May 8, 2020: Twenty migrant labourers were trekking home along a railway track between Jalna and Aurangabad in Maharashtra during the COVID-19 lockdown. Having walked 40 km, at 3.30 am they chose to rest on the railway track, assuming no trains were running. Their destinations were far away, Umaria and Shahdol districts in Madhya Pradesh. Soon after they slept off, 16 of them were run over and killed by a goods train.
Not much later, in September 2020, in reply to a question in parliament, the Union labour ministry stated that it had maintained no data or record of any migrant worker deaths during the lockdown, and so the question of providing relief to the surviving families “does not arise”.
It was absurd and tragic.
The images of the workers’ chapattis, clothes and other personal items strewn on the railway tracks became the only ‘record’ that those 16 deaths did occur.
Police at the site where migrant labourers making there way home during the lockdown were mowed down by a train. Photo: PTI
Fast forward to July 2023: Thousands of migrant workers living in shanty colonies on the banks of the Yamuna in Delhi are homeless. Flowing way above its ‘danger mark’ for days, the Yamuna has again submerged their homes. Thanks to climate change, this monsoon deluge is now more destructive.
Since 1978, the Yamuna has crossed the 207 metre mark three times, all in the last 10 years – 2013, 2019 and 2023.
Each time, the worst hit are Delhi’s migrant workers.
Every year, crores of India’s most vulnerable, most marginalised, and most ‘invisible’ socio-economic group – internal migrant workers – suffer the most due to natural and man-made disasters. They are ignored by their home states and their host states. Most of them are from India’s minority communities, or India’s Scheduled Castes and Tribes. Eight of the men run over by the goods train in 2020 were Gond Adivasis. Unfortunately, as most migrant workers can’t even exercise their vote, they also lack that last bit of clout over the political class and the sarkari babu, that other Indians have.
First, let’s be clear, we are talking about a vast number of fellow Indians.
A 2014 study estimated that India has a 100 million temporary internal migrant workers, with roughly 50% ‘intra-state’ and 50% ‘inter-state’ migrant workers. As India’s population has risen by almost 10% since 2014, the number today should be around 110 million. The study also estimated that India’s internal migrant workers contributed 10% to the national GDP. An irony, because they get very little back.
After Maharashtra, the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) hosts India’s second highest population of migrant workers – factory hands, loaders, rickshaw pullers, street vendors, masons, security guards, cleaners, gig workers, domestic helps – all barely scraping a living. Work in the unorganised and informal sector means zero job security. Migrant workers often work for less than minimum wages, work long hours, and work in unsafe conditions.
Apart from employers, they are also exploited by middlemen and labour contractors on whom they rely to find work. With very little to survive on, the Yamuna’s floodplains offer the cheapest real estate to them. And so, most residents in the shanty colonies on the Yamuna floodplains, and on the margins of the scores of ‘nallahs’ that wind towards the Yamuna, are migrant workers.
Living conditions here are highly inadequate – these shanty colonies are over-crowded, with little access to sanitation, water, electricity. Despite being far more vulnerable to disease in such unhygienic conditions, migrant workers have poor access to healthcare facilities. They also know the Yamuna floods almost every monsoon, but are forced to take their chances. And almost every year, they endure a cycle of flooding, packing their belongings and slumming it on Delhi’s pavements for weeks, and then having no choice but to rebuild their shanties on the same floodplain.
The Yamuna flooding. Photo: Shekhar Tiwari
What migrant workers went through during the COVID-19 pandemic, should have been a tipping point, pushing state governments and the central government to finally think of ways to improve their lives, but that has simply not happened. Stranded Workers Action Network (SWAN), a volunteer group that provided relief to migrant workers during the pandemic, also compiled their testimonies. Their report about what migrant workers faced during the pandemic’s deadly second wave in April and May 2021, reveals just how vulnerable migrant workers can be.
For instance, the report says that 82% of the workers had just two days of rations left at the time that SWAN reached them. As many as 76% of them had just Rs 200 left with them, 92% had not received any money from their employer after work stopped and 56% of the workers had been without work for more than a month.
Further evidence that we remain unmoved despite being aware of the hardships faced by migrant workers, is the cut in MGNREGA spend in the 2023-24 Union Budget. The fact is that the needs of migrant workers are known. Almost all of them work without a contract, which makes them vulnerable. Most migrant workers are not unionised, which makes them further vulnerable. They also need an urban employment guarantee system and a system of wage support or social security in the event of job loss. A strong grievance redressal system that deters employers is also needed. So, why have these needs not been addressed over the years?
A key reason is the lack of political or electoral clout.
As many as 60% of migrant workers don’t return home and vote in national elections, often skipping state elections too. But they are aware of the power of their vote, many of them choosing to return to vote for local elections. A 2012 study showed that a robust 78% of migrant voters even had voter i-cards for their home constituency. Their absence is even reflected in the voter turnout figures for UP and Bihar, the most prolific migrant worker ‘sender’ states. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Bihar and UP had among the lowest voter turnouts at 57% and 59% respectively, below the national average of 67.4%.
Also read: Why There’s No One Left to Vote in North Bengal’s Tea Gardens
While some migrant workers prefer to retain their home state vote, those who want to vote from their ‘host’ state, often run into red tape, unable to provide proof of residence. Many migrant workers, for instance, rickshaw pullers simply live on and around their rickshaws. While construction workers often shift from one work site to another. India’s hundreds of thousands of migrant workers are ‘invisible’ politically. Their inability to vote keeps them from forming an electoral block, whose interests the politicians would then be pressured to serve.
A group of migrant labourers walk to their villages amid a national lockdown, on the NH24 near the Delhi-UP border, March 26, 2020. Photo: PTI/Ravi Choudhary
As a matter of fact, the Election Commission already has solutions for these hurdles, but has just not applied them to India’s migrant workers. India’s ‘netas’ too, are guilty of not pressing hard enough. After all, providing for the migrant workers as ‘host’ states or cities, after they acquired political heft, would be an additional fiscal challenge, and a lot of additional work.
For instance, for India’s homeless, the Election Commission has provided for verification via local block officers. A similar solution could be provided to migrant workers as well. And for migrant workers preferring to retain their home state voter status, the EC could give them access to the already existing system of electronically-transmitted postal ballot (ETPB). In 2019, the ETPB option was provided to 18 lakh defence personnel across India. There is also a proposal to give such a ‘remote voting’ option to NRIs across the world as well. Why not provide the same to migrant workers?
Such measures will ensure that migrant workers are heard by politicians and government servants in the cities that they contribute so much to. Even the option of voting remotely in their home state, will force politicians to push for their demands in their host states and cities.
That’s when India’s migrant workers will have some chance of being more ‘visible’, more ‘heard’.
Rohit Khanna is a journalist and video storyteller. He has been Managing Editor at The Quint, and is a two-time Ramnath Goenka award winner.
