📰 ‘Migrant labourers are the most disenfranchised invisible citizens’
It is shocking that those who build fantasy cities not only can’t own a home of their own but also can’t vote in elections, says political scientist Ashwani Kumar
•Political scientist Ashwani Kumar, whose forthcoming co-edited book titled Migration and Mobility is to be out soon, speaks on migration, inter-State workers and amendment to the Inter-State Migrant Workers Act, 1979.
The COVID-19 crisis for India has also become a humanitarian one, involving inter-State migrants on return journeys home racked by pain and suffering and no surety of any income going ahead. Could we have an idea about the contours of this migration?
•There is a wealth of theoretical and empirical literature on the reasons behind short-term seasonal and circular migratory flows in India. For a majority of migrant labourers, migration is either a livelihood accumulation strategy or survival risk reducing strategy whichever way we define the nature of migration. The migration studies also confirm that the migrant labourers are the most exploited and also disenfranchised invisible citizens of contemporary India. It’s shocking that those who build fantasy cities not only can’t own a home of their own but also can’t vote in elections and treated like almost ‘as second-class citizens’. This double tragedy of migrant life is ironically further exploited by sons of soil politicians in various States of India.
•According to the Census of India, 2011, more than 450 million Indians (37%) are internal migrants who change their residence within a country’s national borders. About 30% of the migrants are youth aged 15-29 years and another 15 million are children. Women migrants are less represented in regular jobs and more likely to be self-employed than non-migrant women. Domestic work has emerged as an important occupation for migrant women and girls. Facing relentless bouts of gender discrimination at home, and on the farms as wage workers, these migrant women are forced into various forms of servitude in the domestic spaces of affluent city dwellers.
Is there more granular data on migration?
•Prominent migration scholars like Priya Deshingkar suggest that around two-thirds of internal migrants are concentrated in rural areas, while around one-third are concentrated in urban areas in India. Males dominate the inter-State and inter-district streams of migration, while females dominate the intra-district stream of migration. Studies suggest that household members were found to migrate in various combinations — men only, women only, men and women, and men, women and children. Described as ‘footloose workers’ in migration studies, about 100 millions of workers/labourers circulate from place to place never with the intention to settle down, but to return to their native villages and towns once a job is completed or when a working season comes to an end. In between migration and settlement for employment and livelihoods, these footloose army of migrants are often denied welfare rights in their destination place and imposed debilitating transaction costs in case they decided to negotiate their citizenship rights.
What is the distribution in terms of caste and gender deprivation and type of work that migrants move home to do?
•Research studies suggest that Scheduled Tribes are several times more likely to migrate compared with upper castes, followed closely by the Scheduled Castes who are more likely to migrate than OBCs, and then by Backward Castes (BCs) who are more likely to migrate. Upper caste households with some assets migrate for better opportunities but not for coping strategy. Short-term migrants are engaged mostly as casual labour and mostly remain invisible and often face exploitative labour practices. Such migrants are often found as construction workers, brick kiln workers, auto drivers, rickshaw pullers, sex workers, private security guards, household help, cab drivers, dabbawalas , presswalas , courier workers, beauty parlour workers, plantation workers etc. Field studies by leading migration scholar R.B. Bhagat indicate that the lead source States of internal migrants are Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Uttarakhand and Tamil Nadu, whereas key destination areas are Delhi, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Haryana, Punjab and Karnataka. According to a UNESCO study, Surat at 58% has the highest percentage of migrant labour population in India, while the percentage of migrant population is 43% for Mumbai and Delhi. Internal migration has become so ubiquitous that Kerala, long known for “Kerala model” of human development and land of expatriates, has embarrassingly become a ‘rainbow country’ of migrants. Pouring mainly from West Bengal, Tripura, Assam and Maharashtra, domestic migrants are now estimated at 25 lakh in Kerala. Micro studies conducted by research institutions and NGOs suggest that around 80 million short-term migrants are working in India, including: 40 million in the construction industry, 20 million domestic workers, 7 million sex workers and around 12 million who work in illegal mines.
There are calls for the Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service), Act, 1979, to be amended to respond to the massive changes since then and to be more effective. What are the amendments you would suggest?
•The Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1979 is largely a regulatory law failing to incorporate welfare rights of the migrant labourers. The most urgent revision is to introduce a National Migrant Workers Commission at the Central level backed up by State level Migrant Workers Commissions. Also, we need to expand the definition of migrant labourer and include next generation skills like IT, mobile repair, financial services related works. Also, the Act needs to include provisions for State-supported skill training services for migrant labourers. A long pending issue is portability of migrant workers’ voting rights. The Election Commission of India is already working, so time has come to empower migrant workers so that they gather better bargaining power and political voice in the system. Other laws relating to workers must be synergised with the Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act. For instance, the Building and Other Construction Workers (Regulation of Employment And Conditions of Services) Act, 1996 should be integrated into the Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act. And it needs to be implemented by the Secretary of the Migrant Workers Commission. In this digital age, we must stress more digital administrative techniques such as smart cards and leverage Jam — Jandhan/Aadhaar/mobile payment infrastructure for portability of all.
