The months of lockdown and the pandemic continue to form a part of a blurry scary past. Haunting images of those harrowing times are imprinted in our collective consciousness: images of food lying on the tracks on which a family died, of police and authority spraying pesticides over a group of people during a mass exodus, workers desperately trying to get home in inhumanely crowded buses, trains, bicycles, and even on foot. The common link across these images is that this devastation most afflicted the migrant workers of our country. Once in a while the issue of migration comes into the news.

The most recent such incident happened where four migrant workers from Bihar lost their lives while cleaning a septic tank in Gujarat. Earlier this year, 23 migrants from Bengal succumbed because of the collapse of a bridge in Mizoram. Although these incidents did not create ripples, the news that did manage to get adequate limelight was the Coromandel Express accident that took place in Odisha, where about 288 people lost their lives. The train is a popular choice for migrants who move from Bengal to the southern states as seasonal and/or circular migrants in search of jobs to send remittances back home. While this furore erupts and fizzles out as well, we are often ignorant about and discount the crucial role played by migrants in the functioning of our economy. Migration is central to the functioning of society and the economy. A number of theories have been put forth in economics to explain the causes and implications of migration.

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The popular Lewis model sought to explain the shift of people from the agricultural to the industrial sector, which is hypothesised to eventually lead to economic development. This was followed by the Harris-Todaro model that cited differences in expected wages between traditionally rural areas to more modern and industrial urban areas. These works were followed by scholars who highlighted non-pecuniary reasons for migration. Social network theory talks about how workers migrate to places where they already have people of their family, community, caste, or religion.

Additionally, push factors (low job opportunities, natural calamities, etc.) and pull factors (better job opportunities and other agglomeration benefits) facilitate the movement of people from their places of origin to destination areas. The system of industrial capitalism is crucially hinged on the creation of migration. As city-centric manufacturing industries expand, traditional occupations are often destroyed and workers are compelled to move to primarily unskilled and low-paying jobs in the industrial sector.

Uneven development among states and between rural and urban areas within the states has facilitated the process of internal migration in India. Scholars have noted how labourers or agricultural workers with no land and security generally choose to migrate to the city. The Economic Survey of 2016-17 states that more developed areas like Maharashtra, Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala receive the maximum number of migrants, while less developed areas like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have very high out-migration.

Further, migration in India is also seasonal wherein migrants shuffle between their rural and urban jobs depending on the agricultural season. The quest for competitive pricing has led to more and more flexible and insecure jobs. Economic development in the globalised world has resulted in the formation of the informal sector. Rural migrants are often absorbed by the informal sector where they are majorly engaged in poor quality jobs with low pay, long working hours, negligible security, and precarious work. They constitute a part of the vulnerable labour force since they are desperate for a job and lack adequate social capital to be employed in better jobs. This makes them more susceptible to exploitation. Migrant workers are often observed to be working for longer hours but at wages lower than what is paid to locals. While local workers are sometimes able to unionise and bargain for better wages and working conditions, migrant workers are generally more cautious, given the greater consequences of losing their jobs.

Furthermore, lack of benefits (housing and meal) to be provided by employers requires migrant workers to have their own arrangement of accommodation. High cost of living in cities pushes migrants to reside in slums and squatter settlements that lack basic amenities and are in deplorable condition. Instead of recognising the plight of the migrant workers and arguing for better living conditions, slums and squatter settlements are considered eyesores by the more privileged class. Attempts are made by both the privileged and the State to repeatedly demolish these dwellings on various pretexts.

In addition to the pecuniary disadvantages that migrant workers face, the sense of belonging and identity of migrant workers is often challenged. This particularly holds for inter-state migrants. Not knowing the language or not being part of the local political milieu lessens their bargaining power and sets them apart from local workers. Recent reports have shown how migrant workers are treated with suspicion in India. Two migrant workers were beaten to death by locals in Gujarat as they were suspected to be thieves.

Residential areas of poor Bengali-speaking migrants in Karnataka were demolished because they were suspected to be illegal Bangladeshi immigrants. While the Inter-state Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act has been enacted by the government of India, the desired result of payment of minimum wages, payment at par with local workers, provision of accommodation, payment of travel allowances and medical facilities are far from what is prescribed.

The development that the country boasts about is mostly a result of exploitation of the hard work of migrants. While sympathy is found in abundance when tragedies occur, we fail to acknowledge the crucial role played by migrant workers in the functioning of the economy. As a result, we ignore the necessity of asserting their rights to having decent working and living conditions. They are generally not the topic of discussion and often do not constitute an ‘issue’ which can make or break elections. Migrants form the base of the society and economy, and thus, need to be at the centre of policy making. Fresh news of migrant-related accidents or tragedies came to light while we were in the process of writing this piece.

This highlights the sorry state of affairs related to migrants and their constant vulnerability. We continue to overlook how severely they are impacted by accidents, climate change, hate crimes, and operational failure almost on a daily basis. For most of us, they are numbers which come to us through media reporting and are lost somewhere in the corner of a newspaper. While our ignorance and apathy towards migrants makes them mere numbers, we shamefully forget that these are real people with ambitions, who had to leave their bhitey maati (place of origin) to live on the margins of an unknown place in the hope of securing a better future for themselves and their families.

(The writers are, respectively, a PhD scholar at Colorado State University, and a PhD scholar at the Centre for Development Studies (JNU), Kerala.)