Labour migration spikes as Covid-19 wanes in Rajasthan

Labour migration spikes as Covid-19 wanes in Rajasthan

Urvashi Dev Updated: Saturday, January 23, 2021, 11:17 PM IST
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PTI

While the Covid-19 pandemic saw labourers return in large numbers to their native places, migration has begun in large numbers from the poverty-ridden tribal areas of Rajasthan due to lack of employment opportunities.

Last year when the pandemic was raging across the country, around 15 lakh labourers had returned to Rajasthan from other states. However, as the situation shows signs of normalising, labour migration has picked up.

Santosh Poonia, programme manager at the NGO Aajeevika Bureau which works on labour issues, says migration is higher now than it was earlier.

We see more migration now because people had no work and income in the last 2-3 months. They have picked up debts and now entire families, men, women and children are migrating to other states in search of jobs,” says Poonia.

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme provided immediate succour to the labourers who returned with little money or supplies even as some stayed away from the scheme.

The main reasons for people opting out of MGNREGS is that it only provides 100 days employment and the daily wage in Rajasthan is Rs220 while other states such as Gujarat and Maharashtra pay Rs500-600 daily wages. Moreover, not everyone is getting work and wages paid timely, says Poonia.

The government had launched an online portal and registered some 45 lakh workers who were to be paired up with industries for jobs. Skill programmes were also launched to upskill the workers but the programme has remained a non-starter.

“Most of the industries did not register as they would have to follow the labour laws providing all benefits to labour. The government managed to find jobs for only 5,000 of the 45 lakh labourers,” says Poonia,

Recently, the death of 13 labourers from Rajasthan’s Banswara district in Surat has again underlined the issue of unemployment in the tribal region of south Rajasthan which forces thousands of families to migrate to neighbouring states.

The labourers were sleeping on a footpath in Surat when they were crushed to death by a speeding dumper truck on the midnight of January 20.

According to a 2014 study by the NGO Aajeevika Bureau, around 5.8 million people from Rajasthan migrate to states such as Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Telangana. Labourers are mostly employed in the construction, transportation, mining, hotels and hospitality, and agriculture sectors.

The tribal dominated districts of south Rajasthan are backward and underdeveloped. There is no major industry and most of the people are dependent on agriculture.

Poonia says that no efforts have been made by the government to provide employment in this region and almost the entire population is engaged in agriculture.

“Even in agriculture, there has been no attempt to do value addition such as putting up food processing or agro industries,” he says.

Sanjay Patel, the Surat centre coordinator for Aajeevika Bureau says that housing is a problem for labour as rentals are too high and there is no public housing.

“The labour which comes here are seasonal migrants. They move from place to place for work and also return to Rajasthan every few months so they are not keen to buy or rent houses,” says Patel.

He says the migrants don’t always find shelters near their place of work and either live in sites at the workplace or in open spaces at great personal risk. "Neither the governments or the employers have bothered to address the need of housing for lakhs of migrant labourers who find their way to Gujarat each year," he says.

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