Migrants, Mobility and Citizenship in India 9781138595774, 9780367765460, 9780367765477

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Migrants, Mobility and Citizenship in India

This book reconceptualizes migration studies in India and brings back the idea of citizenship to the center of the contested relationship between the state and internal migrants in the country. It interrogates the multiple vulnerabilities of disenfranchised internal migrants as evidenced in the mass exodus of migrants during the COVID-19 crisis. Challenging dominant economic and demographic theories of mobility and relying on a wide range of innovative heterodox methodologies, this volume points to the possibility of reimagining migrants as “citizens.” The volume discusses various facets of internal migration such as the roles of gender, ethnicity, caste, electoral participation of the internal migrants, livelihood diversification, struggle for settlement, and politics of displacement and highlights the case of temporary, seasonal, and circulatory migrants as the most exploited and invisible group among migrants. Presenting secondary and recent field data from across regions, including the northeast, the book explores the processes under which people migrate and suggests ways for ameliorating the conditions of migrants through sustained civic and political action. This book will be essential for scholars and researchers of migration studies, politics, governance, development studies, public policy, sociology, and gender studies as well as policy makers, government bodies, the civil society, and interested general readers. Ashwani Kumar is Professor and Senior Policy Researcher in the School of Development Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. R. B. Bhagat is Professor and Head in the Department of Migration and Urban Studies at the International Institute for Population Sciences, ­Mumbai, India.

“On the whole, compared to international migration, scholarship on internal migration has been quite scant. After Myron Weiner’s seminal Sons of the Soil, very little has been written on migration within India. Yet, the need for understanding migrants better is only too obvious, especially after we watched millions of Indian workers walking miles and miles to reach home after the lockdown induced by Covid-19. The essays collected in this volume cover wide-ranging aspects of this inadequately understood, but vital, segment of Indian society. Hugely enlightening!” Ashutosh Varshney, Director, Center for Contemporary South Asia; Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences; Professor of Political Science, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, U.S.A “The most significant scholarly intervention on India’s ‘invisible’ migrant workers who have long been ignored in policy corridors and our public debates. By locating the debates on internal migration firmly within the discourse of citizenship, this book challenges current scholarly debates and policy prescriptions, to recognize that the ‘migrant’ issue is inextricably linked to the realization of full, substantive citizenship rights. This is the framework that should define India’s policy responses to the ‘migrant crisis’ made visible through the horrors of the Covid-19 induced lockdown. A must-read for scholars, policymakers, and citizens.” Yamini Aiyar, President and Chief Executive, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, India “Undeniably, migrant workers are the most vulnerable citizens of India. The editors of this meticulously researched and much-needed volume bring back the issue of portability of voting rights for migrants to the heart of citizenship debates in India. An illuminating and invaluable guide to policy-makers!” Neera Chandhoke, Political theorist and former Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Delhi, India “The importance of deepening our understanding of India’s migrant communities has been made all too clear by recent events, including the coronavirus pandemic. This timely volume by a diverse array of established and new voices helps build toward such an understanding. The pieces in this volume make clear the multiple challenges of inclusion that migrant communities face and convey the urgency with which we must meet these challenges.” Tariq Thachil, Director, Center for Advanced Study of India (CASI); Associate Professor of Political Science, Madan Lal Sobti; Chair for the Study of Contemporary India, University of Pennsylvania, U.S.A

Migrants, Mobility and Citizenship in India Edited by Ashwani Kumar and R. B. Bhagat

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informal business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Ashwani Kumar and R. B. Bhagat; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Ashwani Kumar and R. B. Bhagat to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this book are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher. The analyses, data and figures based on research material are intended here to serve general educational and informational purposes and not obligatory upon any party. The editors have made every effort to ensure that the information presented in the book was correct at the time of press, but the editors and the publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability with respect to the accuracy, completeness, reliability, suitability, selection and inclusion of the contents of this book and any implied warranties or guarantees. The editors and publisher make no representations or warranties of any kind to any person, product or entity for any loss, including, but not limited to special, incidental or consequential damage, or disruption alleged to have been caused, directly or indirectly, by omissions or any other related cause. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-59577-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-76546-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-76547-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by SPi Global, India

Contents

Lists of figures ix Lists of tables x Contributors xii Foreword xvi Preface and acknowledgements xviii 1 Internal migration and citizenship in India: An emerging perspective

1

R. B. BHAGAT AND ASHWANI KUMAR

PART I

Migrants and citizenship

17

2 Why do migrants remain excluded in present-day India and what should we do about it?

19

PRIYA DESHINGKAR

3 Migration and Right to the City: A gender perspective

35

R. B. BHAGAT

PART II

Migrants and electoral politics

49

4 Migration and inclusive elections

51

ASHWANI KUMAR AND SHASHWAT DHAR

5 Electoral participation in India’s metropolitan cities SANJAY KUMAR AND SOURADEEP BANERJEE

65

viii  Contents 6 Inclusive exclusions: Citizenship practices and circular migrants in India after 1989

76

INDRAJIT ROY

7 Indigene, outsider, and the citizen: Politics of migration in Assam

97

SMITANA SAIKIA AND RAVINDRA CHOWDHARY

8 Migrant voters and political parties: Notes on an analytical framework

110

ESWARAN SRIDHARAN

PART III

Migrants, development, and social change

115

9 Livelihood diversification and out-migration: An appraisal of rural Bihar

117

NANDAN KUMAR AND R. B. BHAGAT

10 Domestic migration and multiple deprivations: Cycle rickshaw pullers in Delhi

137

NARESH KUMAR

11 Unpacking women’s associational migration in India: Theory and evidence

155

SANDHYA IYER AND ANANYA CHAKRABORTY

12 Role of caste in migration: Some observations from Beed District, Maharashtra

174

KALYANI VARTAK

13 Struggle for settlement: The case of Nomadic Dombari community in Aurangabad District, Maharashtra

193

PRAVIN SHANKARRAO KHANDAGALE

14 Migration and the politics of citizenship: An ethnography at the borderlands of Rajasthan

203

SRISHTEE SETHI

Epilogue: Migrants, memories, and mythologies

219

ASHWANI KUMAR

Index 227

Figures

3.1 Percentage of migrants by gender in mega urban agglomerations in India, 2011 40 3.2 Reasons for migration to urban areas by gender in percentage 40 4.1 Association between in-migration and voter turnout 56 5.1 Voter turnout in India’s Lok Sabha elections, 1952–2014 66 9.1 Out-migrants by destination (%) 127 9.2 Internal migrants by destination (%) 127 9.3 Annual household income from different sources of participant households (in Rs. 000) 128 9.4 Share of different economic activities in household income 131 10.1 Reasons for choosing rickshaw pulling as an occupation, 2009–10 143 11.1 Pathways of women’s associational migration 159 14.1 Informal migrant settlement, Kaliberi, Jodhpur 207 14.2 Informal migrant settlement, Banar Road, Jodhpur 208

Tables

4.1 Association between in-migration and voter turnout, 1982–86 to 2000 56 4.2 Estimates of internal migrant population in India’s major metropolitan cities (%) 57 5.1 Voter turnout by locality (%) 67 5.2 Voter turnout in India’s metropolitan cities (%) 67 5.3 Class-wise voter turnout trends in India’s metropolitan cities (%) 69 5.4 Migrants constitute a large number of urban poor in Delhi (%) 70 5.5 Migrant voter turnout in Delhi assembly elections 2015 (%) 70 5.6 Migrants from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in Delhi (%) 72 5.7 Enrolment among migrants in Delhi (%) 72 5.8 Enrolment among Muslim migrants vis-à-vis other Muslims (%) 72 7.1 Assam Lok Sabha Election Results, 2009–2014 104 7.2 Assam State Assembly election results, 2016–2011 105 7.3 Consolidation of Hindu vote in Lok Sabha and state assembly elections in Assam (%) 105 9.1 Area cultivated and production and productivity of different crops 123 9.2 Expenditure and income from agriculture by landholding size 123 9.3 Mean income and expenditure in animal husbandry 124 9.4 Mean income of a wage laborer 125 9.5 Mean annual income from different forms of salaried employment 126 9.6 Amount received by household in last 1 year 128 9.7 Matrix of economic activities taken up by households 129 9.8 Ranking of different income sources (%) 130 9.9 Gini decomposition of income sources 132 9.10 Determinants of livelihood diversification and out-migration 133 10.1 Residence and state of birth of rickshaw pullers in Delhi, 2009–2010 141 10.2 Place of residence of rickshaw pullers in Delhi 2009–2010 (%) 144 10.3 Deprivation Index of rickshaw pullers in Delhi 150

Tables  xi 10.4 Annexure: Cross Index with background tabulation of deprivation characteristics 11.1 Types of non-workers as per NSSO classification 11.2 Primary activities of women according to their marital status (%) 14.1 Annual refugee influx from Pakistan

151 165 167 206

Contributors

Souradeep Banerjee is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at Temple University, Philadelphia, U.S.A. His research interests lie in state capacity, electoral processes, and migration. Previously, he has worked with Lokniti-Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi and on several research projects with the World Bank and Election Commission of India. R. B. Bhagat is Professor and Head, Department of Migration and Urban Studies, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai, India. His research interests include migration and urbanization, environment and sustainable development, demography, ethnicity, and politics. He has served as Consultant to the UNESCO–UNICEF, International Organization of Migration (IOM), and Population Division, United Nations. He was associated with IUSSP panel on Demography of Armed Conflict, was a co-ordinating lead author of the migration chapter of Hindukush Himalayan Monitoring and Assessment Programme (HIMAP) initiated by International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), Kathmandu and a project team member of the IMAGE Project on Asian Migration housed at Shanghai University. He is also engaged in teaching and guiding research students in the areas of migration and urban studies. Ananya Chakraborty is a senior researcher at the Social Impact Assessment Cell, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. She works on issues of women migrant workers in South Asia. Her core areas of interest are gender and migration policy, capabilities, and human development. She is currently involved in knowledge management for SDGs and was a participant at Managing Global Governance Academy hosted by the German Development Institute, Bonn, Germany. Ravindra Chowdhary is a research associate and Ph.D. student in the School of Development Studies at the Tata institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. His research focuses on multi-disciplinary aspect of migration, health, public policy, population, and development. He has published in international peer-reviewed journals.

Contributors  xiii Priya Deshingkar is Professor of Migration and Development at the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, U.K. Deshingkar is an internationally recognized expert on internal migration and precarious work and has worked extensively in South and southeast Asia as well as Africa. Her book, Circular Migration and Multi Locational Livelihood Strategies in Rural India, is a standard reference book on the topic. Her research interests span forced labor, precarity, and human agency in labor markets. She regularly advises ministries and donors on migration policy. Shashwat Dhar is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, U.S.A. His primary field of specialization is comparative politics, with a thematic focus on migration, identity politics, and political behavior and a regional focus on South Asia. Previously, he worked as a research assistant at Lokniti-Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi. He holds a M.A. in Development Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Sandhya Iyer is Chairperson and Associate Professor, Centre for Public Policy, Habitat and Human Development, School of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. She has published several articles in peer-reviewed journals. With K. Seetha Prabhu, she has recently authored Human Development in an Unequal World. Her work focuses on social security, labor and health economics, poverty and human development, South–South cooperation dialogues, and multi-lateral consultancy studies. Ashwani Kumar is Professor and policy researcher in the School of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. He is the author of Community Warriors: State, Peasants and Caste Armies in Bihar. He is one of the chief editors of “Global Civil Society: Poverty and Activism” and co-editor of “Power Shifts and Global Governance.” He also has served as a member of the Central Employment Guarantee Council (Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India) and was the principal investigator of Election Commission of India-funded study “Inclusive Elections and Domestic Migration in India.” He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Oklahoma, Norman, U.S.A. Nandan Kumar is a research analyst at the Academy of Management Studies, Lucknow, India. He has played a leading role in several research projects that examine the impact of social security programs in India. His work highlights the trends and patterns of rural out-migration and livelihood diversification in the Indian context. Naresh Kumar is Assistant Professor and former Chairperson, Centre for Diaspora Studies, Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar, India. He holds a Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He was awarded the Junior Research Fellowship by the University Grants Commission, India. His research focuses on internal migration and

xiv  Contributors transnational migration, migration and development, Indian diaspora, demography, population geography, and social media. He has participated in various national and international conferences across U.K., U.S.A., South Korea, Thailand, and South Africa. Sanjay Kumar is Professor and former Director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi. A pioneer of electoral research in India, his research focuses mainly on voting behavior, a theme on which he has published several books and edited several volumes. He has recently published “Post Mandal Politics in Bihar: Changing Electoral Patterns” and is also the author of Changing Electoral Politics in Delhi: From Caste to Class. He has delivered numerous lectures on survey methodology in the social sciences. Indrajit Roy is Senior Lecturer, Global Development Politics, Department of Politics, University of York, U.K. He formerly held ESRC Future Research Leader Fellowship at the Oxford Department of International Development (ODID) during which he won the Teaching Excellence Award in the Social Sciences. He continues to hold a Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. He studies democratic deepening and societal transitions with a particular interest on the Global South. His current research focuses on the ways in which political identities and ideas about citizenship shape and are shaped by people on the move. He holds a Ph.D. in Development Studies from the University of Oxford, Oxford, U.K. Smitana Saikia is Assistant Professor, Department of International Studies, FLAME University Pune, India. She has a Ph.D. from King’s College London. She has previously taught at Ashoka University, Sonepat. Her research explores the longue durée state and identity formation processes in northeast India to understand peace and conflict in the region. Her research interests lie at the intersection of inter-disciplinary fields of political geography, identity politics, federalism, electoral, and conflict studies. She completed her M.A. in Development Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and B.A. (Hons.) in Political Science from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi. Srishtee Sethi is a senior research associate in the School of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. She was formerly Assistant Professor in the Jamsetji Tata School of Disaster Management at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her areas of research and teaching include refugee rights, cross-border migration, borderlands, advanced qualitative research, state and development, and Partition 1947. She was a CSDS Ph.D. fellow, New Delhi while carrying out research with Pak-Hindu refugees on the borderlands of India and Pakistan. She holds an M.A. from the University of Leicester, U.K. and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

Contributors  xv Pravin Shankarrao Khandagale is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India. He works on nomadic and denotified communities in the state of Maharashtra, India. Eswaran Sridharan is Academic Director and Chief Executive, University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India (UPIASI) in New Delhi, India. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of ten books and has published 85 academic articles in journals and edited volumes. His current research interests include parties and coalitions, political sociology, and international relations. He is the Editor of India Review. Kalyani Vartak earned her Ph.D. from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. She is a freelance researcher based in Washington D.C., U.S.A. Her research focuses on migration, caste, gender, and rural and urban development in India.

Foreword

A democracy is not only about the conduct of free and fair elections, but its success is also measured by making it more inclusive and participatory and further broadening the idea of democratic citizenship. The Election Commission of India (ECI) in past seven decades has ensured smooth functioning of Indian democracy by conducting free and fair elections. Over the years, the ECI has also proactively contributed to realization of universal adult suffrage enshrined in the Constitution as reflected in the rise in voter turnout. This endeavor has made electoral democracy a remarkable experience in accommodating cultural diversity and democratic endurance in the world. The ECI’s interest in past few years in analyzing problems relating to registration of domestic migrants in the electoral rolls and discussing possible options for facilitating the political inclusion of domestic migrants in elections in India has the potential to further broaden and deepen the base of democratic governance in the country. While there is a vast literature on the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of domestic migrants in India, there is little information about their participation in elections. The book Migrants, Mobility and Citizenship in India edited by Ashwani Kumar and R.B. Bhagat is an exceedingly relevant study at a time when the crucial issue of domestic migrants and unsatisfactory access to citizenship rights including voting rights is very much alive. In an ECI-funded study during my tenure as Chief Election Commissioner of India, Ashwani for the first time brought to the fore the issue of inclusive elections and domestic migrants. The issue contributing to democracy deficit has been carefully examined and evidenced in insightful and illuminating papers from leading social scientists and younger generation of researchers. The book takes the reader through various facets of the migrants’ issue and throws light on how we reached the current state and the serious debates needed among policy-makers, academia, and civil society for full restoration of citizenship rights for migrants, especially short-term migrants. It is heartening to note that this book brings back citizenship rights to the core of migration and mobility studies. Increasingly higher participation in elections is widely acclaimed and rightly so. But the answer to the vexing question why about 300 million

Foreword  xvii voters did not participate in elections in 2014 and 2019 need to be found sooner than later and may lie in poor domestic and temporary migrants not enabled enough to participate in elections. International experiences and best practices point out that some countries have experimented with absentee voting. Other measures adopted across the world are: early voting, postal ballot, proxy voting, and electronic voting. In the past, ECI has made special provisions during elections for notified categories of voters such as Kashmiri migrants and the Reang voters of Mizoram to enable them to exercise their franchise at locations away from their original residence. It has been learnt that ECI has been working toward the ease of voting through technology-based digital voting and portability of the voter ID that would allow voters including domestic migrants and Non-Resident Indians to exercise their citizenship rights. There are indeed legal, policy, regulatory, and operational challenges in implementing the above concept. I am hopeful that these efforts of ECI will definitely bear fruits and make Indian democracy more deep, inclusive, and substantive – “an ode to a diverse and democratic ethos and an inspiration to the entire world.” I wish all success to the book in benefitting relevant stakeholders. Dr Nasim Zaidi Former Chief Election Commissioner of India Noida, India

Preface and acknowledgments

Migrants are everywhere – in nooks, corners, and holes of the world. Predictably, this mobility of people has also engendered increasing fracas and frictions over symbols of recognition and resources of material advancement in our neighborhoods and public spheres. True, the world has witnessed rapid acceleration and diversification of population movements in recent times. But migration, forced or otherwise, has been at the center of transforming humanity across the world since ages. And it continues to touch every pore of human life fostering multi-faceted encounters with and between peoples and cultures and places and spaces. In a hyper-globalized world of capital and labor mobility, migration has become a riveting tale of not only those who are migrating but also of those living in sites of departure, transit and (non) arrival with or without citizenship rights. Today more people worldwide live outside their countries of birth than ever before. Migration scholars estimate the number of international migrants to be around 272 million, almost 3.5 percent of the global population in 2019. Women constitute almost one-half (48 %) of this growing stock of transnational migrants. And there are 164 million global migrant workers who remit billions of dollars back to their home countries every year. In 2019 migrant remittances to low- and middle-income countries were estimated to be $554 billion according to the World Bank. With limited or no public welfare benefits, the bulk of these migrant workers are mostly precariat – proletariats, beleaguered ethnic minorities, and refugees in the underbelly of global migrant – industries and the gig economy. Facing newer forms of marginalization like short-term contracts, zero-hours contracts, and declining real wages, this new class of migrant precariat is the most exploited off workplaces and disenfranchised lot in the global economy. In some parts of the world, migrant workers have become a “nation” without a country. No wonder, if international migrants were a nation of their own, they would make up the world’s fourth largest country, surpassing the population of Indonesia. Living in the “the same-different camp of a camp,” migrants have indeed become neo-urban homo sapiens of global capitalism. In short, large migrations are humanity’s shared future, an inevitable, and unstoppable march of history at home and abroad.

