It’s everyone’s problem: The plight of migrant workers in India
It has taken a pandemic of the scale of COVID-19 for the upper classes of urban India to take real notice of the plight of the migrant workers. However, some argue that this new-found attention to the issues unique to migrant workers is too little and too late.
The mass migration that brought these workers to the cities in the first place and pushed them into its underbelly, is not a new phenomena. This crisis has been unfolding gradually over the last 28 years driven by the agrarian distress, systemic collapse of rural livelihoods, and degrading ecological buffers that once served as security nets for these communities.
Every time I use the words ‘returning to normal’ with a hint of nostalgia, a news article about the migrant worker crisis forces me to unpack what this ‘normal’ was for the vast majority of citizens of this country. I am a privileged Savarna (upper caste) woman and I have spent most of my life in urban set-ups. When women like me step out to work in white-collar jobs in India, some other women step in to take care of our children and elderly, cook for us and clean our homes.
Our houses and infrastructure are constructed on the back-breaking labour of the migrant workers. The metabolism of our cities are regulated by the bare hands of these men and women who work as waste workers and sanitation workers. These workers are employed as ‘informal’ labour and migrant workers constitute a big chunk of this layer, which make up for 93% of the country’s workforce.
For these workers, the ‘normal’ that many of us miss was a struggle for two square meals a day, irregular wages, and low access to essential public services like health, education and public transport. Much of the labour comes from marginalised castes and communities, who are then recruited via informal social networks, and existing social vulnerabilities become more pronounced through the so-called ‘free’ market of labour in cities. COVID-19 has merely brought out the absurdity of this normalised ‘abnormal’ to the forefront.
For a generation of people like me, this crisis makes us confront any doubts we had about India’s widening socioeconomic divide. Most days, I find myself struggling with an overwhelming sense of discomfort and collective guilt about the centuries of power imbalance and oppression that has exacerbated the conditions leading to this situation. We must take this awareness and not forget, build it into our work and our view of the world. Kindly remind others when they might forget.
The systemic roots of the crisis can be traced back to what is happening in agriculture in India over the last thirty years. Majority of migrant workers are farmers with small landholdings, who rely on rain-fed irrigation and practice subsistence farming. With degradation of soil health, falling productivity, increasing pressure on lands, water crisis, lack of other viable livelihood options, and impacts of climate change combined with a wider ecosystem level degeneration, farming is no longer a viable profession. The grim situation of agriculture has pushed farmers towards suicide, worsening mental health, informal and insecure debt cycles and migration to cities as a last resort. According to the 2011 census, 3.5 million migrants stated economic reasons for migration. (In the 2001 and 1991 census, these were, respectively, 2.2 and 1.4 million.)
As migrant workers go back to their villages, in search of safety nets that don’t exist in their peripheral lives in urban India, the already broken agrarian system will face immense pressures from all quarters. There is an urgent need to actively start rebuilding the foundations of agriculture with regenerative and redistributive principles at its heart, to render some justice to India’s most vulnerable people.
Promoting regenerative agriculture practices, along with value chains that focus on redistribution as well as supporting policies are going to be pertinent in the times of COVID-19, to effectively respond to the migrant workers’ situation. At Forum, our focus on regenerative agriculture takes on new meanings in the context of India, as learning from the crisis keep unfolding.
There is one big question I keep asking myself, and want to ask of those around me:
Why isn’t agriculture a viable livelihood when it is an essential system: the source of much of our food, industrial inputs and economic prosperity in general?
From my window to the world:
On a personal level, this crisis has revealed how much of my functioning as a professional and as a human being depends on a wider social context. I moved to Mumbai in November of 2019, and after the five times I have moved cities, I felt confident that my social and relationship building skills would sail through the transition. I was looking forward to building friendships and support systems, being part of communities, and professional networks. Yet as the crisis continues, I am struggling to find these ways of connecting in a city that now is locked out of reach, physically.
I attribute most of my sanity through this phase to my housemate who I first met at a conference a few months ago. She moved in two months before the lockdown, when we both had very little idea about what lay ahead of us. I find it almost surreal how much of our lives is written in small moments of connections and conversations — how they inevitably take the shape of something much bigger and more important.
In the last few months, my housemate and I have supported each other with simple things like allocating chores fairly, and more complex ones like processing what this uncertainty means for our respective futures and dreams. We have been able to ‘work from home’ effectively everyday because we managed to create a home-like space in a matter of a few months, and that’s not a small feat. Good housemates are the saving grace of every functioning person’s life during this lockdown and I am grateful to have one!
And finally, what is a signal of a positive trajectory
Through the 73rd & 74th constitutional amendment, India recognizes urban and rural local bodies as statutory bodies necessary for decentralized decision-making. The state governments in India are supposed to transfer power and funds to these urban and rural local bodies for effective functioning. Yet more than two decades later this hasn’t been happening and these institutions remain dis-empowered especially in rural areas. This crisis makes a strong case for empowering these bodies who have emerged as the true front-line warriors of the COVID-19 crisis. In the Indian state of Kerala, the Panchayats (village councils or assemblies) have been handling the health care aspects, food supply aspects and agriculture-related aspects of this crisis effectively. The Indian state of Odisha has also seen success stories coming from its Panchayats in handling the pandemic. These institutions are finally being credited for mobilizing people and resources and taking responsibility in these times, in a way that no other institutions can.
Link — https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/panchayats-pandemic-65185/
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Hansika Singh is a Principal Strategist at Forum for the Future.
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