A LONG NIGHT
Their mass exodus last year following the lockdown opened our eyes to this invisible workforce. Has their plight improved since?
The invisible workforce faces the misery of a second exodus from Covid-hit cities
FOR OVER A FORTNIGHT NOW, 24-year-old Chander Kumar from Bihar’s Bahadurpur village has been living with a sense of déjà vu in his one-room shack in Delhi’s Chhatarpur area. His smartphone has been flashing constant updates on Covid-19 cases in the national capital where he works as a domestic help. He is in two minds, and despite chief minister Arvind Kejriwal requesting them not to leave the city, Kumar and his friends are worried about the week-long lockdown announced on April 20 in the national capital.
Not just in Delhi, migrant workers across Indian cities are watching with trepidation the rising wave of Covid cases and increasing restrictions such as partial lockdowns and night curfews. More than the fear of the virus, it is the dread of economic uncertainty that haunts them. Memories of last March are still raw in their minds when the sudden lockdown left them with no jobs, no food and no means to go home. Desperate, many of them set out on foot, their meagre belongings and families in tow. This
time, they are taking no chances. In Maharashtra, Gujarat, Delhi, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, they are already queueing up at train reservation counters. “I have also bought a ticket for next week,” says Kumar. “I hope the trains don’t get cancelled.” Interstate trains and buses will keep plying during the lockdown in Delhi, so that will be a relief. Back home, chief minister Nitish Kumar has already requested the Bihari migrants to return quickly in the backdrop of the raging second wave of Covid, saying his government will arrange work for them.
Even official sources admit that the lockdown last year triggered a reverse migration that resulted in the secondlargest mass movement after Partition. While the latter saw 14 million people displaced, last year’s lockdown had some 6.7 million migrants returning to 116 districts in six states, according to the skill development ministry database. Independent estimates place the number much higher, at 60 million, or nine times the official count.
In a recent study by ICRIER (Indian Council for Resea
rch on International Economic Relations) and the ISSRF (Inferential Survey Statistics and Research Foundation), a survey of 2,917 migrants in six states—Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha and Chhattisgarh, who accounted for two-thirds of the reverse migration last year—was used to assess their condition before, during and after the lockdown. The study found that 38.6 per cent found no work after returning home, and that household incomes dropped by 85 per cent in the immediate aftermath of the lockdown.
Take the case of construction worker Manoj Kumar, 32, from UP, who lost his job in Delhi in the lockdown. After struggling to return home for a month, he finally made it to his village Kasidaha in Sant Ravidas Nagar district in late May only to realise there was no work for him there. By July, he was back in Delhi. His friend Chaman, from Annupur village in Ambedkar district, was a bit more lucky. Within two weeks of reaching home, Chaman got a call from the UP state authorities offering him work under MNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi Employment Guarantee Act), 2005.
Seeing the plight of the migrants, there was a growing clamour for policy interventions and long-term measures to improve their living conditions. India never had any comprehensive laws to protect this silent demographic; there is the Inter-state Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1979, but its provisions apply only to those recruited through a contractor. On September 29, this act was subsumed under the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions (OSH) Code, 2020, through a notification. The code mandates decent working conditions, minimum wages, grievance redressal mechanisms, protection from abuse and exploitation, enhancement of skills and social security to all categories of organised and unorganised workers, including migrant ones. The code is applicable to every establishment that employs or employed on any day of the past year 10 or more inter-state migrants.
In addition, as the Union minister of state (independent charge) for labour and employment Santosh Kumar Gangwar said in the Lok Sabha on March 22, “Migration-related problems are to be addressed by a multi-pronged course of action…through rural development, improved infrastructural facilities, equitable dispersal of resources to remove regional disparities, employment generation, land reforms, increased literacy, financial assistance and various government welfare and social security schemes.”
The NITI Aayog, on the request of Gangwar’s ministry, has prepared an umbrella policy framework, the National Action Plan for Migrant Workers. It identifies portability of social protection, voting rights, right to the city and health, education and housing facilities as focus areas to improving their living conditions. For coordinated implementation, the NITI Aayog draft proposes a governance structure with the labour ministry as the nodal point and a dedicated unit under it focusing on inter-ministerial and Centre-state coordination. It also proposes mechanisms to coordinate the effort on interstate migration, especially on principal migration corridors.
Critics, however, say the NITI Aayog draft, while advocating a ‘rights-based’ approach to tap the migrants’ potential rather than issuing handouts and cash transfers, fails to address access to protected wages to mitigate the crisis. It asks ‘source states’ to raise minimum wages to stem migration to some extent but doesn’t talk of any minimum wage guarantee as a social security cover.
This silence is critical, especially in the post-lockdown period, when several states have diluted the labour protection framework to ease economic revival. It is often argued that guaranteed wages will lead to a shutdown of businesses and loss of employment, despite substantial evidence to the contrary. The government’s own reports, including the Eco
The silence on minimum wage guarantees in the National Action Plan for Migrant Workers is worrying, especially when states have diluted labour laws