We build statues, name stadiums and write hagiographies to honour Bollywood stars, cricketers, politicians and a pantheon of celebrities. But for the human infrastructure of the nation — the women and men who build tunnels and highways, run factories, service middle-class homes — there are only obituaries of anonymity. The hapless migrant worker is truly the forgotten citizen, mainly breaking the surface of national consciousness as a figure in televised tragedy. “National greatness” is attributed to the products of migrant exertion — shiny new expressways and gigantic statues — but is never expressed in the vocabulary of care and policy requirements for those who make the nation great.
Flung from the abjection of village life into the hostility of their new, distant environments, migrant workers largely exist in the national consciousness as dispensable life. They are driven out of cities during periods of health crises, crushed under collapsed buildings, mutilated through lack of industrial safety mechanisms and stare out of steel pipes from inside collapsed tunnels.
There are a variety of strands of internal migration in India, including long distance and short distance, rural to urban, rural to rural, intra and interstate, intra and inter-district and circular and seasonal. And there are also a number of data sources that tell us about the sea of people that move across local and regional boundaries, seeking livelihoods, leaving behind families and, just as frequently, suffering the ignominy of being perpetual outsiders in their host societies.
Depending on sources, anywhere between 35-40 per cent of the Indian population takes part in internal migration. Unsurprisingly, as far as interstate migration is concerned, workers move from the poor states such as Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand to the richer and more industrialised ones such as Kerala, Maharashtra, Punjab and Karnataka. The low level of formal sector employment — around 22 per cent according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (2021-2022) — means that peripatetic labour is a characteristic feature of Indian society.
In absolute terms, the seasons are evocative in Indian performative traditions but cruel as far as working lives are concerned. The vagaries of agriculture production systems are a significant cause of circular migration. Notwithstanding the actual type of intra-national migration, however, it converts into massive numbers, running into hundreds of millions of livelihood-seekers shanghaied across multiple boundaries of hope and distress.
The migrant labour force produces the visible signs of national pride — governments proudly proclaim the making of a new and global India — but itself becomes invisibilised and, in many instances, criminalised, shorn of basic human dignity. We have policies for making highways but almost none for those who make them: Laws that govern workers’ rights do not, in general, account for the needs of migrant workers. In effect, the migrant worker is reduced to an abstraction: Providing labour but not being accounted for in his or her humanity. That state mechanisms are largely uncaring of the specificities and vicissitudes of migrant labouring lives is indicated by the fact that, in the realm of labour laws, there is just one — the Interstate Migrant Workmen Act, 1979 — that makes any attempt to address the needs of around 37 per cent of the population. The Act contains provisions for housing, healthcare, minimum wages, and prevention of discriminatory practices in remuneration between locals and migrants. Like the migrant worker, these provisions have also taken on a mirage-like quality.
Not only do migrant workers largely slip through legal protections that other kinds of citizens might enjoy, their everyday lives are just as blighted by the re-fashioning of the new spaces that many of them move to. The ways in which cities are increasingly being planned create a fundamentally hostile and discriminatory environment for an already precarious work force. While city infrastructure and private construction activity relies upon the labour of migrants — both women and women — there is no provision whatsoever for looking after the human needs of workers. Bereft of any organised system of health care, financial integration, humane accommodation, work and safety provisions and childcare facilities, migrant workers’ lives are no more than their work day.
Beyond work, they endure an urban purgatory, fending for themselves. Infants are cared for by older children and the latter have no access to any meaningful educational activity and are condemned to their parents’ cycle of disadvantage. When limbs break, it is most likely the end of a working life as the injured usually return to their home-places to ensure whatever modicum of health care they can secure as the city offers nothing by way of quick and necessary access to medical facilities. And if seasonal necessity forces many to leave villages to seek livelihoods in urban environments, their terrible conditions of urban housing means that the seasons of the city only add to their misery.
And yet, we build “smart cities” rather than thoughtful ones. Thoughtful cities are those where the lives of those who, of necessity, must leave their homes to seek sustenance at the mercy of hostile strangers, achieve a level of material and human dignity.
In the case of the workers trapped in the Silkyara tunnel, it isn’t only the collapsed rubble that surrounds them. Rather, they have also become enveloped in hype regarding their role as representatives of national diversity and unity. What is needed is less media nationalism and greater and sustained attention to policies that address the peculiar and complex lives of mobile labour.
For the hundreds of millions who only become visible as key players in personal and familial disasters, the most genuine form of national greatness lies in devising measures that limit the impact of such tragedies.
The writer is British Academy Global Professor, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS University of London
Migrant workers largely exist in the national consciousness as dispensable life
14
1
25.11.2023
We build statues, name stadiums and write hagiographies to honour Bollywood stars, cricketers, politicians and a pantheon of celebrities. But for the human infrastructure of the nation — the women and men who build tunnels and highways, run factories, service middle-class homes — there are only obituaries of anonymity. The hapless migrant worker is truly the forgotten citizen, mainly breaking the surface of national consciousness as a figure in televised tragedy. “National greatness” is attributed to the products of migrant exertion — shiny new expressways and gigantic statues — but is never expressed in the vocabulary of care and policy requirements for those who make the nation great.
Flung from the abjection of village life into the hostility of their new, distant environments, migrant workers largely exist in the national consciousness as dispensable life. They are driven out of cities during periods of health crises, crushed under collapsed buildings, mutilated through lack of industrial safety mechanisms and stare out of steel pipes from inside collapsed tunnels.
There are a variety of strands of internal migration in India, including long distance and short distance, rural to urban, rural to rural, intra and interstate, intra and inter-district and circular and seasonal. And there are also a number of data sources that tell us about the sea of people that move across local and regional boundaries, seeking livelihoods, leaving behind families and, just as frequently, suffering the ignominy of being........
© Indian Express
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Nikkei Editorial
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
