Ganjam, Odisha: Kamallochan Sahoo (42) was just 18 when he first boarded a train to Surat along with a few others from his village, Kalamba, in Odisha’s Ganjam district to work. It was not his last trip to Surat. Nor was he the first–or last–to board a train to the west.
Almost a decade earlier, his paternal uncle had made the same journey to work in a textile mill.
“I don’t know who started the trend of going to Surat. But a lot of people from our caste were migrating there and everyone who did had the best things to say about the city,” said Sahoo, who belongs to Teli, a dominant caste in his village falling under ‘Other Backward Classes’ (OBCs).
“My community was there. They could assure me of good work, decent accommodation and food. So I wasn’t worried and had made up my mind to migrate to Surat,” said Sahoo, who also worked in the textile mills of Surat.
Kalamba’s landscape is characteristic of many villages in Ganjam. A narrow road cuts through the village, flanked by rows of tightly packed pucca houses that share common walls. Locally, they are known as ‘train compartment houses’ for their striking resemblance to railcars–a livelihood symbol in this region. For much of the year, it is just women, the elderly, and children who live in these homes–the men working in Surat.
The weekly train departing from Brahmapur, the nearest railway station to Sahoo’s village in eastern India, takes over 30 hours to reach Surat located in the country’s west, about 1,700 km away. It is always packed–with some leaving home for the first time, while others are returning to work they have been doing for decades.
Ganjam is amongst the 14 migration-prone districts in Odisha by the state’s labour directorate, based on the magnitude of out-migration.
But it’s not everyone who can migrate to Surat, or is welcome there.
Kalamba is predominantly home to OBCs like Sahoo, who make up 90% of the population, with a smaller community of Pano belonging to the Scheduled Castes (SCs).
“General caste and OBC families dominate this migration pattern,” said LibyJohnson, executive director of Odisha-based nonprofit Gram Vikas. “Villagers typically secure jobs in Surat through established social networks and connections with acquaintances already working there. This reliance on social capital often excludes SC and ST [Scheduled Tribes] workers, who face challenges accessing such networks,” he said.
The Pano community, for example, are stigmatised as an ‘untouchable’ community in local caste hierarchies across Odisha and do not have a large presence in Surat.
The climate push
Many years ago, the villagers in Kalamba relied on an unusual ritual to decide their fates: grains of rice, the staple food crop of the state, were assigned to various states, and crows were invited to peck at them. The chosen grain dictated where the men would migrate – Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir or beyond. For years, the village entrusted its future to this peculiar tradition.
But over time, the randomness gave way to a shared resolve, and the entire community began heading to a single destination: Surat, Gujarat’s bustling hub of textiles and diamonds.
The migration corridor’s formation, however, was shaped by industrial shifts, extreme climate events and their impact on people across caste hierarchies in the village.
Located by the volatile Bay of Bengal, Odisha has for years found itself tackling extremes of cyclones, long dry spells and also floods.
Ganjam district is flanked by the sea on one side, mountains on the other, and plain land stretching between the two. Frequent cyclones, flooding and drought have impacted agriculture and also fishing–the major source of income for rural households–denting incomes of both agrarian and fishing households, said locals.
Several men from Dalit and OBC communities began migrating in the 1960s to the rice mills of Myanmar and the jute mills of West Bengal, said Umi Daniel, Director, Migration, Aide et Action.
He said that the initial wave of migration came mainly from landless Dalit communities, with landowners joining later as agriculture began to fail due to the changing climate.
“However, these opportunities eventually dwindled due to various factors, such as the collapse of these mills in Myanmar,” said Daniel. “Around the same time, power looms began shutting down in Mumbai, with the industry shifting to Surat.
“As these transformations unfolded both at the source and the destination, the two trends converged, prompting people from Ganjam to start migrating to Surat,” he said.
