Labour Migration: A Shadow of Poverty in Orissa

One Sunday evening, we were enjoying the evening coffee at the ETV canteen. The live telecast of world famous Lord Jagannath Rath Yatra had pulled us there. Suddenly we heard someone softly humming Jagannath Bhajan. Such a beautiful coincidence! We tried to locate the source and discovered some people from Orissa were busy with ‘Trinath Mela’, a typical devotional Oriya get-together, in an under-construction ETV corporate building.   The ambience was typically Oriyan, for a moment, we forget that we were in the capital city of Andhra Pradesh, far away from the epicenter, yet feeling the Orissa fragrance.  After the completion of Trinath Mela, we were curious to know the reason of their presence in Hyderabad. Unfortunately under the façade of celebration of joy and ribaldry there lay a sad story, which is known to all of us but forgotten by all of us. 

Rather than the soul of India, Orissa is more known for many wrong reasons. Whether it is starvation death or selling of small kids, Orissa has always sited at the front page of any regional, national or international newspaper.  This needy state becomes a laboratory for the international organizations to experiment with poverty, hunger and deprivations.  When we are rich in our resources, minerals and manpower, then why are we pointed out only for shameful reasons? Again winter season entered the state with the migration storm. Every newspaper and electronic channel got an issue to arise. Again the major headline in the primetime news of every electronic channel is covered from Orissa with this sensational issue. Do you think only Oriya people are migrated from their state to other state for job? If not, why do we get so much unwanted publicity. What are the main reasons of migration? We have made an effort to carve some facts about labour migration in Orissa.

How can we define migration? Migration denotes any movement of groups of people from one locality to another. But there is considerable conceptual difficulty in defining a migrant. Migration of labourer takes different forms. In one end, the place of working and residence of the labourer may be different, and the distance covered by daily commuting. At the other end, the worker’s may move permanently from their places of birth or usual place of residence, maintaining little or no contact with their places of origin. Between these two ends, people move away for differing periods of time.   Based on how long they are away from their place of origin, the migrants are distinguished as ‘permanent’, ‘semi-permanent’ and ‘temporary’. Labour migration belongs to temporary migration, which is likely to stay away from their places of origin for more than a few months in a year. The temporary migrants are also known as ‘short duration’ migrants, ‘seasonal’ migrants or ‘circulatory’ migrants.

Face of Orissa

Poverty and migration have always been interrelated in Orissa. The poverty profile shows that income poverty is higher in Orissa than in the rest of India. Although poverty has been falling over time, all data sources indicate that the gap in incomes and between Orissa and the rest of India has widened over the last twenty years. Whereas in 1980 per capita income in Orissa was 27% lower than in the rest of India, in 1997 it was 70% lower. The proportion of people below the poverty line is estimated at 47.13% compared with 26.1% in the whole of India. And there are wide disparities between coastal and southern regions. It is because of high concentration of Scheduled Tribe population in the southern region. Scheduled Tribe population in coastal area is 7.2% as against 39.7% in the southern region. So, poverty ratio in coastal region is 64.0% as against 85.5% in the southern region. If we see the overall trend, we find that 80% of the rural families are leading a painful life in the state. And we lost many investment opportunities due to non-availability of basic infrastructure in our state. It is a dead state for outsiders and it is the real worry for investors to start something new in Orissa. State’s economy has incurred huge losses to the extent of Rs 13,230 crore due to natural calamities from 1998-2003. More than 90% of the state plan outlay is being financed from borrowings.

The Issue

Seasonal migration has become an important livelihood strategy for many Oriyas. Lakhs of people migrate to the other states for working as wage labourers. The Adivasis, Harijans and backward class villagers are always struggling for their basic need (i.e. food). After the harvest, the villagers who are engaged in paddy field become jobless. Hardly they will get any opportunities in their villages to maintain their daily expenditure. How many days, they will sit idle? Some of them get an opportunity to work in brick-kilns within the home state. What about the millions of farmers after the harvest season? They need work; they want money to fulfill their minimum requirements. Without second thought, they have to leave their villages and their homes in search of ‘work for food’ and start their journey to the neighbour states for working in construction, in weaving, in hotels or as rickshaw- and cart pullers.  This is not a new story, it is being repeated every year since 1965. This trend was started by the Harijans, who could not get any work once the harvest was over.

The problem with this migration episode is the middleman, the labour contractor, who is better known as sardar. The role of sardar is to herd the labourers and organized into small groups and send them to the different destination. If you study the matter in a neutralized manner, this is a mutual need for the employers and labourers. The rich industrialists, brick-kilns owners or the road contractors savour the cheap and skilled labour and at the same time the poor farmers get a source of income round the year.  Sometimes the sardar helped the poor labourers by offering a loan, at a vulnerable time, for anything from Rs. 5,000 to 20, 000. That will paid back by the labour when the migration season comes. The migration cycle begins like this. 

When we are talking about the law for migration issue, the only law, the Interstate Migrant Workman Act, 1979, formulated with particular attention to western Orissa, applies only to people who cross state boundaries. Movements within the state do not fall within its purview. Its emphasis is on regulation of movement, not on welfare and security. And it is almost impossible to apply the law in favour of individuals: there is yet no state machinery to follow up on names and addresses, even if a worker is able to report them.