Preface and acknowledgments  xix India is no stranger to this narrative. In fact, India as a nation is indeed a story made and remade by waves of migration and migrants from all over the world. Thus, one is not surprised when the great Urdu poet Firaq Gorakhpuri wrote Sar Zamin-e-hind par aqwaam-e-alam ke firaq/Kafile guzarte gae Hindustan banta gaya (“In the land of Hind, caravans of the peoples of the world kept coming in and India kept getting formed”). And this caravan continues even today albeit with a twist of bitter–sweet truths of rising tides of millions of internal migrants facing multiple forms of discrimination and exploitation. The moving scenes of hundreds of thousands of jobless migrant laborers walking back home with their pots, pans, and blankets into tattered rucksacks have exposed the “disenfranchised invisibility” of internal migrants. It was heart wrenching to witness how those who build fantasy cities and glitzy malls not only cannot own a home of their own but are also often treated like “second-class citizens” in a nation with 450 million internal migrants, almost 37 percent of the country’s population as per the 2011 Census. The unprecedented migrants’ crisis in the coronavirus pandemic also took the veil off from the unspoken truth of India’s democracy. Hungry migrants walking back home are also “disenfranchised invisible” citizens as many of them cannot cast a ballot in any elections held once they migrate from their native places. So, the lives of migrants are a classic case of double whammy of discrimination and exclusion. In other words, the idea that India is the pristine land of one of the biggest migration stories in the history of civilization has taken a dent beyond repair, at least in the near future. This motivates the urgency and relevance of the edited volume. For starters, we must share with the readers that the idea of putting together this volume was conceived during the National Seminar on Migration and Citizenship at Tata Institute of Social Sciences Mumbai, India in March 2016. Sponsored by Indian Council of Social Science Research, and curated by Ashwani Kumar, the national seminar brought together some of the leading scholars from the disciplines of political science, sociology, economics, demography, migration, development studies, and civil society activists to debate migration and mobility in their spatial, discursive, analytic, and social contexts. Inspired by Myron Weiner’s seminal work “Sons of the Soil,” the national seminar sought to interrogate the relationship between the state and migrants and attempted to revive interest in Prof. Weiner’s work on migration and ethnic demography: a branch of political demography that is concerned with unpacking the experiences of spatial mobility and interrogating their relationship with the state. Against the backdrop of migrant’s political and electoral exclusion from democratic spaces, the seminar illumined some of the socio-spatial aspects of migrant invisibility and the paradox of disenfranchisement that characterizes the lives of India’s internal migrants. In doing so, the seminar set the tone for an academic and policy debate on portability of voting rights for migrant workers, and ways to facilitate access to state-provided welfare services.

xx  Preface and acknowledgments Admittedly, it also spawned an animated and engaging conversation between participants of the seminar for a collaborative publication on migration with a focus on citizenship rights. In other words, this edited volume is the outcome of a collective endeavor refined over years with innovative heterodox conceptual and methodological paradigms and approaches beyond the usual developmental or demographic perspectives. Challenging dominant economic and demographic theories of migration and relying on a wide range of methodologies from quantitative statistical analysis of large data sets to qualitative research methods ranging from deep ethnographic accounts to micro-studies from different regions of India, this volume opens up the possibility of reimagining migrants as “citizens” rather than mere populations. No intellectual project of this scope is possible without accumulating substantial debts. As editors of this volume, we are grateful to all participants at the national seminar and contributors to this volume. We thank each and everyone of them and apologize in advance for any inadvertent omissions. We would like to expressly record our thanks to Prof. Priya Deshingkar (University of Sussex, Brighton, U.K), Prof. Eswaran Sridharan (University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India (UPIASI), New Delhi, India), Prof. Sanjay Kumar (Lokniti-Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, India), Dr. Indrajit Roy (University of York, York, U.K.), Dr. Sandhya Iyer (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, ­Mumbai, India), Dr. Naresh Kumar (Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar, India), Dr. Srishtee Sethi (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India), Souradeep Banerjee (Temple University, Philadelphia, U.S.A.), ­Smitana Saikia (FLAME University, Pune, India), Dr. Nandan Kumar (Academy of Management Studies, Lucknow, India), Ravindra Chowdhury (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India), Pravin Shankarrao Khandagale (University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India), and Ananya Chakraborty (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India) for actively supporting the national seminar on migration, and also agreeing to be co-travelers throughout the journey of seeing the manuscript through publication. What binds us all is the symphony in our voices; what sets us apart is the uniquely original treatment of migrants and migration. We are also indebted to Prof. Partha Mukhopadhyay, (Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, India), Prof S. Chandrasekhar (Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai, India), Rahul Verma (Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, India), and Dr. Aaditya Dar (Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, India) for supporting our research and public outreach. We thank Umi Daniel, (Aid et Action, South Asia), Simpreet Singh (Right to the City activist, Mumbai, India), Priyanka Jain (Ajeevika Bureau, Udaipur, India), and Sunil Mekale (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India) for sharing activist–academic action research on migrant experiences in the national seminar. We are delighted that our ongoing work has been generously supported by leading editors and journalists in the media such

Preface and acknowledgments  xxi as Nistula Hebbar (The Hindu), Avijit Ghosh (The Times of India), Ivinder Gill (Financial Express), Arunava Sinha (Scroll), Robert Wood (Centre for Stories – Perth), Subhangi Khapre, (Indian Express), Kaushik Deka (India Today), and Anupama Katakam, (Frontline) in the media. These ties have helped us build bridges between the social sciences, humanities, arts, and civil society working to advance the interests of migrant workers during this global pandemic. We would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge the support of Dr. Shashank Sekhar Sinha (Publishing Director, Routledge) for believing in us and our manuscript. It has been a great pleasure to work with Rimina Mohapatra from Routledge. Her keen eye for detail has been extremely helpful and rewarding. We also thank anonymous reviewers whose detailed comments enriched the final manuscript. And we are indebted to Dev Narayan Chaudhury (IIT-Mumbai) for his help with preparing the index and graphics. We thank Prof. Shalini Bharat (Director, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India), Prof Surinder Jaswal (Deputy Director, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India), Prof. Ritambhara Hebbar (Dean, School of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India), Prof. Siva Raju, Prof. Abdul Shaban, Prof. Arvind Tiwari, Prof. Amita Bhide, Prof. Dharmendra Pratap Singh, Prof. Manish Jha, Dr. Permula Gopinath, other colleagues at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India, and the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai, for their support and encouraging us to build a vibrant network of scholars, ­practitioners, and activists working on research and public advocacy of migrant rights. We are immensely grateful to Dr. Nasim Zaidi, former Chief Election Commissioner of India for writing foreword to the book and inspiring us to commit to a long-term engagement with citizenship rights of migrant workers in India’s democracy. We also thank Mr. Umesh Sinha (Deputy Election Commissioner, Election Commission of India) and Ms. Padma Angmo (Deputy Secretary, Election Commission of India) for entrusting the TISS research team to undertake seminal policy research on internal migrants and inclusive elections in India. Special thanks are due to Prof. Ashutosh Varshney (Brown University, Providence, U.S.A.), Prof. Yamini Aiyar (Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, India) Prof. Neera Chandhoke (formerly at University of Delhi), and Prof. Tariq Thachil (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, U.S.A.) for their continuous support of our research and sharing with us their pioneering scholarly insights on migrants and citizenship in democracies. We are deeply grateful to Sudhir Patwardhan for sharing his painting titled ‘Leaving the City’ for the cover of the South Asia edition of the book. Last but not least, we are particularly grateful to Shashwat Dhar (Vanderbilt University, Nashville, U.S.A.) for his untiring and efficient handling of the book project in his role as the volume’s Managing Editor. From reading early drafts to corresponding with contributing authors and soothing our deadline blues, he was vital to seeing this volume through to publication.

xxii  Preface and acknowledgments We owe him our unconditional gratitude. Finally, we would like to extend a special thanks to our friends and families for their affections and support in these troubled times of a global pandemic. Working on this volume has been a soul-searching experience of up-country homecoming “in the dawn, armed with a burning patience” in the words of poet Arthur Rimbaud. As migrants ourselves, we would like to believe in this prophesy of Rimbaud and in our journey across genres, generations, and geographies. Prof Ashwani Kumar, TISS, Mumbai and Prof. R. B. Bhagat, IIPS, Mumbai

1 Internal migration and citizenship in India An emerging perspective R. B. Bhagat and Ashwani Kumar

It is remarkable to know how and when the concept of human beings evolved into the concept of citizens, and how and when the concept of people evolved into the concept of populations. Noted philosopher Akeel Bilgrami grappled with some of these questions in one of his more recent works (Bilgrami, 2018). Perhaps, the modern idea of citizenship emerged with the appearance of nation-states in human history during the eighteenth century when subjects turned into citizens and people into populations. The instrument of census taking was reengineered during this time which enumerated people into an inanimate category of population. The idea of the nation-state as an ethno-political entity bounded by a defined territory intrinsically stands in conflict with idea of migration and mobility. However, the people moving across national borders and those moving within a nation face different types of challenges and often enter into different relationships with the state. Elite migrants share a very different relationship with the state compared to those who hail from historically marginalized, low-income communities. In addition, there are large numbers of stateless refugees whose citizenship rights lie in a state of perpetual uncertainty. As such the relationship between nation, migration, and citizenship is neither linear nor well-defined. In the age of globalization, whereas transnational citizens hold multiple passports1 and enjoy the benefits of both the nations of origin and destination, the same privilege and rights are denied to many internal migrants who have lived and worked for decades within national borders. Paradoxically, while it seems that our familiar way of looking at citizenship and rights is anachronistic, the disarticulation of citizenship with the nation and nationalism is strongly opposed (Gutiérrez & Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2008). Thus, we find that citizenship Acts have been used to defend national borders and national identity through immigration controls in many countries. On the other hand, the basic idea of citizenship is not even debated with respect to internal migrants who lose their equal status, face discrimination, and are often denied their civic rights and entitlements. A distinction between formal and substantive citizenship is very pertinent to understand the relationship between migration and citizenship. While formal citizenship entails being a member of the nation-state, substantive citizenship connotes an array of civil, political, social, cultural, and

2  R. B. Bhagat and Ashwani Kumar economic rights people possess and exercise (Holston & Appadurai, 1996). With respect to poor migrants who have membership of the state but are deprived of access to many of these rights, the non-fulfillment of substantive citizenship renders their formal citizenship (e.g., right to vote) meaningless. In other cases, many migrants even lose their formal citizenship as they are unable to vote either due to non-inclusion of their names in the electoral rolls at the place of destination or unable to be physically present at the place of origin at the time of voting. However, it is indeed a puzzle as to why some migrants have succeeded in entering accumulative pathways while others have been consigned to perpetual penury. Scholars have argued that the fulfillment of substantive citizenship rights is not contingent on the formal citizenship (Holston & Appadurai, 1996). In many instances, some of the more successful migrants do manage to get their substantive citizenship rights fulfilled without having access to formal citizenship. However, we increasingly live in an era of migration and mobility. The movement of goods, services, capital, technology, culture, ideas, and most importantly, people are the significant components of the economic and mobility transition shaped by globalization and neo-liberal policies. Internationally, there were some 272 million migrants in 2019 (UN, 2019). On the other hand, internal migrant flows were almost four times greater than flows of migrants moving internationally (UNDP, 2009). Thus, migration is too important to be ignored by social scientists. Within the social sciences, the study of migration is much debated for its impact on economic development and less on how migrants engage with the state, and how they negotiate the economic, cultural, legal, and political fallout of dislocation. In the international context, illegal migration has been viewed as a major challenge to the existence of the nation-state. Notably, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) does not recognize right to immigrate, while recognizing the right to emigrate and return to one’s home country as a human right. On the other hand, while many nations allow the right to migrate within national borders as a fundamental right, the rise of nativist politics in many countries including India threatens to undermine the constitutional protections accorded to migrant communities. In multi-ethnic democracies, greater internal migration has often been accompanied by sons of the soil violence against certain immigrant groups. Several studies testify to the link between growing levels of sub-national migration and a rise in the incidence of anti-migrant violence (Bhavnani & Lacina, 2018; Fearon & Laitin, 2011; Weiner, 1978). It is precisely due to the perceived threat posed by sub-national migration that middle- and low-income countries have increasingly adopted policies aimed at restricting population movements within their borders. The proportion of Less Developed Countries (LDCs) that regulate internal migratory flows from rural to urban areas has almost trebled between 1974 and 2011, going up from 24 percent to 70 percent during this period (Bhavnani & Lacina, 2018). India represents an ideal setting within which to situate a study of the relationship between internal migration, state, and citizenship rights. According

Internal migration and citizenship in India  3 to the Census of India 2011 and National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) 2007–08, three out of ten Indians can be classified as internal migrants, or people who have moved across district or state/province boundaries. In 2011, some 450 million persons were migrants based on place of last residence, accounting for about 37 percent of India’s population. Some of the major reasons commonly cited for migration have been work/employment, business, education, marriage, moved at birth, and moved with family/ household. Scholars argue that government data tends to underestimate the flows of seasonal/circular migration, a stream dominated by people belonging to historically marginalized groups like Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes with an extremely low asset base and poor educational attainment and skill sets. It is this floating segment of the migrant population, mostly comprising people working seasonally in brickkilns, construction, plantations, mines, and factories that is most vulnerable to exploitation by labor contractors and faces relatively greater hurdles in participating in elections and politics, and in accessing public goods. The studies show that the annual rate of seasonal and temporary migration is seven times higher than the rate of permanent and semi-permanent migration in India (Keshri & Bhagat, 2013). In both the categories of migration, there are also huge variations by age, gender, educational level, occupational status, skills, earnings as well as linguistic and cultural background of internal migrants. As a result, they experience varying levels of vulnerability and exclusion. Migrants with poor skills and education, driven by distress are hugely vulnerable and suffer from deprivations and exploitation in the places they migrate to (UNESCO, 2013). Given the growing importance of migrants in reinventing spatial relations between the state and society and redefining citizenship rights, the book seeks to engage with the new generation of migration scholarship in India, contesting the “powerless and impoverished image” of migrants and underscoring the benign consequences of migration in the form of returns from “accumulative migration” which accrue over time as migrants acquire knowledge, confidence, and skills (Mendola, 2008). Thus, migration including seasonal/circular migration/short-term migration has increasingly been recognized as a part of the normal livelihood strategy of poor people and does not always occur only during times of emergency or distress. Incidentally, spatial dislocation also exacerbates existing socio-economic exclusions, in the form of the denial of social, cultural, and political rights of migrant groups. This is most pronounced among seasonal, short-term, circular migrants. Empirical studies and official statistics have largely overlooked or underestimated the scale of short-term migration (Bhagat, 2011). Some of the more contemporary work on migration and nativism has also brought to fore the salience of institutional design in mediating the relationship between migration and citizenship. High levels of political decentralization have been shown to bolster incentives for sub-national elites to pander to nativist groups (Bhavnani & Lacina, 2018). Many Indian states have instituted a gamut of protectionist policies to restrict the entry

4  R. B. Bhagat and Ashwani Kumar of migrants into educational institutions, government jobs, and industrial establishments within their jurisdiction. Research studies have routinely pointed out that migrants in their habitat of enumeration or identification are often excluded from the economic, cultural, social, and political life of the host society and many a time treated as second-class citizens. The constraints faced by migrants especially short-termed/seasonal migrants – the so-called un-domiciled migrants – are varied and range from lack of formal residency rights; lack of identity proof; lack of political representation; inadequate housing; low-paid; and insecure or hazardous work to limited or no access to state-provided welfare services and discrimination based on ethnicity, religion, class, or gender (UNESCO, 2013). Described as “footloose workers” in migration studies, millions of workers/laborers 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, this footloose army of migrants are often denied voting rights in the host region and must face debilitating transaction costs in case they decide to return to their place of origin to exercise their vote. In the last decade or so, a much vibrant body of scholarship has emerged on the much-understudied dynamics of the relationship between migration and politics. Of late, there has been a resurgence of political demography, a sub-field of population studies that found its own distinct identity in the pioneering work of Myron Weiner. However, Weiner’s theoretical formulations need revisiting in light of the growing federalization of the Indian polity and the emergence of a federal “voting” market since the 1990s. The mechanics of asymmetrical federalism and coalition politics have emerged as critical intervening variables in explaining why migration has had benign consequences in some states, but not in others (Bhavnani & Lacina, 2015). Inspired by latest advances in the quantitative and qualitative research, recent work on migration is now looking at pathways of identity formation among urban migrant communities (Thachil, 2017), the specific conditions under which sub-national elites engage in discriminatory behavior against migrants (Gaikwad & Nellis, 2016) and the drivers of anti-migrant attitude formation among natives (Gaikwad & Nellis, 2017). Recent developments during last few months have brought migration both international and internal in the national consciousness. A National Register of Citizenship (NRC) was prepared in Assam in an effort to identify illegal migrants also referred as infiltrators. This led to the wide protests over intention of the Central Government to implement NRC at the Pan India level following Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) in August 2019. However, the protest and anger subsided as Corona pandemic broke out in the month of February 2020. The Central Government declared a nationwide lock down on March 24, 2020 which led the exodus of migrant workers from big cities to rural areas. Millions of migrant workers lost their jobs; faced with starvation, they desperately started returning their homes even

Internal migration and citizenship in India  5 walking barefoot. Several of them died when returning. This has shaken the conscience of the nation and raised the question of citizenship status of migrants. It is however not clear how this is going to unfold in the political and economic agenda of the nation as migrants are neither a class nor an identity; they are neither a vote bank. The unprecedented reverse migration and the immense suffering of migrants will be, perhaps, forgotten but will remain in the national memory haunting over the violation of citizenship rights forever. The agenda for futuristic migration research stems from an unrecognized paradox that remains hitherto unaddressed in migration studies: while migration is a fundamental right guaranteed by the Indian Constitution under Article 19, migrants’ citizenship rights are often violated; migrants are hardly recognized as citizens and systematically excluded from exercising their political, social, and economic rights. Thus, this book is a modest attempt to initiate a dialogue across the social sciences on the new ways of thinking about the contentious migrant-state relationship, thus enabling policy makers, academics, and activists to recognize that migrants not only need a formal identity but also require actual realization of citizenship rights through sustained civic action.

