined them to their congested living spaces, as moving out meant facing police atrocities.” In their villages, they had family, no rent to pay and food to eat. Little wonder they set out for home—with 80 per cent of them heading back to Bihar and UP.

Many of these workers are ‘circular migrants’—who come to the cities seeking work in the non-agricultural season—and would have returned to their native places after the monsoon. “They go back in June-July. Railway data shows that around 4 million people move around that time. The lockdown advanced their return by a month or two. It’s surprising that the government did not anticipate this movement,” says Kundu. Priya Deshingkar, professor of migration and development at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, says their invisibility is the reason why the urban poor and migrant workers in the informal sector fall below the radar of central and state government officials. “Several studies show that 80 per cent of the circular migrants lack identity and domicile documents. They also remain invisible because they are recruited by labour market intermediaries such as contractors and brokers,” she says.

By the time the prime minister extended the lockdown on April 14, the situation had turned even more complex. More than the Centre, states like Bihar were unwilling to take back people fearing an exponential rise in Covid cases. Nor did they have adequate testing and quarantine facilities to give them the confidence to handle the inflow. Villages, too, were reluctant to accommodate the returnees, fearing infection. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy, on whom both the Centre and states rely to execute policy, became even more obdurate after Delhi chief secretary Renu Sharma was suspended for trying to facilitate the movement of migrants back to UP. “The ad hoc and haphazard way policies are designed and implemented was the real problem,” says Varun Aggarwal, founder of India Migration Now (IMN), an advocacy group in Mumbai.

“We thought the lockdown would end after the first three weeks,” says a top Madhya Pradesh government official. “When the second phase came, we thought it would be the last. The extension of lockdowns, with the authorities each time not clarifying whether it was the last one or there were more to follow, made people

impatient.” When the first wave of migrants returned, he reveals, the state government was completely unprepared, yet managed to handle them and contain Covid’s spread. “But when the second wave began,” he says, “with vehicles clogging the borders and those travelling on foot or on trains arriving simultaneously, the resources to manage them were stretched.”

The Centre, meanwhile, began focusing its energies on providing food and relief to migrants through cash transfers. Two days into the lockdown, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced a Rs 1.7 lakh crore stimulus package under the PM Garib Kalyan Yojana, which included free foodgrains to ration card-holders for three months and Rs 500 cash transfer to women Jan Dhan account-holders for three months. States were directed to use their Building and Construction Workers Welfare Fund to provide relief to construction workers. Though not aimed directly at migrant workers, the provisions, government sources claimed, covered many of them. States such as Assam and Odisha made direct cash payments to the distressed, even if the coverage and quantum remained debatable. As the distress among migrants increased, the Centre empowered the states to use their allocation under the National Disaster Response Fund (NDRF) to provide food and shelter to migrant workers. By April 3, Rs 11,092 crore of NDRF had been released to states.

However, with most wage labourers tending to leave their ration cards behind with their families and the One Nation, One Ration Card scheme yet to be implemented, many found themselves unable to access welfare schemes. Others just wanted to go home. “Without any income support, the idea of providing food for three months was based on a faulty assumption,” says Chinmay Tumbe, migration expert and professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. “Most left because their landlords evicted them, leaving them with no place to stay.” The uncertainty over the length of the lockdown further exacerbated insecurities. Lack of awareness proved another impediment. A survey by Jan Sahas, a non-profit organisation, found that 62 per cent of the workers did not have any information about emergency welfare measures provided by the government and 37 per cent did not know how to access them.

Even as the movement of migrants continued, it took the central government 53 days after the lockdown to set up a National Migrant Information System, an online dashboard for states to monitor their movement. Of the 11 empowered groups set up on March 29, not one dealt with the plight of the migrants. It took the fifth instalment of the central government’s Rs 20 lakh crore package in May to give migrant workers some relief, that too in the form of easier credit access, not direct cash transfer.

The government’s May stimulus package did extend the free ration scheme to another 80 million Indians excluded under the public distribution system, which covers 810 million people. However, there implementation was left to the state governments. Registration and paperwork means a large number of migrants—primarily short-term labourers—will remain stranded as most of them lack documents such as Aadhaar cards.

Meanwhile, from May 1 onward, the Union home ministry allowed interstate movement of migrants on trains. Top railways officials say they had estimated they would have to transport around 3 million migrants, but midway they realised the numbers would be much higher. Till May 26, the railways had moved more than 4 million people, yet the crowds kept swelling. With most migrants headed to UP, all major junctions started getting clogged, resulting in delays and diversions. A blame game also began between the Centre and states, with Union railways minister Piyush Goyal charging many states with not sending in requests for trains to transport migrants and the chief ministers of these states, in turn, accusing him of ignoring their requests.

Meanwhile, the delays in moving people, just when lockdown restrictions are being eased, are beginning to hurt the economy. Cities are staring at labour scarcity. In Punjab, the exodus of migrants is worrying as the sowing season for Kharif has already begun, while work on labour-intensive paddy will begin by June 10. In neighbou

of the 14.6 million rural to urban migrants for work and business were interstate migrants of the 7.1 mn migrants who went from one urban centre to another for work were interstate migrants