Real Story

The life of seasonal labourers is miserable in every respect. Here we got an opportunity to present the real problems faced by the laboureres. Most of the Oriya labourers are migrated to Andhra Pradesh usually from November to May to work in brick kiln. In regional language, the labourer is known as Pathuria. Starting from the home to reach at the destination, in every step they struggle to survive. Due to suffocation, dehydration and sheer exhaustion in general compartment with overcrowded passengers, their train journey towards the destination place become more disgusting. When they get down at the in brick kiln, the owners showed them an open place to build their hovel.  This is the duty of these pathurias to build their hovels as early as possible else the life under the open sky may be extended to weeks. The owner provides the thatch or polythene for the roof and show them place where they get the materials (raw bricks and clay).  As far as drinking water is concerned, the same water, which is used to prepare the clay, is used for every other purpose. These pathurias are working in brick kilns with a rate of payment about Rs 80 for 1,000 bricks made. They work for 12 to 15 hours, sometimes 18 hours a day to get the wage (around Rs. 70 per day) more than the home state. The minimum wage for daily labour in Orissa is little more than Rs 50.  Additional to that amount, the owner pays the to and fro tickets from their house to kiln. The final settlement is made only when they are ready to leave that place. The final settlement means deduction of all the payment whether it may have taken for food or any other purpose.

The pahturias actually put all their effort to repay the debt what he has borrowed from the sardar. But at the going-home time, the calculation shows a shortfall, which they must pay back in next season. Illness is a normal phenomenon and the expense is first borne by the owner. Very ill people are sent home. Sometimes return journey becomes the last journey for many labourers. They do bring back some money most of which goes treating illness, or just to eat.

Causes of Migration

Migration in Orissa occurs when workers do not get suitable options for livelihood in the home state. So there is some expectation of improvement in circumstances through migration. The improvement sought is not only for better opportunity or higher wages but also maximization of family employment or smoothing of income or consumption over the year. Particularly in Orissa, labour migration occurs due to wage differences between the home and destination place.  The major reason of migration spectrum, the workers could be locked into a debt-migration cycle, where earning from migration are used to repay debts incurred at home. The second reason is purely voluntary in nature because of their limited choices for subsistence. Moreover, absence of non-farm employment, and low agricultural production due to natural calamities has resulted in a growth of seasonal migration.

Poverty Eradication

The Government of Orissa developed number of ways to reduce the poverty in the state but there is no single best way to approach this task. All the strategies will require widespread discussion and consultation within the government and more broadly with the civil society. Though the major portion of Orissa’s population depends on agriculture and migration labourers are generally farmers, it will require increasing in the growth of incomes generated in agriculture. If you concentrate on agriculture, the most urgent requirements are road and irrigation. The implementation of the national Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, which is a centrally funded scheme designed to achieve connectivity. Rural connectivity needs to be improved. Orissa has about 40% villages, which have all weather connectivity as compared to 60% all weather connectivity at national level. All weather connectivity is required for rural roads to produce significant benefits for the farmers in terms of transport infrastructure. At the other side, nearly 60% of the cultivable land is rain fed and exposed to the vagaries of monsoons. Due to the absence of adequate irrigation facilities, agriculture is pathetically dependent upon the monsoons. As a result of the erratic behaviour of the monsoon, agricultural production fluctuates widely from year to year. If we improve our irrigation facility then the farmers will get over the year employment in their cultivation land. No need to migrate to other states. We can use our strength, our labour and our manpower on our soil to develop our Orissa.

The Food for Work Programmes (FFWP) was started in 2000 as part of the Employment Assurance Scheme (EAS) in Orissa. Later this programme was expanded to form a part of any wage employment scheme of the State Government. It was being implemented in the notified districts during periods of natural calamities, such as drought, flood or cyclone. This programme also helps for generation of wage employment for BPL and APL families. The wage is paid to the labourers in the form of foodgrain and partly in cash. Out of 30 districts, 28 districts of Orissa are covered under Food for Work Programme, but the state’s food for work programe is still badly timed, beginning only when work on the fields has started. For communities who have no concept of savings, this is useless. Work on government projects for few months is never enough for the farmers of Orissa. They want round the year employment. It is the responsibility of Orissa government to create different job sources for the jobless farmers who are migrated in the winter just like Siberian birds to Chilka Lake.

Conclusion

Life of labourers is extremely grim, and they are forced to live on a shoestring budget, consuming substandard food to save up to enough money to return home with. Being largely illegal, labour migration remains an unaccounted activity. So it becomes next to impossible to ensure minimum wages or labour rights for a migrant.  In case of accident, sickness or death of a migrant, there is virtually no way to ensure compensation.  The very next responsibility of media is to awake the labourer, the Sardars and at last the government. But unfortunately our local media has adopted a style of negative reporting, largely controlled by politicians with their own agenda. The culture of cynicism has grown rapidly infecting the psyche of the entire population of Orissa. The farmers are struggling for maintaining their daily life, as there is no work for anybody in the state. Our political leaders thought of to make Orissa prosperous through mega projects sponsored by central government. But the labourers have benefited very little.