Policy and research on internal migration: a futuristic agenda Thus far, international migration has received a disproportionate share of academic and policy attention. More recently “the rise of the transnational approach since the early 1990s and the revival of studies of diasporic communities clearly leave no room for internal migration except as a separate field of study” (King & Skeldon, 2010). While transnationalism in the field of international migration provided a ray of hope in overcoming national borders in the evolution of global citizenship, no such hope is in sight with respect to internal migrants achieving a sense of equality, justice, and dignity as they get pitted against the “sons of the soil.” Of late, the strident nationalism in India premised on demolishing differences has little respect for pluralism in nation building and making India’s vibrant democracy more inclusive. Such tendencies are likely to undermine migrant rights hamper growth and national integration. Thus, the emerging social and political conditions in India also provide a fertile ground for future research on internal migration and mobility in the country. Internal migration is also a neglected area of research in the field of politics and policy sciences, but has enormous consequences for life, livelihood, and dignity of the people. Although they are citizens, many are vulnerable and not able to access their citizenship rights both in formal and substantive sense. A large number of internal migrants particularly those with seasonal, temporary, and circulatory nature are not able to access their social, economic, and cultural rights, although they are Indian citizens. Sometimes children of seasonal and temporary migrants also move along with them affecting their schooling. Seasonal schools at the place of origin are being

6  R. B. Bhagat and Ashwani Kumar tried in the state of Odisha (Daniel, 2011); another option could to provide education at the work-sites in the places of destination. However, from policy perspective there is no concern and the matter is left to the voluntary and charitable organizations, whereas the state has enacted a law to ensure compulsory and free education to all children under the Right to Education Act. Similarly, many migrants are not able to access food grain under the present Public Distribution System despite the Right to Food Act being enforced due to lack of ration card at the place of destination. Shelter is another big issue for the migrants particularly in the big cities. Working men and women’s hostel and night shelter for the migrant population is not a priority in city development plans. The spatial dislocation deprives migrants from availing social security programs and increases their vulnerability. This is because citizenship rights and entitlements provided by the welfare state is place bound. Portability of social security programs is being suggested in policy recommendations, but how to implement it within the federal arrangements in India is a daunting task. As a part of the strategy, some scholars suggest internal migration as one of the criteria for fiscal transfer to the states by the Central Government (Bhavnani & Lacina, 2017). There exist a host of labor laws in India, but these laws do not distinguish between migrant and non-migrant labor. These are inadequate to deal with the variegated problems of labor migration. The only Act which pertains to the internal migration is the “Inter-State Migrant Workmen Regulation Act 1979” which deals with contactor-led movement of inter-state movement of labor but is hardly enforced. It is also true that many migrant workers do not move with the help of contractor but seek jobs independently through their network of kith and kin. On the other hand, under the Construction and Other Building Workers Act thousands of crores of rupees are lying unused with the construction workers welfare boards which is collected as building cess for the welfare of the construction and building workers but not spent due to lack of registration of such workers. The new labor codes enacted recently amalgamating various labor laws have neither made any drastic changes in the legal framework addressing the conditions of migrant workers. Whereas the states mostly located in central and Eastern India send migrants, the states located in the Northern, Western, and Southern India receive migrants. The regional disparity and urbanization act as pull factors whereas poverty, low wages, and lack of job opportunities push migrants from the areas of origin. While such propositions are very true at the macro level using state as a unit of analysis, the micro picture of who migrates is influenced by many other factors such as aspirations, local conditions, and personal networks (Bhagat, 2014). However, the macro–micro dynamics of migration are heavily biased toward economic theories of migration, generally understood as labor migration. This diminishes the importance of other less understood forms of migration such as marriage migration, students’ migration, and many other forms of forced migration such as displacement and trafficking in

Internal migration and citizenship in India  7 research and policy recommendations. Further, the political dimension of migration is yet to emerge as an area of priority for academics and policy makers assuming its wishful non-existence. Research linking the areas of internal migration, human rights, and citizenship is lacking. The ontological bias of migration research not recognizing migration as a political process is a serious barrier in research and policy making. Migration may enhance human freedom or subjugate it depending upon the circumstances. It is because of this nature of migration that the political dimension of migration is relevant. How far migration has eroded or strengthened patriarchy, the caste system, or class power is not squarely addressed which are so pertinent in the Indian context? Lack of such concerns also prevented the integration of migration research among various disciplines like sociology, political science, economics, and geography albeit dominated by economic theories. Data on migration is very important for the visibility of migrants, migration research, and providing scientific evidence for policy making. Due to lack of data and improper application of methodology several myths may take strong roots shaping public perception and even research outcomes based on speculation and prejudices. For example, popular narratives in public discourse and even in academic circles associate migration with urban poverty, proliferation of slums and shanties, environmental degradation, urban unrest, and the economic threat to natives. Many of these are myths perpetuated by societal antagonism and do not stand the test of critical scientific inquiry (UNESCO, 2013). Sometimes there is no political support to migration research, and this is very much evident in the Indian context. In India, migration data is collected and published by public authorities like Census of India and National Sample Survey Office (NSSO). The NSSO collected and published data on migration as a part of employment and unemployment survey pertaining to the latest year 2006–07. On the other hand, there has been a huge delay in publication of data on migration by 2011 Census. The entire data on migration is still not available until May 2020 when this book was being finalized. Lack of data and proper understanding of migration is a strong barrier to the integration of migrant communities and mitigating the pernicious effects of “the sons of the soil” politics which is extremely critical to balanced regional development and national integration.

Overview of the book Migration is usually defined as a change in the usual place of residence. This definition is not adequate to capture all forms of spatial mobility such as seasonal, temporary, and circular movements and sojourns which may not necessitate a change in the usual place of residence. It is in this sense that the book uses the categories of migration and mobility which are generally not parsed out well in migration research. Migration scholarship is replete with economic models and perspectives because its origin is traced to the

8  R. B. Bhagat and Ashwani Kumar Industrial Revolution. Perhaps the first comprehensive work by Ravenstein known as “Laws of migration” appeared in 1885 (Ravenstein, 1985). Early migration studies used the physical concept of gravity and explained migration as a function of the size of the origin and destination population and predicted to be inversely related to distance. The field of migration studies has now become multi-dimensional and complex in regard to internal and international migration and is also being shaped by what critics refer to as national political agendas of “methodological nationalism” (Beauchemin, 2015). This has led to the erosion of citizenship rights of migrants. However, the political consequences of migration became obvious only after the Second World War with the creation of United Nations (UN). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights by UN in 1948 and the convention relating to the status of refugees adopted by UN in 1951 are some of the landmarks in the history of the protection of citizenship rights. This also explains the shift in focus to international migration, although Ravenstein laws of migration originated in the study of internal migration in the United Kingdom and later extended to West European countries. However, since the 1980s, while internal migration has gained widespread academic and policy attention and its linkages with economic development have been reconceptualized in the light of theories based on the “New Economics of Migration” (Stark & Bloom, 1985), the political consequences of internal migration, questions of political participation, integration, citizenship rights, vulnerabilities, deprivations, exploitation, and violence faced by migrant groups have received far less attention. The book consists of 14 chapters. The introductory chapter of the book highlights the relationship between the state, citizenship, and migration and sets the future agenda of research on migration. It also presents the overview of the all included chapters. In the first two parts, seven chapters present perspectives on studying migrants, politics, and citizenship, while third part consisting of six chapters present case studies interrogating migrants and development interactions. The book does not claim to be exhaustive but fills an important gap in migration studies. A chapter by Priya Deshingkar argues that the migrants belonging to the poorer strata of society are among the most excluded from exercising their rights as citizens of India. This includes men, women, and children belonging to Dalit communities, Adivasis, poorer artisanal castes, certain religious minorities, and other disadvantaged groups. Many of these people migrate from rural areas to cities and towns in search of a better life either temporarily or permanently. While both migrants to rural and urban areas face exclusion and a lack of full citizenship, this chapter focuses on rural–urban migration because it offers an opportunity to analyze how the causes of exclusion transcend both rural and urban spaces and spheres of policy making. It identifies the structural causes (skewed policies based on outdated and untested migration theories, inadequate data, and precarious work conditions) and cultural factors (gender norms, caste hierarchies, and ethnic tensions) that perpetuate these inequalities and injustices. It is

Internal migration and citizenship in India  9 also argued that the structural and socio-cultural factors are in fact mutually constitutive with one buttressing the other to create micro-spaces of exploitation where the bodies of workers belonging to certain groups are systematically undervalued. It further specifies that the migrant experiences should inform policy and theory which presently reflect a very crude understanding of the functioning of labor markets for poor migrants. The author calls for more attention to the understanding of the intersectional dynamics of migration, recognizing the role of social differentiators such as gender, ethnicity, and caste in mediating the drivers and outcomes of migration as well as in informing policy. Finally, the chapter highlights the need for greater political commitment to understanding the types of migration that the poor engage in and working on ways to support them in their struggle for a better future. The chapter concludes that it is only by recognizing the social relations and cultural norms that are structuring and driving these processes that we can begin to devise ways that would effectively include those who have been left out of citizenship and decent work. Efforts are needed to change the culture that underpins labor market structures, urban policy, and data collection in India as a first step toward building a more inclusive society for migrants. Migration has been a spatial process that is crucially linked to the historical process of urbanization. Researchers show that urbanization is a strong force for economic growth and a powerful engine of wealth creation and capital accumulation. With the declining importance of agriculture and the growing contribution of industrial and service sectors to economic growth, urbanization acquired center stage in the process of development and cities emerged as the source of economic and social opportunities. In a subsequent chapter, R.B. Bhagat shows how since the 1970s, urbanization across the globe has been shaped by corporate capital under the neo-liberal policies of the state. In this context, the urban poor, slum dwellers, and migrants are dispossessed as a result of urban restructuring and gentrification. The chapter evaluates women’s migration to urban areas, identifies exclusionary processes against migrants in cities, and suggests strategies for implementing the “Right to the City” perspective. The Right to the City perspective ultimately seeks to achieve the urban transformation that is just and equitable compared to the nature of urbanization based on neo-liberal policies promoting exclusion, deprivation, and discrimination. Right to the City is also expected to unite the disparate categories of deprived people under a common vision to build our future by building cities. The chapter reviews the nature of migration, urbanization, and city in India from the perspective of gender; it reviews the nature and process of women’s migration to urban areas in the light of recently available evidence, identifies the exclusionary processes operating in Indian cities influencing migration and women migrants in particular, and suggests strategies for the integration of women in building inclusive cities. The chapter by Ashwani Kumar and Shashwat Dhar looks at the underlying causes of political exclusion of India’s internal migrants. Drawing on

10  R. B. Bhagat and Ashwani Kumar Myron Weiner’s insights about the social and the political consequences of successive waves of sub-national migration, it underscores the paradox that while migration is guaranteed as a fundamental right by the Indian Constitution, migrants are often denied the right to vote and participate in elections. The authors provide compelling evidence of migrant disenfranchisement; they find that states which have higher rates of in-migration are more likely to have lower voter turnouts than states that have lower rates of in-migration. They attribute these findings to the complex web of legal, political, and institutional hurdles that migrants face in exercising their voting rights. The chapter also draws attention to the little understood political effects of sub-national migration in multi-ethnic societies. Intra-country population movements are not without consequences, they are known to have destabilizing effects on political systems; they have sparked violent ethnic clashes in many parts of the world and spurred low-intensity civil wars in several others. With a large number of its federal states based on ethnic (linguistic) majorities, India has always provided a fertile ground for the growth of nativist politics. In many states, sub-national elites have been at the forefront of stoking nativist fears about economic defeat and cultural invasion at the hands of so-called outsiders. The chapter revisits some of the core theoretical formulations of Myron Weiner’s classic Sons of the Soil and examines the plausible implications of extending voting rights to migrants at the place of destination. In another chapter based on fieldwork in Delhi, Sanjay Kumar and Souradeep Banerjee argue that in successive elections, turnout levels in India’s big, metropolitan cities have been much lower compared to turnout levels in its semi-urban and rural constituencies. In the absence of any empirical evidence, the media and political commentators have often attributed this phenomenon to middle-class apathy and its disdain toward electoral politics. This chapter contests this popular claim and argues that in big cities, it is not the middle class but the urban poor which is unable to exercise its franchise. Further, based on a study conducted in Delhi, the paper argues that the urban poor are predominantly internal migrants who are systematically excluded from formal, electoral politics due to lower voter turnouts and lower enrolment rates. The chapter by Indrajit Roy explores how a discussion centered on “mobility” might contribute to understanding the changing processes and practices of citizenship in India and some of the broader issues of politics and democracy. The study of politics in general and democracy in India remains constrained by its “sedentary bias” or the assumption that people and their politics are territorially rooted. Such a perspective barely does justice to the study of citizenship in a country crisscrossed by millions of internal circular migrants, seeking dignified lives and livelihoods. This chapter seeks to shed light on the ways in which citizenship unfolds in India. First, it explores the political factors that contribute to mobility within India: what do people’s perspectives about the reasons for their migration tell us about political change in India? This discussion provides a useful correction to the perspectives that focus on either economic growth that “pulls” migrants

Internal migration and citizenship in India  11 or economic desperation that “pushes” migrants. Rather, the chapter suggests the significance of political narratives in shaping migrants’ aspirations and their own evaluations of their present conditions and future possibilities. However, the chapter also posits these social implications of political change vis-à-vis the social and political exclusion to which migrant workers are subjected. It examines the ways in which labor migrants are continually denied the very “right to have rights” by being deprived of the right to vote as well as their entitlements in an increasingly unequal India, thereby undermining any advantages that might accrue to them from their mobility. A consideration of these fragmented experiences per force emphasizes the inclusive exclusions similar to the paradox of formal versus substantive citizenship currently practiced in contemporary India. A chapter concludes with a commentary by Eswaran Sridharan on how scholars can systematically go about examining the little understood linkages between political parties and opportunities for electoral mobilization of migrant communities. The chapter is primarily concerned with inter-state migrants, where the migration does not carry only economic consequences, but also involves inter-ethnic contact and interaction between various linguistic and other ethnic groups. The author suggests four cluster variables to explain the nature of the relationship pursued by parties with respect to migrant populations: the character of migrant population, the character of parties, the organizational capacity of these parties, and specific nature of party competition among various parties for electoral gains. The author explains how these four clusters of variables might affect the relationship between political parties and inter-state migrant voters at the sub-national state level. Migration and development interactions have been examined based on both secondary and primary data. Much of the work on the link between migration and livelihoods assumes that migration is always distress ridden. This leads policy makers to erroneously suggest strategies to reduce rural to urban migration. The chapter by Nandan Kumar and R.B. Bhagat shows that this is a long-held myth that creates serious barriers to the integration of migration and development. Revolving around the livelihood options of out-migrants, this chapter provides evidence and argues that the “rural area” is now not as agrarian as it is thought to be; livelihood patterns have become diversified as much as it may not be characterized by one particular activity, and migration is an intrinsic part of this livelihood diversification strategy. Findings from the study show that the contribution of agriculture to the rural economy has been significantly downsized, and thus it may be naive to assume that agricultural development will generate enough propensities for the expansion of non-farm activities in rural areas. It is leading to a situation where growth and development in rural society may take place, delinked from agriculture. In the study area, remittance has become the main source of livelihood for almost half of the household. Given the dependence on migration, better knowledge, healthy and capable workforce, and strong social networks, the protection of migrant and labor