Women, the elderly and children are left behind in the villages of Ganjam, as men from most villages in Ganjam migrate to Surat and Kerala for work. Photo: Aishwarya Mohanty
Decades later, the bustling industrial hub of Surat is now home to nearly one million Odias, according to the Surat Odiya Welfare Association (SOWA), a nonprofit based out of Surat. Most of the migrants have permanently settled in the city while the others are seasonal migrants.
Majority of all migrants from Odisha are from Ganjam, many of whom toil in the city’s power loom industry. Most migrants are from the OBC community.
In Kalamba, only 20% of the nearly 1,200 households own agricultural land and most families rely on this annual exodus for survival, villagers said.
But it wasn’t rising climate risks alone though that pushed migration numbers. Youth aspiration played a key role.
The smell of soap and a caste network
When Kamallochan Sahoo left home at the turn of the millennium, all he carried was a pair of rugged pajamas, two vests, faded yellow and green T-shirts, a cotton towel, and Rs 1,000 from his father. He remembers every item vividly, and the hope with which he left his village: that one day, he would return with much more.
“We were young then, and men would return from Surat with better clothes, perfumes, and strong odour soaps. We were fascinated,” he said. “A lot of men from our village had worked in looms in West Bengal, but struggled to make ends meet. It was a different kind of loom in Surat and life seemed better.”
Researchers have often described Surat as the El Dorado of the east, with people from impoverished regions imagining it as a city with gilded pavements and ample job opportunities.
“Around 40 years ago, when my father was young, the Surat-Odisha corridor became busier,” said Jayanto Gantayat (45), a member of SOWA who closely works with the Odia migrant labourers in Surat.
“Young men in large numbers started moving to Surat. There were no livelihood opportunities back home in Ganjam, not even in the big cities of Odisha,” said Gantayat. In contrast, Surat offered better money that workers could send back home, and the opportunity to live life in a big city, he said.
Ganjam, a sprawling district covering 8,070 sq km–roughly five times the area of Delhi–has a population of over 3.5 million. Migration was essential to earn a living, but not an affordable option for all.
As per the last recorded census of 2011, nearly 70% of Ganjam’s population belongs to the OBC and general castes, who are landholders. Scheduled castes and tribes comprised 20% and 3% of the district population, respectively.
This caste dynamic shows in the migration pattern.
Historically, Brahmins, Khandayat, Kurmi and the OBCs in Ganjam were landowners and thus constituted the dominant caste groups. People from the SC and ST communities depended on them for their livelihood, showed a study, Caste Dynamics in Labour Migration, by Madhusudan Nag, Benoy Peter and Divya Varma.
Kalamba’s landscape is characteristic of many villages in Ganjam. A narrow road cuts through the village, flanked by rows of tightly packed pucca houses that share common walls. Locally, they are known as ‘train compartment houses’ for their striking resemblance to railcars. Photo: Aishwarya Mohanty.
With greater access to education compared to SC/ST communities, the OBCs could tap migration opportunities to improve their household incomes through significant remittances. “Many resourceful OBC migrants in Gujarat transitioned from unskilled labor to skilled professions, and some even established themselves as entrepreneurs, achieving upward social mobility and reshaping their economic roles in Ganjam,” the study stated.
The caste of the migrant from Ganjam became a factor in the jobs they picked and the time they spent in Surat, said researcher Nag. Migrants from marginalised castes took up daily wage work and focussed on shorter or cyclical migration routes–given the lack of a support system in destination cities. Dominant caste migrants, with a “stable asset base and sufficient financial security in their native villages”, focused more on jobs that helped them preserve their social stability back home–the textile power looms being a case in point that offered a steady income.
The growing number of OBC migrants in Surat acted as a pull for more residents from Kalamba to take the train to Surat.
“What started as a necessity soon turned into an aspiration as more and more people, especially young men, started migrating to Surat, in search for not just a better livelihood but also better life,” Gantayat added.
This sentiment is also recorded in the Ganjam District Gazetteer. It states: “Migration from Ganjam District is not attributed to distress. It is rather attributed to the quality of expertise people possess. Ganjam traditionally sends more than half a million people to Gujarat to work in textile Industries, diamond cutting and polishing Industries and ship breaking yards. Such huge migration to Gujarat is not due to distress conditions but due to the demand of such labourers in these Industries. Such migration is mostly suo-moto through peer connection.”