•Another urgent issue is portability of the public distribution system (PDS) for migrant labourers and also allowing migrant labourers to use their NREGA job cards in any part of the country. This portability of NREGA will be a great relief, if any migrant labourer is in crisis like the pandemic, he or she can take up NREGA work at the destination site rather than returning home.
•He said this during an online lecture on Sunday on ‘Freedom of Speech in times of COVID-19 - Fake news and misinformation’, organised by the MBA Academy, Madras Bar Association. The event saw the participation of S. Parthasarathy, chairman of the MBA Academy, and M. Baskar, secretary of the Madras Bar Association.
•Justice Kaul was part of the Bench which recently took suo motu cognisance of the migrant workers’ crisis.
•In a recent hearing of the case, the Bench saw Solicitor General Tushar Mehta submit how “a handful of people give certificates to judges of neutrality only if judges abuse the Executive!” The judge said it was a struggle to regulate social media without restricting free speech. He said “fake news propensity has aggravated, creating hostility against identifiable groups” even before the onset of the pandemic in the country.
•He said there was a lot of information available during COVID-19 period, including its “remedies”, the origin, people who were “helping the spread of the virus” and such.
•These messages even take on religious and racial undertones. Justice Kaul said there was hardly any discernment or effort to know from where information had come or who had sent it on social media. Messages received on social media platforms were “mindlessly forwarded” creating panic and triggering hate at a difficult time when people were worried about their livelihood and basic essentials.
•He noted how overall intolerance had exceeded limits.
•Even prior to the COVID-19 period, “we had become increasingly intolerant of the opinions that do not match with ours. What is perceived as the middle path becomes the casualty. There are various shades of grey, it is not always black and white. As a democratic polity, we have to appreciate the opinion of others... People who hold opposing views call each other as a ‘Modi bhakt’ or ‘urban naxal”, etc.... Both sections are equally intolerant,” he said.
📰 A phantom called the Line of Actual Control
The absence of a definition of the LAC allows new and surreptitious advances on the ground
•At the heart of India’s and China’s continued inability to make meaningful progress on the boundary issue are four agreements — signed in September 1993, November 1996, April 2005 and October 2013 — between the two countries. Ironically, India and China keep referring to these agreements as the bedrock of the vision of progress on the boundary question. Unfortunately, these are deeply flawed agreements and make the quest for settlement of the boundary question at best a strategic illusion and at worst a cynical diplomatic parlour trick. Here’s how.
•According to the 1993 agreement (on the maintenance of peace and tranquility along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in the India-China border areas), “pending an ultimate solution”, “the two sides shall strictly respect and observe the LAC between the two sides... No activities of either side shall overstep the LAC.”
•Further, both the 1993 and the 1996 agreement (on confidence-building measures in the military field along the LAC) say they “will reduce or limit their respective military forces within mutually agreed geographical zones along the LAC.” This was to apply to major categories of armaments and cover various other aspects as well, including air intrusions “within ten kilometres along the LAC”.
No bearing on ground reality
•The specification of this phantom LAC as the starting point and the central focus has made several key stipulations and articles of the four agreements effectively inoperable for more than a quarter of a century. In fact, many of the articles have no bearing on the ground reality. Article XII of the 1996 agreement, for instance, says, “This agreement is subject to ratification and shall enter into force on the date of exchange of instruments of ratification.” It is not clear if and when that happened.
•Astonishingly, nowhere in the 1993 agreement is there the provision to recognise the existing lines of deployment of the respective armies, as they were in 1993. The agreement does not reflect any attempt to have each side recognise the other’s line of deployment of troops at the time it was signed. That would have been the logical starting point. If both armies are to respect the LAC, where is the line? The ambiguity over the LAC has brought a prolonged sense of unease and uncertainty and thus exponentially contributed to the military build-up in those areas. The absence of a definition of this line allows ever new and surreptitious advances on the ground.
•Had the wordsmiths of the 1993 agreement begun the exercise with the phrase “pending an ultimate solution, each side shall strictly respect and observe the line of existing control/deployment” instead of the “LAC”, it would have been more possible to keep the peace. In such a case there would have been two existing lines of control on the map — one for the physical deployment of the Chinese troops and the other for the physical deployment of the Indian troops. This would have rendered the areas between the two lines no man’s land, and would have ensured that the two armies were frozen in their positions.
•In effect, in the eastern sector, where the Chinese have not accepted the loosely defined McMahon line which follows the principle of watershed, and the western sector, which is witnessing another episodic stand-off, the LAC is two hypothetical lines. The first is what Indian troops consider the extent to which they can dominate through patrols, which is well beyond the point where they are actually deployed and present. The second is what the Chinese think they effectively control, which is well south of the line they were positioned at in 1993.
•Now consider para 4 in Article II of the 2013 agreement (on border defence cooperation). It enjoins the parties to “work with the other side in combating natural disasters or infectious diseases (emphasis mine) that may affect or spread to the other side”. Given this serious intent, how do we read the latest round of fisticuffs and intense physical scrimmage between Chinese and Indian soldiers that left at least 70 Indian soldiers injured and hospitalised in Ladakh? It could have exposed some of the Indian soldiers to a local Chinese mutation of COVID-19. Forget physical distancing, were they even wearing masks?