12  R. B. Bhagat and Ashwani Kumar rights at the point of destination attain great significance for the development of the area of origin. A substantial segment of India’s internal migrants is engaged in vulnerable and precarious occupations. Daily wage workers, construction workers, domestic servants, sanitation workers, and rikshaw pullers are some of the many examples of migrants performing dirty, dangerous, and demeaning jobs, a reality that demands attention in research and policy making. The chapter by Naresh Kumar explores the problems and prospects of in-migrants in Delhi mainly engaged as cycle rickshaw pullers. Cycle rickshaw pullers are one of the highly neglected segments of migrant population in Delhi. Drawing on primary data and using quantitative methods, the chapter discusses the reasons for out migration from various places of origin to Delhi, examines the socio-economic and demographic profile of this migration stream while also documenting occupational problems faced by this segment of migrant population. The chapter brings to fore the multiple deprivations faced by cycle rickshaw pullers and identifies the gaps in government policies and programs in addressing them. Gender constitutes a very important segment of migration, but women migrant workers have largely remained invisible in the vast scholarship on internal migration. The chapter by Sandhya Iyer and Ananya Chakraborty shows that the position of women migrants in India has predominantly been understood through the prism of “marriage migration,” a characteristic feature of Indian patriarchy. Women’s mobility in India has largely been confined to associational migration which entails women moving from their natal houses to their spousal residences upon marriage. Provisional figures from Census 2011 indicate that over 81 percent of women’s migration was due to marriage or associational reasons. Various rounds of NSSO also attest to the increasing proportion of marriage migration among women, both in urban and rural areas. They however argue that such an interpretation of women’s migration undermines their agency at the destination regions when they seek to enter the labor market. The faulty association of marriage as the single largest cause of migration underestimates women’s contribution toward economic development following marriage. This disallows them to negotiate their position within the labor force as they are relegated to the status of flexible and secondary workers. This chapter explains how official data sources have misguided agency formation among women migrants. Along with patriarchy, it is essential to understand the interface between caste and migration in promoting freedom or perpetuating subjugation in the Indian context. The chapter by Kalyani Vartak sheds new light on the relationship between caste and migration. Based on primary data collected in Beed district of Maharashtra, the study argues that caste plays a significant role in facilitating or constraining migration and also in creating or perpetuating migration patterns. Social networks and capital which enable and encourage migration are essentially caste-based networks. Hence, certain migration streams may be easily accessible to migrants while others

Internal migration and citizenship in India  13 will be closed. Migration patterns differ across caste groups. For the erstwhile lower castes, migration offers an opportunity to escape oppressive caste structures and practices, for the dominant castes it is a way of consolidating power in the spaces they inhabit. Further, economic and social remittances of migrants also play a salient role in shaping caste practices and also in weakening or strengthening the power of certain caste groups. Thus, role of caste in mediating migration needs is far more nuanced than what much of the earlier work on migration suggests. Historically, humans have wandered as hunter-gatherers for centuries before they began to organize themselves into settled agrarian communities. Nomadism is still prevalent among several primitive communities in India and their settled life and livelihood pose serious challenges before the government. The task of settlement of these communities is also laden with conflict with local communities. The chapter by Khandagale Pravin Shankarrao focuses on the “Dombari,” a nomadic community known for Dombaryacha Khel (acrobatic performance). Dombaris have established a settlement in the Paithan Taluka of Aurangabad District in Maharashtra. Holy places of Paithan Taluka have created enormous livelihood opportunities for the Dombaris, but the settlement is also a source of conflict between the local villagers and the tribe. On the other hand, the state government of Maharashtra has introduced a special welfare scheme known as Yashwantrao Chavan Mukta Vasahat Yojana pertaining to settlements for the nomadic communities. However, data show that the scheme has not yet been implemented owing to social, political, and other extraneous factors influencing the process. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the study sheds light on the “struggle for settlement” inhabited by the Dombari community, failure to access government schemes, and the lingering threat to their livelihood rights which are so dependent on the survival of their settlement. Migration is not always voluntary and planned, it may often be forced, and undertaken under distress. Displacement and refugees are two such instances which sometime overlap in Indian situation due to partition of the country in 1947. It is not always clear whether people are displaced or refugees but the instrument of citizenship invented through independence has deprived many people the access of the territory which they have been visiting for their livelihood and social existence. The chapter by Srishtee Sethi describes how borders, borderlands, and frontiers separate communities and people? This chapter looks at the contested citizenship and displacement among cross-border migrants locally referred to as “Pakistani-Hindus” who occupy these borderlands. Simply identified as Hindus with a Pakistani nationality, they belong to the Bhil tribe and were the original inhabitants of Tharparkar area in Sindh. The Pak-Hindu migrants are caught between the politics of two nations trying to negotiate identity, space, and securing citizenship in India. The author argues that it is a case of a location and identity conflict that the Hindu Bhils encounter which eventually turns them into cross-border migrants with an unstable citizenship status. The chapter contests the dominant discourse of

14  R. B. Bhagat and Ashwani Kumar the state and brings focus back on the “migrant” transcending the South Asian borders as immigrants, refugees, or simply as displaced persons. The complexity and marginalization faced by the community is put forth with the support of oral narratives exploring their “lived experiences” recorded in refugee camp sites in Jodhpur. The chapter by Smitana Saikia and Ravindra Chowdhary examines the National Registers of Citizens (NRC) and citizenship politics in Assam surrounding the issue of illegal migration. The NRC process was a massive bureaucratic exercise that lasted 10 years involving over 50,000 state government officials, costing about Rs. 1,200 crores, and rendering about 1.9 million people stateless. First organized in Assam in 1951, the National Register of Citizens is a record consisting of names of all genuine Indian citizens residing in the state. The current controversy is a result of an attempt to update this list to include the names of those persons and/or their descendants appearing in the “original list” of 1951 or any electoral rolls/admissible documents up to midnight March 24, 1971. The NRC list serves the dual purposes to identify and constitute the Indian citizens on the one hand and detect illegal migrants and non-citizens on the other. Since Assam is a frontier state sharing borders with Bangladesh and cross-border migration has been a historical norm in this region, post-­partition saw this issue acquiring an international dimension and unravels NRC in a struggle for regional political power as well as construction of identity politics in Assam.

Concluding remarks Exploring the socio-spatial aspects of migrant’s invisibility and the paradox of disenfranchisement that characterizes the lives of India’s internal migrants, this book highlights the relationship between the state, citizenship, and migration and sets the future agenda of migration research. It argues that neither citizenship nor migration has a singular form. Citizenship is not only formal but substantive as well. On the other, hand migrants could be permanent or temporary, seasonal, and circular as well. The various chapters of the book confirm that the process of exclusion is more pronounced among temporary, seasonal, and circular migrants. Not only the migrants suffer from socio-economic and political exclusions but statistical exclusion is also glaring. It is underlined that the temporary, seasonal, and circular group of migrants are largely excluded from census and often not included in the periodic employment and unemployment surveys conducted by national statistical agency like NSSO. The unverifiable statistics of jobless migrants walking back home during the national lockdown in Corona 19 is the harshest and cruelest exposure of failings of double-identification (state–citizen) mechanisms of state in India. In this context, the book interrogates the idea of citizenship by emphasizing the contested relationship between the state and internal migrants in India. Despite the state’s claim to inclusive development, migrants’ citizenship rights are often violated. In fact, the state often arbitrarily constructs various categories of citizenship,

Internal migration and citizenship in India  15 privileging one over another in a complex maze of power relations and the interplaying claims to identity and citizenship. The migrants’ intersections of class, caste, and ethnicity were further explored in various chapters. Thus, the book presents the nature of relationship of varied societal groups with the state dwelling on the notion of citizenship, electoral inclusion, migrant politics, engagement with civil society, etc. Shifting the analytical focus to the heterogeneous consequences of migration and integrating fresh insights from new writings on the subject, this volume places the idea of migrant’s citizenship rights to the epicenter of migration studies.

Note 1 Many countries allow dual citizenship for their nationals since 1970s. There are as many as 84 countries now that recognize dual citizenship (Siaplay, 2014). Since 2004, the Government of India provides ‘Overseas Citizenship of India’ (OCI) status to their erstwhile citizens and their descendants now holding passport of other countries. Such persons can visit India without visa and enjoy the social and economic rights except the right to vote and purchase of agricultural land.

References Beauchemin, C. (2015). Migration between Africa and Europe (MAFE): Looking beyond immigration to understand international migration. Population-E, 70(1), 7–12. Bhagat, R. B. (2011). Migrants’ (denied) right to the city. In Marie-Hélène Zérah, Véronique Dupont, Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal (Eds.), Urban policies and the right to the city in India: Rights, responsibilities and citizenship (pp. 48–57). New Delhi: UNECSO and Centre de Sciences Humaines. Bhagat, R. B. (2014). Urban migration trends, challenges and opportunities in India. Background Paper for World Migration Report 2015: Migrants and Cities, International Organization for Migration. Bhavnani, R. R., & Lacina, B. (2017). Fiscal federalism at work? Central responses to internal migration in India. World Development, 93(May), 236–248. Bhavnani, R. R., & Lacina, B. (2015). The effects of weather-induced migration on sons of the soil riots in India, World Politics, 67(4), 760–794. Bhavnani, R.R., & Lacina, B. (2018). Nativism and economic integration across the developing world: Collision and accommodation. Cambridge University Press. Bilgrami, A. (2018). Gandhi, Marx and the ideal of an unalienated life. Frontline, March 30, pp. 93–101. Retrieved May 7, 2018, from http://www.frontline.in/ the-nation/gandhi-marx-theidealofan-unalienated-life/article10094562.ece#test Daniel, U. (2011). Update on National Workshop on Child Migration, Education and Protection 29–30 November 2011, New Delhi. Fearon, J. D., & Laitin, D. D. (2011). Sons of the soil, migrants, and civil war. World Development, 39(2), 199–211. Gaikwad, N., & Nellis, G. (2016). Do politicians discriminate against internal migrants? Evidence from nationwide field experiments in India. International Growth Centre (IGC), London, UK, 52 pp.

16  R. B. Bhagat and Ashwani Kumar Gaikwad, N., & Nellis, G. (2017). The majority-minority divide in attitudes toward internal migration: Evidence from Mumbai. American Journal of Political Science, 61(2), 456–472. Gutiérrez, D. G., & Hondagneu-Sotelo, P. (2008). Introduction: Nation and migration. American Quarterly, 60(3), 503–521. Holston, J., & Appadurai, A. (1996). Cities and citizenship. Public Culture, 8(1), 187–204. Keshri, K., & Bhagat, R. B. (2013). Socio-economic determinants of temporary labor migration in India: A regional analysis. Asian Population Studies, 9(2), 175–195. King, R., & Skeldon, R. (2010). Mind the gap! Integrating approaches to internal and international migration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36(10), 1619–1646. Mendola, M. (2008). Migration and technological change in rural households: Complements or substitutes? Journal of Development Economics, 85(1–2), 150–175. Ravenstein, E. G. (1985). The laws of migration. Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 48(2), 167–235. Siaplay, M. (2014). Do countries that recognize dual citizenship have healthier economies? Evidence from the economic community of West African States, Migration and Development, 3(2), 254–271. Stark, O., & Bloom, D. E. (1985). The new economics of labor migration. The American Economic Review, 75(2), 173–178. Thachil, T. (2017). Do rural migrants divide ethnically in the city? Evidence from an ethnographic experiment in India. American Journal of Political Science, 61(4), 908–926. United Nations (2019). International Migrant Stock: Migrants by Destination and Origin (POP/DB/MIG/Stock/Rev.2019, Table 1), Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, New York. United Nations Development Programme (2009). Human development report, overcoming barriers: Human mobility and development. New York: United Nations Development Programme. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (2013). Social inclusion of internal migrants in India. New Delhi: UNESCO. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0022/002237/223702e.pdf Weiner, M. (1978). Sons of the soil: Migration and ethnic conflict in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Part I

Migrants and citizenship

2 Why do migrants remain excluded in present-day India and what should we do about it? Priya Deshingkar

More than 70 years after Independence, India continues to struggle to fairly distribute the benefits of growth, development, and welfare to large parts of the population that remain socially, politically, and economically excluded. Among these, migrants belonging to the poorer strata of society are arguably among the most excluded from exercising their rights as citizens of India. This includes men, women, and children belonging to Dalit communities, Adivasis, poorer artisan castes, certain religious minorities, and other disadvantaged groups. Many of these people migrate from rural areas to towns and cities in search of a better life either temporarily or permanently. While both rural–rural and rural–urban migrants suffer from exclusion and a lack of full citizenship, this chapter focuses on rural–urban migration because it offers an opportunity to analyze how the causes of exclusion transcend both rural and urban socialities and spheres of policy making. It cuts to the heart of the structural causes (skewed policies, inadequate data, and precarious work conditions) and cultural factors (gender norms, caste hierarchies, and inter-religion tensions) that perpetuate these inequalities and injustices. I argue that structural and socio-cultural factors are in fact mutually constitutive with one buttressing the other to create spaces of exploitation where the bodies of workers belonging to certain groups of people are systematically undervalued. This chapter is organized in three parts. In the first part, I trace the history of the major policies and legal approaches for the protection of migrant and labor rights since Independence and draw on the little evidence that shows enormous gaps in their implementation. Given the lack of data on the kinds of migration that poorer people engage in India as well as evaluation of data on the implementation of programs that are designed to help them, I perforce had to rely on the grey literature and media reporting to build my argument. It is recognized in the social sciences that grey literature has an important role to play in areas where published data and statistics are difficult to find (Pappas & Williams, 2011). In part two, I discuss three interconnected areas of exclusion: urban labor markets for low-skilled work, urban restructuring policies as well as data on migration to build a picture of the spatial marginalization and precarization of poor migrants in urban spaces. I link these processes to class,

20  Priya Deshingkar caste and gender discourses, and stereotyping, first in the way that they propel certain groups of people into certain segments of the job market, second in the way they shape priorities in urban policy, and finally how they also permeate approaches to data collection. I argue that it is only by recognizing the social relations and cultural norms that are structuring and driving these processes that we can begin to devise ways that would effectively include those who have been left out of citizenship and decent work. Ultimately there is a need for a shift in culture and attitudes that are the root causes of exclusion. The chapter concludes that there is a need to better recognize who migrants are, disaggregate the enormous diversity of their social backgrounds, and recognize how this intersects with urban living and labor markets.

Protective labor legislation in India India probably has the most comprehensive legal structure for labor welfare and protection in the world that can be traced to efforts to put right the suppression of collective action under colonial rule. After Independence in 1947, labor rights were enshrined in the Constitution, especially the right to collective action, equality at work, entitlements to fair wages, and decent work. Significant laws and acts include the Industrial Disputes Act of 1947, the Minimum Wages Act (1948), the Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act (1979), the Contract Labour System (Regulation and Abolition Act) (1970), the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act (1976), the Equal Remuneration Act (1976), and the Building and Other Construction Workers Act (1996). While early legislative measures were aimed at securing the rights of workers in the organized sector, more recently steps have been taken to bring benefits to the vast and growing informal or unorganized sector. The informal sector is a loose term used to describe a range of working arrangements without written contracts and protection under the law. In the post-Independence development discourse it was seen as a transitional stage on the way to a modern economy with secure jobs and employment. However it persisted and the removal of worker protection with the spread of neo-liberal approaches to development has resulted in the expansion of informal work in India as well as globally. More than 90 percent of all jobs are informal in India and the term unorganized sector is often used to describe such workers. The latest data on informal employment are available from the 66th round of the quinquennial survey on employment and unemployment conducted by the NSSO in 2009–10. From this, we know that construction, manufacturing, and wholesale and retail trade activities together were the main providers of employment for informal sector enterprises and “all” enterprises in both the rural and urban areas. The construction sector, which after agriculture is the most important source of employment, has arguably become even more important as people move out of agriculture (ILO, 2017).

Why do migrants remain excluded in present-day India  21

Migrant-specific legislation Chief among migrant-specific legislation and much lamented for its ineffectiveness is the Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act which entitles migrant workers to a number of benefits including pensions, group insurance, loans, children’s education, and crèches. The catch however is in the fact that the onus of declaring workers is on recruiters and migrants who must register at origin and destination. This author did not come across any interstate migrants who were registered under this Act in all the 8 years of her research on migration across various states in India (Deshingkar & Start, 2003; ­Deshingkar et al., 2008; Deshingkar & Farrington, 2009; Deshingkar & Akter, 2009; Deshingkar, 2010) and neither have others including Rogaly et al. (2002) and Mosse et al. (2005). One issue is that the law is full of loopholes as a number of commentators have observed, but the more serious issue is rent-seeking and collusion between employers and the state to maintain structures of exploitation. As Breman (1996) notes, junior inspectors and officials would rather conceal than act on reports of exploitation as there are profits to be made that are attractive for poorly paid employees. When it is not outright corruption, it may be indifference that is the problem, with government officials turning a blind eye to exploitation. In a statement that indicates the degree of indifference to the exploitation of migrant workers, Kundu (2014) notes “State-level agencies like Labour Commissioners and Provident Fund Commissioners that play an important role in the implementation of the Act rarely show much interest in these activities” (p. 191). Likewise, the Report on Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganised Sector published by the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS, 2009) also declares the Act to be problematic (p. 165). According to the same report, The Bonded Labour (Abolition) Act of 1976 has not performed much better either. The Acts most relevant to male migrants1 coming from rural areas to work in the city are: The Building and Other Construction Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1996, (BOCW Act) and the Building and Other Construction Workers’ Welfare Cess Act, 1996, (Cess Act). These Acts aimed to collect 1 percent as cess from employers and save this for the welfare of workers. However there have been reports since the 2000s that the amount of cess has grown while uptake has remained woefully low (Deshingkar, 2009). Even as recently as January 2020, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has raised concerns that the cess of Rs 162 crores owed to workers involved in the construction of the Hyderabad Metro has not been paid.2 Failing to get exact figure of funds collected through the cess from government authorities such as the Comptroller Auditor General, the Supreme court expressed outrage “that even the CAG does not have all the figures and whatever figures are available, may not be reliable” and went on to add “

22  Priya Deshingkar If this constitutional body does not have the required and accurate information, there is undoubtedly a financial mess in this area and this chaos has been existing since 1996. The only victims of this extremely unfortunate state of affairs and official apathy are construction workers who suffer from multiple vulnerabilities.”3 The bench noted that quantum of cess collected in the second quarter of 2017 amounted to Rs. 5,000 crores and would add up to a very significant sum, but observed, “The figures presented to us by the CAG or even the Standing Committee do not reflect such a huge collection. Obviously, there is something terribly rotten with the collection and accounting mechanism …” The attention of the public was drawn to this issue by the National Campaign Committee for Central Legislation on Construction Labour, an NGO, which filed a public interest litigation in 2006 against the Center and all the states and union territories of India. In Telangana and Andhra, the then Union Minister of State for Labour and Employment Bandaru Dattatreya openly accused the Telangana government of collecting Rs 443.12 crore but spending only Rs 98.69 crore on the welfare of laborers. The Minister accused the state government of spending the funds on official foreign tours, buying luxury cars and refurbishing their offices rather than the intended beneficiaries (The Hans India, 2017). For women arriving from rural areas, domestic work is often the preferred occupation especially for those with little formal education and skills and also because it is culturally deemed appropriate for women. Despite the fact that domestic work has a very long history in India, going back hundreds of years, it was only recently that they were given formal recognition as workers. The reasons for the inaction are ostensibly that domestic workers are difficult to monitor and the state should not interfere with private homes. Half-hearted action has been taken; the Domestic Workers Welfare and Social Security Bill was drafted by the National Commission on Women in 2010 but it has still not become law.4 Meanwhile stories of long hours, poor pay, no days off, and abuse continue.5 It can be speculated that policy makers place lower importance on the lives of domestic workers who come from highly marginalized and vulnerable communities including Adivasis, Dalits, or landless OBCs. Nearly all of them are migrant workers and an overwhelming majority are women.6 These broad observations are certainly corroborated by my own experience as an urban Indian resident and also through extensive fieldwork in rural and urban India. These examples of problematic policy implementation show weak political commitment to protecting the interests of poorer and marginalized migrants which is a symptom of the social hierarchies and patriarchal attitudes that permeate the institutions that make policy in India. As Joshi (2011) observed in her research on the allocation of natural resources in Uttarakhand, welfare programs make tokenistic gestures to be inclusive but in practice reproduce social inequalities:

Why do migrants remain excluded in present-day India  23 In water policies as well as in popular discourses, not only is caste insulated from gender, little attention is also paid to the complex way these questions manifest themselves in the structure and culture of water organisations. Concerns relating to caste and gender equity have remained limited to “old forms of oppression” faced at community levels. There is a resounding silence on the reproduction of these inequities in the implementing and policymaking arenas.