Gantayat, for example, turned from migrant to labour contractor over the years. “I brought my wife and children here and now we are settled here. My village in Aska block of Ganjam has one man from every household in Surat,” Gantayat said.
Besides, those migrating to Surat had community support, as long as they were from the OBC community.
Jagannath Gouda (38) from Sunapalli village of Ganjam, for example, inherited a small piece of land, not enough “even for a kitchen garden”. So migrating to Surat was an organic choice.
“My father, my uncles both maternal and paternal had migrated to Surat for work and so it was easy for me to find work and a place to stay. I keep switching looms,” said Gouda, who has worked in Surat for over 20 years, during which time he helped four of his cousins and friends to find work in the city.
But when Mitika Nayak, 40, a native of Bada Badangi village in Ganjam who belongs to a Scheduled Caste, reached Surat, he found himself tackling caste hierarchy he thought he had left behind in his village.
“They wouldn’t let me touch their machine. I had to dine separately, live separately. They would complain for the slightest mistake and it was becoming difficult to work in such an environment so I decided to quit,” said Nayak, who lived in Surat for two years.
Nayak, like several other workers from the SC community in Ganjam, have started migrating to Kerala, which they find more welcoming.
Mitika Nayak from Bada Badangi village in Ganjam started migrating to Kerala after two years in Surat. He aspires to build a concrete pucca house for his family. Photo: Aishwarya Mohanty.
For the OBC community, this means Kerala is not in the reckoning as a destination.
Textile power loom worker Sishir Sahoo (49) said his sons may not migrate to Kerala. “They will go to bigger cities like Chennai or Hyderabad, where they can work as delivery agents or in hotels or as salespersons. They do not want to work with people from the other community (SC) at construction sites. It doesn’t require a lot of skill. My sons will find better-skilled work,” he said.
‘Stuck in Surat’
But a sense of ennui has set in amongst Ganjam’s migrants in Surat, with some resenting a lack of growth, and their inability to carve out a new future for their children despite toiling in power looms for years.
Sishir Sahoo, who is averse to his children migrating to Kerala, said he could build a concrete home over the years with great difficulty. His sons, unable to pursue higher studies due to economic constraints, joined him at the textile unit in Surat, contributing to their earnings to support the household.
They are now looking for alternate opportunities, preferably in the southern states of India since earnings in Surat have stagnated over the years, he said.
“The work has increased, the pay has not,” he said.
Sahoo earns Rs 20,000 a month–a figure that has seen little change despite the growing demands of his work. When he started, the workshop had four machines. Now he operates 12, often requiring night shifts.
In Surat, workers begin their day at 5 a.m., cooking rice and curry in a modest room where they spend Rs 1,200 on rent. Non-vegetarian meals are reserved for Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays; the humble potato curry their meal on the remaining days.
After food and other expenses, Sahoo manages to send home Rs 10,000 every month.
Some like Akshay Pradhan have managed to opt out. The textile loom worker spent a decade in Surat, saved enough money to buy a two-wheeler and build a concrete house. He said he invested his savings wisely–which has earned him a place of influence in his village now, where he now carries out projects for various nonprofits.
“People have started coming to me for guidance,” he said
But Sishir Sahoo’s future remains wedded to work in Surat, despite the plateaued earnings, he said.
“I never thought of leaving because I’ve learned the art well,” he said, referring to his mastery of operating textile machines. “This was the education I got, and now I use it to earn a living. How can I, at this age, think of doing something else?”
The reporter has reached out to the district administration for their response on the intervention measures being undertaken to address migration in the district; we will update this story when we receive a response.
This is the first of a two-part series studying caste equations in the Surat-Ganjam migration corridor. This article was originally published on IndiaSpend, a data-driven, public-interest journalism non-profit.