Perceptions of LAC
•It is in this theatre of the militarily absurd that we should look at the outcome of the attempted exchange of maps in the western sector where this round of confrontation continues between India and China. This came after the exchange of maps in the middle sector where divergences were the least, i.e., the existing line and the Chinese and Indian idea of the LAC were more or less the same (in 2002). Kanwal Sibal, who was the Foreign Secretary then, and Wang Yi, the head of the Chinese delegation, met in New Delhi in 2003 for this purpose. It had been agreed that both sides would exchange maps to an agreed scale on each side’s perceptions of the location of the LAC in the western sector. The idea was to superimpose the maps to see where the perceptions converged and, crucially, where they diverged. Due to the contentious nature of the sector, it would provide a starting point, not the end point, to discuss how to reconcile divergences presumed to be significant, given Chinese military behaviour on the ground there.
•Each side handed over its map to the other. Mr. Wang took the map, gave it a long, hard look, and wordlessly returned it. He provided no reason for his action. The meeting effectively ended there. Had he been instructed not to accept any map the Indian side provided? Or did he make a spur-of-the-moment decision that this exchange was not in China’s interests? In hindsight, it is obvious that Mr. Wang didn’t think the map was in Chinese interests, because if he had, the Chinese would have with them, officially, New Delhi’s claim with regard to the LAC in the western sector where they wanted the most territory. That meant that their hands would have been tied because New Delhi could subsequently say that the Chinese were intruding into India’s LAC.
•By disregarding the map, China is not bound in any way by New Delhi’s perception of the LAC, and therefore does not have to limit liberty of action. This was evident then and is especially evident now. Because the nature of the terrain, deployment, and infrastructure and connectivity asymmetries in the border areas continue to be so starkly in China’s favour that it is clear that the Chinese are in no hurry to settle the boundary question. They see that the cost to India in keeping this question open suits them more than settling the issue.
📰 It’s time for a universal basic income programme in India
Providing unconditional regular pay checks, at least till the economy normalises, is the need of the hour
•The ongoing crisis is creating changes that could end up dividing society into pre- and post-COVID-19 days. These changes are also likely to exacerbate the novel challenges accompanying the fourth industrial revolution.
•Today, disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence are ushering in productivity gains that we have never seen before. They are also steadily reducing human capital requirements, making jobs a premium. A microcosm of these trends can be seen in Silicon Valley. The region is home to five of the world’s eight most valuable companies. These giants, all technology companies, have a cumulative market cap of over $4 trillion, yet they together directly employ just 1.2 million people.
Tool to eradicate poverty
•Many consider a universal basic income (UBI) programme to be a solution that could mitigate the looming crisis caused by dwindling job opportunities. UBI is also deliberated as an effective poverty-eradication tool. Supporters of this scheme include Economics Nobel Laureates Peter Diamond and Christopher Pissarides, and tech leaders Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
•UBI in its true sense would entail the provision of an unconditional fixed amount to every citizen in a country. Nevertheless, countries across the world, including Kenya, Brazil, Finland, and Switzerland, have bought into this concept and have begun controlled UBI pilots to supplement their population.
•India’s huge capacity and infrastructure-building requirements will support plenty of hands in the foreseeable future. Nonetheless, even before the pandemic, India was struggling to find enough opportunities for more than a million job aspirants who were entering the job market each month.
•The 2016-17 Economic Survey and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had once proposed quasi-basic income schemes that leave out the well-off top quartile of the population as an effective means of alleviating poverty and hunger. The fiscal cost of a UBI pegged at Rs. 7,620, at 75% universality, was 4.9% of the GDP. A UBI on par with the numbers suggested by the Economic Survey could lead to targeted household incomes increasing by almost Rs. 40,000 per annum, since the average Indian household size is approximately five.
•The political will was nonetheless lukewarm because of the costs involved. Requirements to trim some of the existing subsidies to balance the resultant deficit were also difficult political minefields for the then government. So the proposition was finally shelved.
Different times
•The times now are very different. IMF has projected global growth in 2020 to be -3.0%, the worst since the Great Depression. India is projected to grow at 1.9%. The U.S. economy is expected to fall by 5.9%. The unemployment rate and unemployment claims in the U.S., since President Donald Trump declared a national emergency, is the highest since the Great Depression. Unfortunately, India does not even have comparable data.
•Lockdowns in some format are expected to be the norm till the arrival of a vaccine. With almost 90% of India’s workforce in the informal sector without minimum wages or social security, micro-level circumstances will be worse in India than anywhere else. The frequent sight of several thousands of migrant labourers undertaking perilous journeys on foot in inhumane conditions is a disgraceful blight on India. One way to ensure their sustenance throughout these trying times is the introduction of unconditional regular pay checks at maximum universality, at least till the economy normalises. If universal basic income ever had a time, it is now.