Micro-spaces of exploitation and segmented urban labor markets Next, I discuss the issue of segmented urban labor markets. Right upon entry into urban areas, poorer migrants seeking work are channeled into specific niches of low paid, precarious work in the labor market. The specificities of the niches that they occupy depend on who they are – those who are from a relatively higher caste and male occupy the more “skilled” and prestigious jobs such as keeping accounts; those in between such as the better connected and better educated backward caste men may perform intermediary jobs such as masonry and carpentry. At the bottom of the ladder are Dalits, Extremely Backward Castes, and Adivasis performing the worst jobs of poorly paid manual labor. For women there is an additional layer of stereotyping and discrimination as they are systematically paid less than men for jobs of comparable strenuousness (Sonpimple, 2018). In his paper on gender and urban development in India, Bhagat (2017) draws attention to the intersection of traditional identities with the evolution of new forms of inequity and discrimination in urban areas. In rural areas traditional identities revolved around the varna caste system in regions where upper caste Hindus controlled land and other productive assets. Indeed, specific niches and micro-spaces of work have emerged based on caste, class, ethnic, and gender identities. Existing data and policy in India reflect a very crude understanding of how migrant labor markets work. Let us examine how rural identities intersect with urban labor market niches through the example of migrant construction workers and domestic workers. A construction worker or domestic worker, for example, is seen as a person with a distinct caste, regional, or gender identity. Extensive fieldwork and interviews conducted by this author in several Indian states show that these differentiators are extremely important in migrant labor markets. In construction work there is clear differentiation along these axes with specific communities being preferred by employers for specific tasks. For example, the Vaddis or Vaddars, a community found in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, who were traditionally skilled stone workers are now employed in road building because of their reputation for having the required stamina for heavy digging work; the “Palamur” workers from Mahabubnagar who have a reputation for being hardworking and suited to heavy construction work are preferred for dam building; plumbers from Orissa; “rod-benders” also from Orissa are employed as semi-skilled workers and paid more than the

24  Priya Deshingkar lowest manual workers who are drawn from the Dalit and lower tiers of the Backward caste community. Women employed in construction usually belong to poorer social groups and they are employed in gendered jobs such as sifting sand and carrying bricks. They have extremely limited prospects for acquiring skills in construction and are routinely paid less than men because they are socially constructed as being physically weak and incapable of learning skills in the same way as men. Tribals and Dalits are often employed in brickkilns, a spatially and economically marginalized part of the construction industry, where the working conditions and terms of remuneration are arguably worse than regular building work. Here too the discursive construction of their identities “lazy,” “alcoholics,” and “needing to be controlled” justify the exploitative patterns of recruitment and work. Similar differences are observed in domestic work where the lowest jobs such as cleaning toilets is usually the job of the erstwhile untouchable castes while nannying or ayah work and housekeeping is for those who are a tier above and the highest jobs such as cooking are the territory of the upper castes, mainly the Brahmins. These examples illustrate how social constructs of identity can have a profound bearing on the type of work that they can enter, the conditions in which they are employed, and their prospects for changing their lives. They demonstrate the continuing importance of social differentiators including caste, ethnicity, and gender in shaping the spaces that migrants live and work in. The persistence of caste-based relations and identities in present day spheres of economic activity have been researched by others including Gorringe et al. (2017) and (Kumar, 2012). They conclude that while caste identities are changing, caste related hierarchies and status persist. So what? could be the response to these observations. Why should it matter if certain kinds of people are preferred for certain jobs? On the positive side, this means that those with skills that are in demand such as the Palamur workers and Vaddis can command better prices for their labor compared to those whose capabilities are judged as inferior on the basis of who they are. These are the unfortunate people who are at the bottom of the job ladder, occupying the micro-spaces of exploitation that are so difficult to address. Lifting them out requires a cultural shift, not just a shift in legislation. Furthermore, it is useful to think about the social relations that mediate migration and the search for jobs and how this links to creating and maintaining specific niches of exploitation and discrimination. These findings also speak to the literature on human geographies of work and space. In a path-breaking book, Hanson and Pratt (1995) unpicked the social processes that underlie the segregation of men and women into different occupations and show how their experience of work differs. They showed how social, economic, and geographic boundaries are overlaid and intertwined. In their case studies of employment in Worcester, Massachusetts there was clear evidence of employers seeking out certain kinds of social characteristics in male and female employees that perpetuated the structures of social and occupational differences. While this context was

Why do migrants remain excluded in present-day India  25 culturally very different, to Asian countries, similar observations have been made by human geographers researching domestic employment in countries including the Philippines and Singapore (Tyner, 2003; Huang & Yeoh, 2016) as well as Ghana (Awumbila et al., 2019). Tyner’s case study of Filipina domestic workers argues that migrants and migrations are socially and politically constructed by employers, the state, and intermediaries who position those from certain social backgrounds into occupations where their labor can be extracted cheaply without the protection of their rights. Huang and Yeoh contend that domestic workers in Singapore are channeled into different niches of the job market depending on certain nationalistic and gendered stereotypes where they are differently “valued” for specific qualities such as willingness to perform repetitive, boring, and menial jobs for relatively low wages. Similar findings emerged from Awumbila et al.’s case study of brokerage in migration for domestic work from northern Ghana to the capital city of Accra where employers preferred demure women and girls from certain ethnic groups.

Recruiters, contractors, intermediaries The micro-spaces of exploitation are typically hidden and controlled by employers in collusion with recruiters and the state. We often hear the refrain that it is recruiters – variously known as contractors, thekedar, dalals, and middlemen – who are the exploiters of poor and vulnerable migrants. But recent research shows that they are merely part of the nexus between the state and business that creates the structures of exploitation (Ye, 2014; Deshingkar, 2019; Deshingkar et al., 2019). Recruiters occupy a morally hazy position in the middle as they often belong to same community as migrants and are helping their fellow men and women not only to access lucrative urban markets on the one hand but also channeling them into exploitative work and playing an important role in the extraction of cheap labor. While the state pays lip service to furthering the goals of labor protection, there is no doubt that labor market policy is highly contested in practice: on the one hand are neo-liberal positions calling for deregulation of labor markets to make them more efficient (exemplified by institutions such as the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank), and on the other is the protectionist approach, arguing for protective legislation for a poor and vulnerable workforce (exemplified by the ILO and labor rights organizations). Proponents of deregulation believe that protective legislation leads to misallocation of resources because it does not allow wages to adjust to the marginal productivity of labor; it does not allow labor markets to adjust to economic shocks; it takes away economic rent from capitalists toward labor and reduces profits, which reduces investment and, ultimately, growth (Besley & Burgess, 2004; Jha & Golder, 2008). Minimum wages in particular have been blamed for worsening unemployment by setting prices above market clearing levels. Downward wage flexibility,

26  Priya Deshingkar especially for less-skilled workers, is seen as important for maintaining levels of employment and growth. However, others have drawn attention to the imperfection in labor markets in countries such as India. They fear that free market forces will lead to exploitation and unfair outcomes, which will ultimately impact on human development and growth. They argue that protective legislation can improve productivity and lead to decent work, particularly for the vulnerable (Jha & Golder, 2008; Standing & Tokman, 1991). Furthermore, protective legislation can boost economic demand, growth, as well as employment (the Keynesian argument). This author agrees that protecting labor is important as processes of social exclusion in traditional economic relations have permeated modern urban labor markets. Labor market regulation and protection is needed to address entrenched caste, class, gender, and ethnic inequalities in Indian society.

Exclusionary urban policies Not only is exclusion and precarization of certain groups of people being played out in urban spaces of work, their lives and living are also imbued with spatial exclusion and precariousness (Butler, 2006). Slums or informal settlements are often the first point of arrival for rural–urban migrants (Saunders, 2011). Taking the spread of slums as a proxy for these spatial forms of exclusion we see that the proportion of urban populations living in slums in India has grown rapidly. The Committee on Slum Statistics estimated that the slum population in the country would increase from 93 million in 2011 to 102.7 million by 2016. There has indeed been a huge increase in the slum population which is illustrated here through a picture of the city of Hyderabad. According to Census 2011 statistics presented in the 2015 Yearbook of the Government of Telangana Directorate of Economic and Social Statistics, one in three residents of the city was a slum dweller. Of the total population of 72 lakhs, nearly a third or 32 percent of the population was living in slums.7 This represents an astounding 264 percent increase in the slum population in the municipality area over the previous census. An article in the Times of India cites an interview with Ananth Maringanti, urban geographer at the Hyderabad Urban Lab, who argues that natural increases of the population cannot explain such an increase “It is unnatural for normal urban population growth to fuel this kind of increase in slum populations. Rural to urban migration is driving the increase.”8 What is striking here is that despite the city attracting migrants from poor regions within the states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh and further afield, little provision has been made for this by the Central or state governments as I argue below. According to the High Powered Expert Committee 2011 appointed by the Ministry of Urban Development, migration to urban areas has accounted for a 20–25 percent of the increase in the urban population. Additionally, the Report of the Technical Group (TG-12) on Urban Housing Shortage

Why do migrants remain excluded in present-day India  27 (2012–17) appointed by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, estimated the shortage in urban housing at the beginning of the 12th Plan period (2012) to be in the region of 18.78 million units albeit this also included housing in need of upgrading. There is clearly a serious issue with a lack of planning for rural–urban migration. Bhagat (2017), links neo-liberal urbanization policies such as the Smart Cities Mission in 2015 (erstwhile Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission launched in 2005 – whose primary aim was accelerating economic growth). But equity considerations have been lacking as non-consultative spatial reconfigurations and slum clearances were sanctioned under this new approach. As he notes Though the Constitution guarantees freedom of movement and freedom to settle within India as a fundamental right of all citizens (Article 19), migrants face several barriers in their ability to access civic amenities, housing, and employment. They also encounter restrictions on their political and cultural rights because of linguistic and cultural differences. Discrimination against migrants is articulated in various parts of India under the “sons of the soil” political ideology. Indeed, as civil society organizations like the Housing and Land Rights Network India (HLRN) have noted, the number of forced evictions has increased across urban and rural India. According to HLRN, nearly half the evictions were in urban areas and carried out for a range of reasons including “city beautification” projects, mega events, and interventions aimed at creating “slum-free cities.” There is clearly a mismatch between the realities of rural-migrants’ lived experiences and the aims of urban policy. Although a number of major programs have been initiated by the Central Government for inclusive urbanization, the record on improving working and living conditions for those at the bottom is poor. The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), was launched in 2005, with a planned investment of over $20 billion over 9 years. This included sub-components known as Basic Services to the Urban Poor (BSUP) and Integrated Housing & Slum Development Programme (IHSDP) as well as Interest Subsidy Scheme for Housing the Urban Poor (ISHUP). Since 2013, the Rajiv Awas Yojana and latterly the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY), with two components Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Urban) (PMAY-U) for the urban poor and Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana (Gramin) (PMAY-G and also PMAY-R) for the rural poor, have been launched with a goal of building 20 million affordable houses by March 2022. News reports indicate that many of these plans may in fact be symbolic rather than an expression of real intent given the intense competition on urban land, insecure tenure with constant threats of eviction, an absence of land/housing titles in slum areas and weak political commitment to implementation. An article in The Hindu Business Line dated July 9, 2017 indicates that as of April 2017 only 1.88 million urban houses had been

28  Priya Deshingkar approved for construction and a mere 103,000 had been built under the PMAY-U.9 Already entrenched barriers to obtaining land deeds such as corruption, clientelism, and privileging some people as citizens and others as not are plaguing programs such as PMAY as well. Yet there is little recognition of that when such grand plans are formulated. There are also differences in the way that states are implementing the scheme with some such as Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh taking the lead whereas others such as Telangana that have not built any new houses.10

Data on migration The third major area of exclusion and marginalization that I want to highlight is migration data. Nearly 10 years ago, De Haan & Yaqub, (2010) made the observation that “Much of the migration of the poorest is not seriously recognized, and nor are major categories of the poorest migrants.” This remains an unfortunate reality in India despite the inclusion of data on migration in the National Census and specific rounds of the National Sample Survey collecting data on migration.11 Both of these nationally representative surveys contain data on migration, albeit in different forms. One key difference is in the definition: while the census considers anyone who has moved away from their place of birth or last place of resident as a migrant, the NSS defines it by usual place of residence. The 2007–08 NSSO report on Migration in India, for example, defines a migrant as any member of a household “whose last usual place of residence (UPR), at any time in the past, was different from the current place of enumeration” (NSSO 2007–08, p. 11). Furthermore, the census estimates the level of immigration into a particular area or migrant stocks and the NSS also measures outmigration. The NSS contains more detailed information on non-permanent or short-term movements including seasonal and circular migration. It defines a shortterm migrant as any member of a household who had stayed away from his/ her current place of enumeration for a period of 1 month or more but less than 6 months within the last 365 days, for the purpose of employment or in search of employment, was counted as a short-term migrant. For those household members, who had stayed away for a period of 30 days or more but less than 6 months from a household, information was collected regarding number of spells, destination during longest spell and if worked, industry of work at 2-digit level of NIC-2004 for the longest duration of work. Kochkina and Sircar’s (2014) computation based on NSS 2007–08 data on short-term migrants indicate that the number of short-term migrants in rural areas is 1.7 percent of the total rural population which is approximately 14.5 million individuals and this number when seen as a proportion of the rural workforce constitutes 3 percent of the total rural workforce. Their calculations show that for every 28 male short-term migrants, there were only five female short-term migrants indicating that short-term migration is nearly six times more prevalent among males than among females Analyzing the same data, Keshri and Bhagat (2012) have shown that

Why do migrants remain excluded in present-day India  29 short-term migration is a strategy of the poorest and most marginalized groups. The Scheduled Tribes have the highest rates of migration (31.9 per thousand) which is almost double that for Scheduled Castes and the total population. Further results show that in rural areas, STs have higher rates of temporary migration (34.7) followed by SCs (18.2). However analysts agree that the data on short-term or temporary mobility in these national statistics is an underestimation (Deshingkar, 2010; Morten, 2017). Based on census data of either POB or POLR, it is not possible to distinguish between permanent, semi-permanent, and temporary migrants. Srivastava and Sasikumar (2003) maintain that there may be methodological problems that create difficulties in the measurement of temporary, seasonal, and circulatory migrants. Deshingkar (2010) has argued this on the basis of comparing smaller studies with national statistic, and others have compared the results of household datasets and the NSS for the same region. Morten (2017) outlines in her paper how comparisons between the NSS and Coffey et al. (2015) household survey in specific regions, which overlapped for the two surveys, showed that the NSS data indicated a rate of 16 percent for short-term migration whereas their survey counted 30 percent. Morten employs the second wave of the ICRISAT household panel dataset (2001–2004) to estimate temporary migration. The advantage of ICRISAT data is the collection of more detailed information through a specific module for temporary migration. Forty percent of households send a migrant in at least one of the 4 years of the survey, again showing a higher rate of short-term migration than national statistics. Other comparisons also highlight these differences. For example, the 2011 NSSO data estimated the number of domestic workers at 3.9 million, but trade unions put the number at around 10 million.12 While there is no doubt that smaller studies have richer data on temporary and seasonal migration, it is not in a form that is digestible by policy makers. Many smaller studies employ smaller surveys and qualitative methods which generate evidence that is not representative of the general population. Policy makers are reluctant to accept such evidence, especially qualitative evidence, because of fears that it is anecdotal and may not be replicable elsewhere. It needs to be remembered that qualitative research does not aim to achieve representativeness or estimate the incidence and patterns of migration for a particular population or region. What it can provide is critical information on caste inequalities, power dynamics, gender relations, and hidden occupations. In fact I would argue that without understanding these, an understanding of the drivers and outcomes of migration is not possible. Munshi (2019) has also stressed the importance of recognizing informal caste-based institutions and their intersection with the economy. He calls for due attention to such cultural factors when designing development policies and interventions; There is an increasing awareness that spill overs must be accounted for when designing and evaluating development programs. In the Indian

30  Priya Deshingkar context, these spill overs will often extend beyond the village to cover the entire caste, spread over a wide area. This fact seems to have gone unnoticed by development economists evaluating government programs and even explicitly analyzing networks in India. While insufficient understanding of the extent, social composition as well as the cultural positioning of different groups of migrants may not seem to be an extremely serious problem in itself, the fact is that the movements of poorer people are the least understood (Keshri & Bhagat, 2012) is hugely problematic. Why is it, we may ask, that nearly 70 years after Independence in a country with 276 million poor people, we do not have a comprehensive picture of the kinds of migration that poor people engage in and why they end of up in the jobs they do and how they are kept there? Without such detail, there is no basis for action such as social protection for migrants or programs that help them to maximize the development impact of migration. Not only that, NSS data on short-term migration was not disaggregated on the basis of caste and religion (Kochkina & Sircar, 2014), a problematic gap as so much depends on these differentiators as I argue above. Indeed as Dasgupta and Kar (2018) observe, Indian employment estimates suffer from analogous difficulties. They argue that while under-employment and disguised unemployment are known to be important, it is impossible to capture them satisfactorily in surveys when work is predominantly either self-employed or casual in nature. They conclude These data limitations make detailed analyses of employment and earnings trends outside the formal sector in India difficult beyond a broad impressionistic level. While long overdue, the country still does not have a longitudinal survey of occupations, income, or internal migration for example. Over 90% of the labor force continues to be in the informal sector, with no job security or protective labor legislation. Efforts have been made to fill some of these gaps by drawing on other sources of data. The most recent Economic Survey of India contains a chapter on migration which is based on data collected by the Indian railways. These first-ever estimates of internal work-related migration using railways data for the period 2011–16 indicate annual average flows between the different states, totaling nearly 9 million people. These estimates are significantly greater than the 3.3 million suggested by successive rounds of the National Census and higher than any previous estimates.13

Conclusion and way forward Collective action and representation by unions and NGOs is undoubtedly important and has resulted in some positive changes. For example, a number of trade unions and NGOs such as Disha Foundation have fought for the rights of construction workers and some successes can be seen. But political

Why do migrants remain excluded in present-day India  31 commitment at higher levels to improving the conditions of construction workers remains weak. Even those workers who have been employed on large, high-profile projects, such as the Commonwealth Games and Asian Games, have not enjoyed the benefits that they should by law.9 In an effort to address the poor implementation of laws meant to protect migrant workers, the Supreme Court of India has very recently passed a directive to improve the registration of workers and the distribution of benefits.14 But it remains to be seen whether this can stimulate change in an entrenched system of inequality. By far the most far-reaching improvements of the working conditions of informal sector workers have resulted from international consumer pressure, as was seen in the case of companies such as Gap in 2007 (Deshingkar, 2009). Within a year of receiving complaints from the public about media reports of exploitation in factories that produce garments overseas, the company introduced a system of approved vendors and the Gap Code of Vendor Conduct. The company circumvented the Indian inspection system and appointed its own Vendor Compliance Officers, who can perform unannounced audits of any sub-contracted handwork facility. They have also offered consumers information on how and where the garments were produced. Clearly the Indian government bowed to these demands as large amounts of export earnings were at stake. But for many of those who are working in exploitative and precarious occupations without such international value chains the process is likely to be slower. My conclusion is that there is a need to change the culture that underpins labor market structures, urban policy, and data collection in India as a first step toward building a more inclusive society for migrants. Changing culture is no simple task but good progress has been made in critical areas such as contraceptive use and son-preference, for example. There is a need for public awareness campaigns, training of civil servants, and research about the connections between gender, caste, and ethnicity in migrant labor markets and urban spatiality. Advocacy groups, unions, government, and academics must work together to bring about this change. Technical and legal fixes are not enough.

Notes 1 Due to gender norms related to masculinities and femininities, certain kinds of work is deemed to be appropriate for men and others for women. Men are typically employed as bricklayers, plasterers, supervisors and skilled workers in carpentry and electrics whereas women entering construction work are usually employed in “less skilled” work. 2 https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Hyderabad/construction-firms-evadingthousands-of-crores-of-building-cess-cpim/article30677935.ece 3 https://www.makaan.com/iq/latest-real-estate-news/sc-blasts-govt-on-rottenconstruction-cess-collection-system-asks-it-to-treat-labour-as-formal 4 http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/its-not-help-its-work/article19273135. ece

32  Priya Deshingkar 5 http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/south-asia/article/2102652/indian-policeprobe-complaint-domestic-worker-abuse-after. 6 http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/its-not-help-its-work/article19273135. ece 7 http://www.telangana.gov.in/PDFDocuments/Statistical%20Year%20Book%20 2015.pdf 8 https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/hyderabad/Steep-rise-in-Hyderabadsslum-population/articleshow/22153558.cms 9 https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/housing-for-all-theres-a-lot-tobe-built/article9756490.ece 10 https://qrius.com/tracking-the-pradhan-mantri-awas-yojana/ 11 The NSS collects data for 100,000 households comprising a nationally representative sample. It collects data on consumption and expenditure as well as special topics periodically including migration. 12 http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/its-not-help-its-work/article19273135. ece 13 https://www.indiabudget.gov.in/es2016-17/echap12.pdf 14 http://www.nirmana.org/

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Why do migrants remain excluded in present-day India  33 Deshingkar, P. (2019). The making and unmaking of precarious, ideal subjects migration brokerage in the global south. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45(14), 2638–2654. Deshingkar, P., Awumbila, M., & Teye, J. K. (2019). Victims of trafficking and modern slavery or agents of change? Migrants, brokers, and the state in Ghana and Myanmar. Journal of the British Academy, 7(S1), 77–106. Deshingkar, P., Sharma, P., Kumar, S., Akter, S., & Farrington, J. (2008). Circular migration in Madhya Pradesh: Changing patterns and social protection needs. The European Journal of Development Research, 20(4), 612–628. Deshingkar, P., & Start, D. (2003). Seasonal migration for livelihoods in India: Coping, accumulation and exclusion. London: Overseas Development Institute London. Press Trust of India (2018). Bring model scheme for construction workers in 6 months: Supreme Court. The Economic Times. Retrieved May 8, 2018, from https:// economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/policy/bring-model-schemeforconstruction-workers-in-6-months-supremecourt/articleshow/63370338. cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst Gorringe, H., Jodhka, S. S., & Takhar, O. P. (2017). Caste: Experiences in South Asia and beyond. Contemporary South Asia, 25(3), 230–237. Hanson, S., & Pratt, G. (1995). Gender, work, and space. Oxfordshire: Taylor & Francis Group. Huang, S., & Yeoh, B. S. (2016). Maids and Ma’ams in Singapore: Constructing gender and nationality in the transnationalization of paid domestic work. Geography Research Forum, 18, 22–48. ILO (2017). India Labour Market Update. Retrieved May 8, 2018, from http:// www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/--asia/---ro-bangkok/---sro-new_delhi/documents/publication/wcms_568701.pdf Jha, P., & Golder, S. (2008). Labour market regulation and economic performance: A critical review of arguments and some plausible lessons for India. Economic and Labour Market Papers 2008/1. Geneva: International Labour Office. Joshi, D. (2011). Caste, gender and the rhetoric of reform in India’s drinking water sector. Economic and Political Weekly, 46(18), 56–63. Keshri, K., & Bhagat, R. B. (2012). Temporary and seasonal migration: Regional pattern, characteristics and associated factors. Economic and Political Weekly, 81–88. Kochkina, E. V., & Sircar, S. (2014). Temporary migration in India: Findings from statistical data and learnings from case studies. Journal of Siberian Federal University Humanities & Social Sciences, 10(7), 1794–1802 Kumar, P. P. (2012). Place of subcaste (jati) identity in the discourse on caste: Examination of caste in the diaspora. South Asian Diaspora, 4(2), 215–228. Kundu, D. (2014). Policies to safeguard migrants’ rights: A critical approach urban India. 34(1), 184–212. Morten, M. (2017). Temporary Migration and Endogenous Risk-Sharing in Village India. Unpublished Monograph. Stanford University April 30, 2017. https://web. stanford.edu/~memorten/ewExternalFiles/Morten_IndiaMig.pdf Mosse, D., Gupta, S., & Shah, V. (2005). On the margins in the City: Adivasi seasonal labour migration in Western India. Economic and Political Weekly, 40(28), 3025–3038. Munshi, K. (2019). Caste and the Indian economy. Journal of Economic Literature, 57(4), 781–834.

34  Priya Deshingkar NCEUS (National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector). 2009. The Challenge of Employment: An Informal Economy Perspective. New Delhi: Academic Foundation. NSSO (2007) Employment & Unemployment and Migration Survey: 64th Round, July 2007–June 2008. National Sample Survey Office, Government of India. Pappas, C., & Williams, I. (2011). Grey literature: Its emerging importance. Journal of Hospital Librarianship, 11(3), 228–234. Rogaly, B., Coppard, D., Safique, A., Kumar, R., Sengupta, A., & Biswas, J. (2002). Seasonal migration and welfare/illfare in Eastern India: A social analysis. Journal of Development Studies, 38 (5), 89–114. doi:10.1080/00220380412331322521 Saunders, D. (2011). Arrival city: How the largest migration in history is reshaping our world. New York: Pantheon Publishing. Sonpimple, U. (2018). Brought up in the margins of modernity: Dalit women migrants in informal urban labour markets in India. European Journal of Public Health, 28(suppl_1). doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/cky048.185. Srivastava, R., & Sasikumar, S. (2003). An overview of migration in India, it’s impacts and key issues. Paper Presented at the Regional Conference on Migration, Development and Pro-Poor Policy Choices in Asia, Dhaka. Standing, G., & Tokman, V. (Eds.) (1991). Towards Social Adjustment. Geneva: International Labour Organisation. The Hans India (2017). The Hans Fund Misuse Slur on Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Retrieved May 8, 2018, from https://www.thehansindia.com/posts/ index/National/2017-05-16/Fund-misuse-slur-on-Telangana-and-AndhraPradesh/300308 Tyner, J. (2003). Made in the Philippines. London: Routledge. Ye, J. (2014). Migrant masculinities: Bangladeshi men in Singapore’s labour force. Gender, Place and Culture, 21(8), 1012–1028.

3 Migration and Right to the City A gender perspective* R. B. Bhagat

Since the1970s the nature of urbanization across the globe including India has been increasingly shaped by corporate capital under the neo-liberal policies of the state. Cities are treated as consumer products with massive private investment in real estate and housing, malls, expressways, flyovers, water fronts, sports and entertainment, policing, and surveillance to promote corporate urban development. Urban amenities and services are privatized, and labor reforms are undertaken to benefit the corporate capital. The urban poor, slum dwellers, and migrants both males and females are dispossessed as a result of urban restructuring and gentrification (Brenner & Schmid, 2015; Hearne, 2014; Mayer, 2012). Such exclusionary processes are acute in Indian cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, and Hyderabad since 1990 (Banerjee-Guha, 2002; Kundu & Saraswati, 2012). The Central Government started Jawaharlal Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) in 2005 which changed to Smart Cities Mission in 2015 primarily with an aim to accelerate the neo-liberal policies of urbanization as a key strategy for economic growth. This has also led to various urban protests and movements in different parts of India related to issues such as the restructuring of urban space, demolition of slums, displacement and relocation, and privatization of urban amenities. In Delhi, in a remarkable development, a new political party called Aam Aadmi Party (Party of Common People) came into power winning almost all seats in Delhi State Legislative Assembly in 2015 supported by the urban poor, workers in informal sectors, slum dwellers, transporters, and migrants. While it is true that cities have evolved through migration, the cityward migration has been an emotive issue in India particularly the inter-state migration. India is a federal country and states are organized along linguistic lines. Linguistic differences which embody cultural differences as well get pronounced in the event of migration. Though the Indian Constitution guarantees freedom of movement and freedom to settle within the territory *  This chapter is a revised version of the paper “Migration, Gender and Right to the City” that appeared in the Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 52(32), 2017, pp. 35–40, and reprinted here with the author’s permission and with due acknowledgment to the original source.

36  R. B. Bhagat of India as a fundamental right of all citizens (Article 19), migrants face several barriers in access to civic amenities, housing, and employment, as well as restrictions on their political and cultural rights because of linguistic and cultural differences. These discriminations against migrants are articulated in various parts of India under the political ideology of “sons of the soil” justifying the claim of the natives for the local jobs while blaming the migrants for snatching them away. These evoked sharp anti-migrant sentiments leading to even violence against them occasionally (Weiner, 1978; Hansen, 2001). Migrants are also vulnerable to discrimination and exploitation as many of them are poor, illiterate, and live in slums and hazardous locations prone to disaster and natural calamities. Women migrants are likely to suffer more in this situation. Migration raises a central issue for the Right to the City, –that is, the right for everyone, including migrants – men and women, minorities, and marginalized to the access of the benefits that the city has to offer – and how best to promote awareness and representation of them within the city (Balbo, 2008). The Right to the City perspective ultimately seeks to achieve the urban transformation that is just and equitable compared to the nature of urbanization based on neo-liberal policies promoting exclusion, deprivations, and discriminations (Purcell, 2002). Right to the City is also expected to unite the disparate categories of deprived people under a common vision to build our future by building cities (Poli, 2014). This chapter reviews the nature of migration, urbanization, and city in India from the perspective of gender; it reviews the nature and process of women’s migration to urban areas in the light of recently available evidence, identifies the exclusionary processes operating in Indian cities influencing migration and women migrants in particular, and suggests strategies for the integration of migration and gender in building inclusive cities in India.

Cities, migration, and gender Migration was a dominant force of urbanization in Western countries as cities emerged as centers of economic growth with the beginning of industrialization. The nature of city is changed from an oeuvre (works of art) to a commodity shaping social relations leading to unequal power, wealth, dominance, and exploitation of labor by the dominant capitalist class (Kofman & Lebas, 2000; Lefebvre, 1991). In India the dominant cities like Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai were planted as port centers during the colonial rule initiating factory production as a source of industrialization. As a result, the existing social relations and hierarchies based on religion, caste, and gender came into conflict with social forces generated by new cities and urbanization. However, the existing primordial identities instead of getting eroded due to urbanization either remained intact or morphed into new forms of inequity and discrimination in the decades after independence (Patel & Deb, 2006). In most of the cities, segregations along caste and community lines are still very prominently visible (Vithayathil & Singh, 2012).

Migration and Right to the City  37 The patriarchal power relations continue to be embedded in religious, caste, place, and gender-based identities in the cities despite increased urbanization and mobility (Fenster, 2005). The decision for women to work outside the home is often taken by male members. Working women have to take care of both household chores and workplace duties, have little control over their salary/wages, and are dependent on men folk for their movement (Jejeebhoy & Sathar, 2001). Migration of women has landed them from the sphere of traditional gender relations in rural areas to the new patriarchal setup embedded in the conjugal family system and separation of living space from workplace. There are several feminist researches who contributed to the understanding of migration as shaped by capitalism and gender. They also studied the role of patriarchal power in determining the control of women’s labor in both home and workplace (Silvey, 2013). Studies also show that women migrant workers are more vulnerable to violence and exploitation in the workplace than their male and non-migrant counterparts (IDRC and CRDI, 2013). The gendered power relations also influence their private life as well as access and use of public spaces. Women’s safety and security are a matter of great concern in cities, while it takes an acute form in respect to migrant women (Fenster, 2005). Further, urbanization as a vehicle of capital accumulation has been associated with increasing concentration of wealth in big cities and urban centers whereas the rural–urban gaps in income, wages, and employment opportunities have also widened. Exclusions and deprivations are very much evident within the city as every fifth urban dweller is living in a slum, about 90 percent working in socially unprotected informal sector with very low level of wages and salary. Cities also pose many challenges to women in general and migrant women in particular. For example, the built environment in cities and urban planning are also not women friendly which is glaringly reflected in the areas of public transport in most of the cities of India. Further, lack of bus services in non-peak hours, roads designed without considering women’s safety needs, or lack of streetlights that increases crimes against women are some of other examples. It is worthwhile to mention that the recent outcry of the case of Nirbhaya – a migrant woman who was waiting for public transport for hours in a bus stop in Delhi, was trapped in a private bus with goons overboard. She was raped and killed. The access to safe public transport when women travel alone or walking act as powerful restrictions on women’s mobility and their Right to the City (Tacoli & Satterthwaite, 2013). In many cities of India, women also face the risk of violence specially during night time where toilet facilities are not available within the premises or located far off outside the home (Mcllwaine, 2013). Lack of water supply in the premises also forces women to spend more time in water collection. The availability of schools, hospitals, creches, etc., in the neighborhood at a walkable distance matters in the life of women. The urban infrastructure and services are generally not gender neutral as men and women do not have equal access (Khosla, 2009). In general,

38  R. B. Bhagat Indian cities do not show gender sensitivity in urban planning and policies (Mahimkar & Gokhale, 2015). However, it is important to mention that women are not just a single homogeneous group, but some are more vulnerable than others. There are poor migrant women living in slums and working as domestic and construction workers who face greater disadvantages compared to middle- and high-class urban women. There are also female-headed households, single women, and professional women who migrated to the city and encounter different types of vulnerability both at the workplace, at residence, and in transit. There is an appalling shortage of basic amenities in Indian cities like access to water and sanitation, cooking fuel, and supply of electricity. As many women have to take care of household and workplace duties, the lack of basic services as a result of state’s failure reinforces the social patriarchal structure and denies them the Right to the City (Haritas, 2013). Cities evolve through migration shaping both social and gender relations. Women’s internal migration in India, be it for employment, education, or movement with the family and household, is shaped by the institution of patriarchy which not only controls access to economic and social resources but also their mobility. Mobility including travel and journey has been an important means to have access to economic and social resources, knowledge, and skills. India’s social organization is predominantly organized through the institution of caste – a hierarchical arrangement of social groups where status is determined by birth. Each social group also lived in a spatially demarcated area. A group of caste is known as Shudras (earlier untouchables now called as Scheduled Castes) always occupied the outskirts of villages as they were considered to be polluted. In fact, historically they have been the agrarian working class in villages, tilled land which they did not own. The traditional system of procuring agricultural labor tied to the land and land owners similar to the system of the serf in Europe was very much prevalent in India. This system of caste relations which was both social and spatial was known as Jajmani System (patron–client relationship), kept the agrarian laboring classes immobile (Dube, 1990). On the other hand, the privilege of mobility was confined to the Brahmins (priestly castes) who moved to provide priestly services and also Vaishyas (trading castes) who were often iterant trading various goods and commodities. In the traditional system of caste hierarchy, the patriarchy and gender segregation were very strong among higher castes compared to the lower castes wherein both men and women worked together in agricultural activities (Raju, 1993). It is also important to mention that historically gender relations are shaped by the institutions of family and marriage deeply embedded within the institution of caste. The mobility of women is controlled and carefully planned within this system through a normative structure of patrilocal residence. In a more patriarchal society of North and North-West India, village exogamy is practiced combined with the practice of child and early marriages which subjected them to sub-ordination and exploitation. Purdah

Migration and Right to the City  39 (veil) system is still practiced in this part of the country which perpetuated their dependency and curtailed their freedom (Dyson & Moore, 1983). Women are often not allowed to move without a male escort, and also their movement is contingent upon the permission of the male members – be it father/father-in-law or husband. However, the situation has been changing due to rapid urbanization of Indian society, albeit slow. Thus, the right to move assumes enormous significance for women’s well-being in a society that is urban and city based. A gender perspective on the Right to the City envisions the safe movement of all women including migrant women within a city, their safety and security at both public and private places, have access to social and economic resources of the city without any prejudice and ensures their participation in building city. This requires a paradigm shift in the ideology of a city from a source of GDP and economic growth to a city that is environmentally sustainable, woman friendly, and inclusive.

Women’s migration to cities: extent and reasons Due to economic growth, rapid urbanization, and increased means of transportation and communication women’s migration compared to men has increased in recent times. Also, the long-distance inter-state migration has increased among women (Singh et al., 2016). While the majority of men report employment as a reason of rural to urban migration, women reported marriage (60%) and moved with household (30%) as the dominant reasons for migration (NSSO, 2010). On the whole, family-related migration for females has been increasing during the last two decades. It would seem that male and female migration from rural to urban areas are related as males move for employment and in search of better employment whereas females follow them after marriage or move later as male migrants settle down. At city level, many mega cities namely Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore, and Pune show an increasing trend in female migration. In fact, the increase in female migration is evident across all size class of urban centers (Singh, 2009). Women have higher intensity of migration compared to men in many cities particularly prominent in mega cities of Delhi, Kolkata, and Ahmedabad as per 2011 Census (see Figure 3.1). As majority of them do not work, this shapes their relationship with the city in determining access and use of city space and resources and consequently their position in urban society. On the other hand, their contribution as home makers and family care providers are enormous but seems to be structured through the continuity of patriarchy transmitted from rural to urban areas. The national statistics on migration collected information on reasons of migration both for males and females. However, migration statistics show very little role of women’s agency in migration as less than 3 percent women migrants reported employment as a reason for migration based on place of last residence data (see Figure 3.2). It is true that there are women migrants who reported reason of migration as either marriage or moved

40  R. B. Bhagat 64.8 63.9 64.7

40.8 33.4 40.8

51 50 50.8

52.3 52.5 50.9

48.7 45.3 50.8

43.1 40.8 43

PERCENTAGE

Female

54.9 54.6 53.3

Male

64.3 63.7 63.9

Total

Figure 3.1   Percentage of migrants by gender in mega urban agglomerations in India, 2011. Source: Census of India 2011, D3 (Appendix) Migration Table (www.censusindia.gov.in).

Male

70 60

Female

60.8 52.7

50 40 25.2

30

29.4

20 10 0

2.6 Employment related

1.4 Marriage

6.8

13.9 5

2.2

Movement with Studies/Educaon parents

Others

Figure 3.2  Reasons for migration to urban areas by gender in percentage. Source: NSSO (2010).

with family but are part of the workforce after migration. In the national datasets like Census and National Sample Surveys, a single cause of migration is being reported out of the several causes like marriage, employment, moved with parents/family members, education, business, and moved after birth. Some researchers have questioned this mono causal reporting of the reason for migration in national data sources whereas in reality the reason of migration is multiple (Mazumdar et al., 2013). It is also important to mention that reasons of migration are mostly reported by the head of the

Migration and Right to the City  41 households who often is a male member of the household. Thus, a patriarchal bias in reporting the reason for migration cannot be ruled out. However, it is also a fact that the job market at the place of destination is very structured in favor of males as only 14 percent of the migrant women reported to have been working in urban areas, although it shows a significantly higher percent compared to employment reported reason of migration (about 3%). Also, there exists a huge disparity between men and women migrants in urban areas. The available data indicate that not only workforce participation of women migrants has declined but also all those who have been working either as self-employed and casual workers prior to migration, about two-fifths of them lost their work after moving into urban areas as per 64th round of NSS Survey conducted in 2007–08 (Singh et al., 2016). This shows some amount of defeminization of the migrant women workforce. However, it is worthwhile to note that while there was some loss of jobs due to migration, on the other hand, there is also an increased job opportunity in certain categories of occupations. For example, some of the large cities show enormous growth in female domestic servants as well as construction workers who are mainly migrants. A similar phenomenon has been observed elsewhere in the world showing increasing feminization of migration as caregivers (Kofman & Raghuram, 2012). In India, a large number of placement agencies have also sprung up that are involved in the recruitment process in many big cities (Neetha, 2002; Srivastava, 2012). Some skill-based diversification and expansion of occupations are also visible. Women migrants are also found working as sales workers, beauticians, hair dressers, in call centers, etc. However, the paid domestic work was the most gender distinctive feature of urban ward labor migration by women (Mazumdar et al., 2013). Studies also show that illiterate women have a higher propensity to migrate than illiterate men (Singh et al., 2016). Thus, the emerging labor market seems to be segmented with women migrants relegated to low skilled, less paid, and less secure jobs of informal nature. This shows that the cities have become exclusionary whereas the patriarchal pressure to migrate continues resulting in the increased confinement of women migrants to the sphere of the home. This has resulted in increased disempowerment and vulnerability of a group of women migrants not only in public places but also at private spaces like home. Naturally the more vulnerable women migrants are those who moved as dependents, less educated, work in precarious jobs, and also led by contractors. Labor migration of women is largely a within state phenomenon but a significant proportion of women migrated for employment purpose to the more urbanized states like Delhi, Maharashtra, Haryana, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Chhattisgarh, and Jharkhand are from northeast India (NSSO, 2010).

Migration, gender, and exclusionary city Exclusionary processes are more indirect and subtle in India compared to China where migrants in urban areas are discriminated on the basis of the

42  R. B. Bhagat household registration system (hukou). In China, migrants are not part of the urban hukou and face discrimination in access to employment, pension, housing, healthcare, and education. This has been a matter of intense debate in recent years (Li, 2010; Solinger, 1999). On the other hand, in India the exclusion and discrimination against migrants take place through political and administrative processes, market mechanisms, and socio-economic processes. As argued by Amartya Sen (2006) that each one of us has multiple identities, a person may suffer from multiple deprivations as well. Women in the city suffer being a migrant and a woman in addition to socio-cultural prejudices and economic deprivations. Migration adds extra to the existing baggage of inequality and discrimination. Migrant women not only face discrimination in wages, but also sexual violence and various types of exclusions – such as access to the public distribution of food, shelter, medical facility, and even voting rights. The migrant construction workers, many of them are women, are denied access to crèche facility, drinking water, sanitation, and toilet facilities (Agnihotri et al., 2012; Bhagat, 2012). A study of migrant women in slums of Mumbai shows that a significant proportion of them (20%) suffer from reproductive health problems (RTIs/STIs). The study also found that sexual violence within marriage is experienced by one in every five migrant women whose husband consumed alcohol. One-fifth of husbands of migrant women have been alcoholic which was a serious threat to their autonomy and life (Mohanty & Bhagat, 2014). The exclusion of migrants – both men and women from access to health services is a very serious issue. Public health services are generally lacking and private health services are too costly to be availed. Migrants in most cases are neither able to reap the benefits of health insurance schemes nor are provided with health insurance by their employers. They also face greater risks of HIVs/AIDs (Saggurti et al., 2011). Lack of housing is a serious problem for migrants in Indian cities. For single migrant women, rental housing is costly, working women’s hostels are either not available or beyond reach, as a result many single migrant women either seek rental accommodation or live as a paying guest (PG). Seeking rental accommodation for single migrant women is very tormenting as they have to fulfill several conditions before getting a rental accommodation (The Times of India, 2016). A study conducted in several states shows that 53 percent women migrants in urban areas have no access to safe drinking water and have to fetch water from public taps/pumps. About one-fifth have no access to toilet facility, and 15 percent have no access to electricity. On the other hand, more than three quarters of women migrants and even more of the male migrants had no ration cards (food entitlement card) at their destinations. Although the situation is better in urban areas compared with rural destinations, the deprivations remain glaring among women migrants (Agnihotri et al., 2012). Many migrants also lack proofs of identity and residence in the city. This turns out to be the biggest barrier to their inclusion. Due to lack of proof

Migration and Right to the City  43 of residence, many are not included in the voter list and cannot exert their right to vote. Agnihotri et al. (2012) noted that a significantly higher proportion of the women migrant workers not voted compared to men also reinforce the sense that women migrant workers face somewhat greater disenfranchisement because of migration. Lack of residential proof also leads to exclusion from opening a bank account, getting a ration card and driving license, etc. It is worthwhile to note that residential proof depends upon a migrant’s ability to either own a house in his/her name or in the name of family member or get house on rent under leave and license agreement. The recent Unique Identification Number (UID) project also insists on residential proof. Women generally lack access to property and housing rights, and the condition is worse for them as they migrate as an associate member along with husband or other relatives. The denial of political rights (of voting) to migrants – both men and women is crucially linked to the denial of the right to the housing in the city. Due to the lack of proper housing, many migrants live in informal settlements and are unable to acquire a residential proof. Also, as most of them work in the informal sector, they have no opportunity to get an identity proof from their employers unlike their counterparts who work in the formal sector. Further, residency is another criterion introduced to deny the entitlement of housing to the migrants vis-à-vis non-migrants. For example, in Mumbai all those who have been living in slums but arrived after the year 2000 would lose the right to housing under slum rehabilitation programs. Also, Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act 1979 is hardly implemented to protect the rights of labor migrants. These instances are indicative of the manner in which urban policies and programs are discriminatory against migrants in general and women migrants in particular. Around two-thirds of the migrant women workers reported that their minor children also migrated with them in comparison to just one-fourth of the male migrant workers (Agnihotri et al., 2012). Children of migrants are denied their right to education as seeking admission to the school is cumbersome, and the language barrier is difficult to overcome. Migrants’ language is generally different from the local language and this adds to the baggage of their disadvantages. The list of denial of rights to migrants is huge and gets longer for women migrants. However, when looking at the denial of rights one should keep in mind that the Right to the City is not an exclusive individual right but a collective right which aims to forge unity among different exploited classes in order to build an alternative city that eradicates poverty and inequality, and that heals the wounds of environmental degradation (Harvey, 2008, 2012). However, it would be pertinent to argue that individual and collective rights should not be seen separately and unrelated as fulfillment of individual rights could turn out to be a transformative step realizing the collective Right to the City.

44  R. B. Bhagat

Conclusion and way forward Urbanization is often associated with the greater independence of women eroding patriarchal power relations and values (Tacoli & Satterthwaite, 2013). However, Indian cities have failed to achieve the goal of gender equality as patriarchal norms continue to play an important role embedded in the urban social structure that is implanted from rural areas through migration with little social reforms. However, it is worthwhile to emphasize that women are not a homogenous group but divided not only based on economic and occupational status but also by religious, caste, ethnic, migrant status, and identities. Each of these identities of women intersects with gendered power relations and patriarchy in determining the realization or denial of the Right to the City. A large proportion of women migrants also live in slums, although its proportion varies from city to city. In some instances, such as access to housing, water, and sanitation, women are more affected than men migrants. Women migrants face various types of discrimination, barriers, and exclusions, and it should form the central concern in city planning and development agenda, and efforts should be made to include and integrate migrants and women politically, economically, socially, culturally, and spatially. This requires an enormous change in the attitude toward the process of migration and urbanization of those who appropriate and dominate cities. A historical understanding of the process of migration and urbanization and migrants’ role in building cities needs to be highlighted. Urban development is a state subject in India, but the Center formulates a huge urban development program giving an opportunity to the states to take advantages of them. Government policies and programs are silent on the issue of migration and protecting the rights of migrants. The value of gender and migration is not addressed, and their rights do not find a place in city development plans unequivocally, while the access to economic and social and health entitlements are denied on the basis of hostile attitude, discriminatory practices, and even through legal frameworks based on the ideology of sons of the soil. As women migrants continue to suffer through patriarchal values and practices, the place-based discriminatory practices also add to the denial of their Right to the City. The shortage of urban amenities and lack of the access to housing adds to their suffering, while they contribute immensely to domestic servants, unpaid household workers, and construction and other workers to the city. It needs to be emphasized that the democratization of city governance and the political inclusion of migrants – both men and women in decision-making processes would be important steps to realize the vision of Right to the City for promoting alternative urbanization and building cities based on principles of freedom, human development, and gender justice. In this light, the implementation of the constitutional provisions under 74th Amendment reserving one-third of seats in urban local bodies should be implemented in letter and spirit. Women should be given responsibility in

Migration and Right to the City  45 planning and decision-making process in the municipal administration. However, any piecemeal approach remains partial and incomplete unless the philosophy of Right to the City acquires a central stage of planning and encourages women to participate in decision-making that is sensitive to gender and the rights of migrants, minorities, and the poor.

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Part II

Migrants and electoral politics

4 Migration and inclusive elections Ashwani Kumar and Shashwat Dhar

India’s vibrant democracy continues to puzzle democratic theorists and scholars of comparative politics. When India embarked on the world’s largest experiment to grant universal franchise to a largely poor and illiterate population, few believed that democracy could succeed in the country. However, more than six decades after India held its first general election, democracy continues to survive despite theoretical predictions to the contrary (Varshney, 1998). This finds striking reflection in the 2014 general election, which saw over 606 million voters or more than 67% of India’s electorate cast their ballots to elect their representatives to the lower house of the Parliament (Election Commission of India, 2019). While this record-breaking turnout was indeed a historic feat and calls for much celebration, it belies the fact that a substantial segment of India’s actual electorate did not exercise its franchise. It may be germane to pose a question here: who are these electors/voters who failed to show up at the polling booths on election day? Much current debates on lower-than-average turnout levels in Indian elections have centered on broadly two elector segments – the so-called “disenchanted” urban middle class and the largely ‘disinterested’ first-time voters. However, there is compelling evidence to indicate that the middle-class voters actually turned out in much larger numbers than before in this election; in fact, turnout levels among the upper middle and middle-class voters were much higher than those among India’s poor, something which we have not witnessed in a long time (Sridharan, 2014). Besides, for the first time since 1999, the average turnout among “young” voters exceeded the national average (Kumar, 2014). Who then could these voters possibly be? There are good reasons to believe that a non-trivial proportion of this relatively dormant elector segment comprises internal migrants, a term which encompasses various shades of human mobility that occur within the territorial boundaries of a state. While much of this migration is permanent in nature, a substantial part of it is short-term, mostly comprising people who 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. Described as “footloose workers” in migration studies, this largely floating and invisible segment of the migrant population

52  Ashwani Kumar and Shashwat Dhar primarily hails from socio-economically marginalized groups, has a poor asset base, and is mostly employed in brickkilns, construction, transportation, plantations, mines, quarries, and agriculture among other sub-sectors of the economy (Deshingkar & Akter, 2009). It is this elector segment that faces relatively greater legal and political hurdles to voting in elections. It encounters debilitating transaction costs to vote at the place of origin. Many of these footloose migrants are concentrated within village clusters of specific districts. Their absence in a closely fought election can make a crucial difference to the election verdict. However, since they are mostly away from their constituencies on election day, it is not uncommon for migrants to lose out on that one opportunity to make their voices heard through the ballot (Sainath, 2004). Facilitating the participation of such migrant workers in the political process thus becomes imperative if elections are to become truly inclusive and fair. But, in multi-ethnic plural societies, such as India, the extension of voting rights to internal migrants at their place of destination has its concomitant risks and challenges. Aside from the governance and logistical challenges that such an exercise would entail, it has the potential to exacerbate sub-national/communitarian impulses and upset inter-ethnic relations in the host society. This is particularly true when migrants find themselves in direct economic and political competition with natives over limited economic opportunities (Weiner, 1978). Under such conditions, sub-national elites often resort to the discourse of the “outsider” in order to gain political mileage for the so-called “sons of the soil.” However, in his pioneering work, Myron Weiner rarely refers to internal migrants as citizens lacking citizenship rights in their place of destination. Given the lack of sufficient research on the systemic political exclusions faced by migrants in India, this chapter attempts to answer three interlinked questions on migrant enfranchisement: First, what explains the low turnout levels among internal migrants? Second, are some categories of internal migrants more vulnerable to political exclusion than others? Third, what are some of the implications of extending voting rights to migrants at the destination? The chapter is broadly organized into five sections. The first section briefly outlines the context of the ongoing debate on extending voting rights to internal migrants (particularly seasonal and circular migrants), who have hitherto remained at the margins of electoral politics in India. The second section briefly surveys the literature on the politics of internal migration in multi-ethnic societies, where migration tends to have destabilizing effects and arouse intense ethnic conflict over “protection of space” and limited economic opportunities. Drawing upon time series data on migration to 26 Indian states, the third section presents suggestive evidence that increasing rates of (inter-state) in-migration are positively associated with turnout levels in sub-national state elections. It further elaborates upon the myriad legal and political hurdles that migrants face while voting during election, since India’s laws do not permit a citizen to vote at a place other than where s/he is “ordinarily resident.” The penultimate section discusses the broader

Migration and inclusive elections  53 implications of extending voting rights to internal migrants at their place of destination for party politics and inter-ethnic relations. The fifth section concludes by identifying key areas for future research on internal migration.

The context The origins of the debate on extending absentee voting rights to internal migrants lies in a slew of Public Interest Litigations (Dr. Shamsheer V.P. versus Union of India) filed in the Supreme Court of India. While making a plea for the extension of absentee voting rights to India’s diasporic population, these petitions also pushed for extending the same rights to the country’s internal migrant population (Mahapatra, 2015). In response to the petition, the Election Commission of India (ECI hereafter) recommended an e-postal ballot system that would allow India’s overseas electors to vote from abroad. After the Government of India conveyed its acceptance of the ECI’s recommendations, the court directed it to work out the necessary amendments to the Representation of People (Amendment) Act 2010, which while granting voting rights to Indian citizens living abroad, requires them to be physically present in their constituencies at the time of polling. Legislative efforts are on to plug this loophole in the law. However, a consensus still eludes political parties and policy makers on whether such special provisions should be extended to India’s internal migrants living away from their place of ordinary residence. Currently, the law makes an exception to the clause on “ordinary residence” for service personnel belonging to the armed and paramilitary forces, armed police forces serving outside their home constituencies and officials posted on foreign missions. “Service voters,” as they are called, have the option of casting their vote through proxy or postal ballots. Questions have been raised about the feasibility of extending similar privileges to internal migrants, mainly on account of the governance and logistical challenges that such a move would pose. What further compounds the problem is the lack of a reliable, nationally representative database on the scale of disenfranchisement among internal migrants. Official statistics on internal migration in India, which are drawn primarily from two sources – D-series Census and NSSO sources, are known to grossly underestimate the scale of short-term migration and do not capture the precise magnitude of the phenomenon.

Migration and identity politics: theoretical debates While there is a wealth of scholarship on the economic consequences of internal migration for receiving and sending states, studies examining the political consequences of migration are far and few between. Myron Weiner undertook the first and the most systematic study of the political consequences of internal migration in ethnically diverse societies. Influenced by modernization theory, Weiner posited that the “process of modernization, by providing incentives and opportunities for mobility, creates conditions

54  Ashwani Kumar and Shashwat Dhar for increasing internal migration” (Weiner, 1978). However, in multi-ethnic societies like India, migration often has destabilizing effects and tends to arouse intense conflict over “protection of space” and limited economic opportunities. Using concepts of “territorial ethnicity” (the notion that certain ethnic groups are rooted in space’), “dual labour market” and the idea of an “ethnic division of labour”, Weiner contests the idea that migrants are necessarily poor, illiterate, and unskilled and argues that migrants may as well be entrepreneurs, bankers, traders, shopkeepers, moneylenders, or self-employed professionals. Examining selected regions of India in which migrants dominate the modern sector of the economy, Weiner examines the specific conditions under which the indigenous ethnic groups, whom he refers to as “sons-of-the-soil” (SoS hereafter), attempt to use political power to overcome their fears of economic defeat and cultural subordination by the more enterprising, more highly skilled, and better educated migrants. In other words, anti-migrant violence typically occurs when there is competitive politicization over resources; when migrants come in direct competition with the native middle classes over the economic benefits of modernization. Weiner’s theoretical formulations, despite being insightful and relevant to our times, have been questioned by some scholars who characterize his basic argument as “neo-Malthusian,” that is, migration engenders population growth to outpace the local resource base (Faist & Schade, 2013). Writing at a time when coalitions were the exception rather than the norm, Weiner underestimated the salience of center–state dynamics in mediating migration induced ethnic conflict. New research on the effects of migration on SoS conflicts underscores the importance of coalition politics and asymmetrical federalism in explaining why such conflicts subside in some states and simmer in others. Bhavnani and Lacina (2015), in their much-acclaimed work on migration induced political violence have shown that states which are politically aligned with the Center are more effective at marginalizing and controlling migrants without recourse to nativist rioting than unaligned state governments. Citing evidence of lower migrant inflows to states when they are politically aligned with New Delhi, they argue that such states are more likely to extract resources and legal concessions from the Center, to discriminate against migrants in important arenas of economic competition and to use police intimidation against migrants without fear of central intervention. However, it is plausible to conceive of other scenarios where extension of voting rights to migrants at the destination may not necessarily generate violent outcomes. In conditions where the ruling party at the Center exerts influence on the sub-national party in power in a state and where the former has a substantial base among the migrant population, the prospect of nativist violence against migrants may be lower. The salience of “micro political incentives” in tempering migration induced conflict thus cannot be ruled out. That migration is inextricably linked to some of the deadliest episodes of political violence is now well-established in cross-country statistical studies. Fearon and Laitin (2011) estimate that more than one-third

Migration and inclusive elections  55 (31%) of all ethnic civil wars between 1945 and 2008 can be termed as SoS conflicts, which typically involve clashes between an ethnic group that considers itself indigenous to a region and recent settlers who come from other parts of the country. However, some scholars argue that cross-country studies tend to miss out on SoS dynamics which stem mainly from population mobility within national borders (Forsberg, n.d.). Drawing on disaggregated district level analysis of migration induced conflict in India’s northeast, Forsberg finds that higher proportions of people perceived to be non-native to an area make it much more likely to experience violent ethnic conflict. Citing a dramatic increase in the number of people enrolled as voters in the northeastern state of Assam, she hypothesizes that violent outcomes may be positively correlated with the inclusion of “foreigners” in the electoral rolls. While a lot of the existing work on the politics of migration in India focuses on the effects of migration on nativist political mobilization, some of the more recent work has sought to examine the micro-level dynamics of migrant political behavior at the place of destination. In their experimental study of the underlying sources of political exclusion faced by urban migrants, Gaikwad and Nellis (2018) find that politicians are less likely to respond to requests for help by migrants compared to those made by longterm city residents. The origins of such discriminatory behavior stems from politicians’ perceptions of urban migrants as politically passive. However, this discrimination evaporates when migrants signal to politicians that have overcome representational barriers and can be relied upon to vote. Thachil’s work on identity formation urban migrant communities examines the conditions that govern cooperation and collective action among poor urban migrant groups. Drawing on fine-grained data from experiments and street ethnographies, he finds that ethnic differences prevail over class distinctions in situations that involve quotidian interactions between poor migrant workers (such as selecting another migrant worker as a roommate) but prove irrelevant to interactions that also implicate urban elites and law-enforcement (Thachil, 2017). He attributes these to a class-induced solidarity effect among poor migrants which is born out of shared experiences of everyday discrimination and repression by urban elites and state agencies.

Migration and turnout In our attempt to answer the first question (on whether internal migrants indeed face barriers/hurdles in participating in elections), we analyze the correlation between the in-migration rates in a state and the average voter turnout in sub-national state assembly elections in India. We adopt the strategy in Bhavnani and Lacina, who have used the 1991 and 2001 Census to build a panel dataset describing the number of in-migrants in 26 Indian states for six time periods (1982–86, 1987–89, 1990, 1992–96, 1997–99, and 2000). To this, we add the state level voter turnout and the following graph plots the relationship between average voter turnout and in-migration.

56  Ashwani Kumar and Shashwat Dhar

Figure 4.1  Association between in-migration and voter turnout.

Source: Kumar, A et al., (2015) Inclusive Elections in India: A Study on Domestic Migration and Issues in Electoral Participation: Tata Institute of Social SciencesElection Commission of India Report. Technical Report. Retrieved from: http:// www.shram.org/reports_pdf/eci_report.pdf

Table 4.1  Association between in-migration and voter turnout, 1982–86 to 2000

Ln (All Migrants) Observations R-squared Controls State fixed effects

(1)

(2)

(3)

Turnout (in %)

Turnout (in %)

Turnout (in %)

-3.922*** (0.660) 84 0.269 No No

-3.738*** (1.244) 84 0.480 Yes No

-0.422 (3.056) 84 0.737 Yes Yes

Source: Kumar, A et al., (2015) Inclusive Elections in India: A Study on Domestic Migration and Issues in Electoral Participation: Tata Institute of Social Sciences-Election Commission of India Report. Technical Report. Retrieved from: http://www.shram.org/reports_pdf/eci_ report.pdf Note: Robust standard errors in parentheses; Control variables are same as in Bhavnani and Lacina (2015), p. 18: “abnormal monsoon rainfall, land degradation, income per capita, unemployment among secondary-school educated male natives, trade flows from other states, population, urbanization among the native population, native male children’s school enrollment rates, and the share of the native male population aged 15–19.” *** p < 0.01

Migration and inclusive elections  57 Table 4.2  Estimates of internal migrant population in India’s major metropolitan cities (%) City

Number of Migrants

Delhi Mumbai Bangalore Hyderabad Jaipur Surat Kolkata

5,157,634 3,592,811 1,729,093 1,301,408 1,269,432 1,244,159 1,185,550

Migrants as a percent of population 46 29 20 19 42 28 26

Source: NSSO 2007–08

Col (1) presents the results of the most basic regression and it suggests that a 10 percent increase in migrants in a state is associated with a reduction in voter turnout by 0.4 percentage points. The coefficient is statistically significant at the 99 percent level. Adding state-level controls does not qualitatively change the nature of the cross-sectional relationship and the coefficient continues to be statistically significant. We also present results of including state fixed effects in Col (3). It can be noted that the coefficient of interest sharply drops and is no longer significant. This could be because there is limited temporal variation to exploit as nearly half of the states in the sample have three or less time periods. The objective of this empirical exercise is not to claim any causal relationship between the two variables, but merely to demonstrate that there may be a meaningful relationship between in-migration and turnout levels. The depression in overall turnouts in these select states may be a function of lower rates of enrolment and turnout among migrant voters. Interestingly, these findings resonate with those of Akarca and Tansel (2015), who in their study on the impact of population mobility on political participation in Turkey, find that internal migration has an adverse effect on turnout at both the place of origin and destination. However, in regions where a large number of immigrants are concentrated, migration is less likely to depress turnout levels. This is because the strength of numbers affords migrants the opportunity and incentive to elect one of their co-ethnic representatives to the Parliament, thus offsetting negative effects of migration on turnout in certain districts. While our model does not offer any empirical estimate of the impact of migration on turnout at sending locations, it nonetheless provides strong clues about the disenfranchisement of migrant voters at the place of destination.

Plausible mechanisms The findings of our statistical model lend further support to our claims that internal migrants are a deeply disenfranchised lot. While they do not lay out

58  Ashwani Kumar and Shashwat Dhar the causal mechanisms at play here, evidence from secondary sources lends us greater confidence in our findings. The problem of low turnouts among migrants has two dimensions – registration and voting. Registration is the first step toward becoming an eligible voter. The Constitution of India has vested the ECI with several powers to execute the management of elections to the Parliament and state legislatures. Article 325 specifies that the ECI should prepare one general electoral roll for every territorial constitution and no person shall be ineligible based on the grounds only of religion, race, caste, or sex. Article 326 states that “no person above the age of 18 years shall be ineligible to be registered as a voter based on the grounds of non-residence, unsoundness of mind, crime or corrupt or illegal practice.” The Representation of People Act (RPA) 1951 requires that in order to be eligible to vote, a citizen must be “ordinarily resident” of a constituency. Section 20 of the same act clarifies that mere ownership or possession of a building or immovable property in a constituency cannot be treated as ordinarily resident until and unless the migrant uses it for sleeping. On the other hand, even persons living in sheds or on pavements without any roof are eligible for enrolment provided they are ordinarily resident in the sheds or on pavements in a particular area, do not change the place of residence, and are otherwise identifiable.1 This raises a pertinent question for policy makers: Who is to be treated as a migrant? And for what sorts of migrants should the ECI consider making special voting provisions for? Technically speaking, every migrant has a constitutionally guaranteed right to vote; a person who migrates from one place (where s/he is ordinarily resident) to another for reasons of employment, education, etc., and resides there for more than 6 months has the option to apply for registration as a voter at the new place. This becomes his/ her new place of residence and there is no question of him/her exercising his/ her voting rights at the place of origin. This has also been the official stance of the ECI. Therefore, the proposal to make voting rights portable may not be applicable to permanent migrants but only to short-term, seasonal, and circular migrants. According to the Census of India 2001, there are 8,885,724 respondents whose place of enumeration was different from their place of residence for less than 1 year and if one subtracts the people who are in the age group 0–14 years (because they are not eligible to vote) there are 5,803,868 migrants left whose duration of residence is less than 1 year, forming 0.6 percent of the total population.2 It is this segment of the migrant population that faces relatively greater hurdles in participating in elections. A bulk of these temporary and “un-domiciled migrants” are engaged in casual, low-paid, and hazardous work. Commonly identified as construction workers, brickkiln laborers, rickshaw pullers, sex workers, private security guards, domestic helps, miners, plantation workers, etc., these migrants tend to lack any formal residency rights, have little or no access to metered water or electricity connections (considered to be a major proof of residence) and other state provided welfare services (UNESCO, 2012). In the absence of a valid proof of identity

Migration and inclusive elections  59 and residence, migrants face formidable barriers to get themselves enrolled on the voters’ list despite having lived at the place of destination beyond the stipulated period. This is evident from the consistently low enrolment and turnout rates among urban migrants, a phenomenon which for far too long has been attributed to the political apathy of the urban middle classes (Kumar & Banerjee, 2017). Legal provisions meant to safeguard the interests of migrants have been largely ineffectual; the Inter State Migrant Workmen Act (1979), which entitles a migrant worker to a host of benefits, such as minimum wages, displacement allowance, residential accommodation, and medical facilities upon registration, among other benefits, have been beset by issues of non-compliance and bureaucratic inertia. Scholars point out that the process of getting a migrant worker registered is far from being smooth and worker-friendly; contractors rarely take the pains to register themselves or the workers with the government, the Employee Provident Fund laws are violated with impunity and worksite facilities have not been found up to prescribed standards (Kundu, 2014). Furthermore, the country’s antediluvian election management practices have underserved a rapidly urbanizing country. With hundreds and thousands of migrants from India’s countryside pouring into its bustling urban centers every year, managing the electoral rolls at the place of destination becomes a logistical nightmare. A city like Bangalore, which has earned the sobriquet of “India’s Silicon Valley” for its famed IT industry, added a whopping 3 million residents between 2001 and 2011. This has put an enormous burden on the city’s election apparatus, which some believe is ill-equipped to deal with the emerging reality of a “dynamic, mobile urban citizenry” (Ramanathan et al., 2012). This explains why despite repeated efforts to clean and update the city’s electoral rolls; errors of inclusion and exclusion of voters abound. Low turnout levels among migrants also speak of the prohibitive transactional costs of voting. A handful of micro studies have documented the crippling hurdles that migrants face in voting during an election. According to a recent study conducted by Aajevika Bureau (Udaipur) in collaboration with five other NGOs, 78 percent of internal migrants possess a voter ID card or are registered as voters in India and out of them 60 percent of migrants were reported to have failed to cast their votes in at least one election – local, state, or national, mainly because they were away from their home constituencies and returning to vote is considered an expensive affair.3 When adjusted for short-distance movements, the percentage of migrants who missed voting is as high as 83 percent (Sharma et al., undated). The study illumines that the web of disincentives deter migrants from exercising their fundamental right to vote. The risk of sacrificing a day’s wages or the expense of traveling back to their homes without the provision of a paid leave or a comparable incentive poses a major barrier to their electoral participation. While Karnataka has instituted a policy to grant a paid holiday to motivate migrant workers to vote, interviews with election officials

60  Ashwani Kumar and Shashwat Dhar reveal that it has had little effect in terms of boosting turnout levels. This is mainly because a vast majority of these migrant workers hail from far-off states like Bihar, West Bengal, Odisha, Jharkhand, and Uttar Pradesh and in ideal conditions, they would require at least 3–4 days to return to their native places in order to cast their votes and join back work.4

Political consequences of extending voting rights to internal migrants in host societies As much of the literature on migration in ethnically heterogeneous societies reveals, migrants often find themselves in economic and political competition with natives over income, employment, and habitat. For politicians and political parties, granting political rights to migrants remains a controversial subject for it opens up a Pandora’s Box of dire political consequences in terms of mobilizing and managing their constituency services. While most political parties in India endorse the move on paper, it is difficult to say how candidates and parties might actually respond to opportunities for electoral mobilization of migrant voters. Micro studies suggest that while political parties in Delhi accept every new entrant or migrant in its folds, those in Mumbai often resort to the discourse of the “outsider” in order to gain political advantage for the so-called “sons of the soil” (Marathi Manoos). This is a little counter intuitive since inter-state migrants constitute a much larger share of Delhi’s population. As of now, we know little about how migrants impact election/political outcomes. Field work conducted by the authors during the 2017 Gujarat Assembly Election suggests that the migrant vote was vital to BJP’s sweep of urban Surat, a major textile and diamond hub in India. Surat has a sizeable migrant population of around 1.5 million, and according to Binod Paliwal, a Bihari migrant who owns a dyeing and printing unit in the region, migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar come here for work and get seduced by the “development” they see around them, turning into “staunch BJP supporters” (Saiyed, 2017). While these claims may be somewhat exaggerated, political parties cannot downplay the importance of the migrant vote in closely fought elections. India has a wide assortment of political parties and one would expect some qualitative difference in how parties respond to opportunities for electoral mobilization of migrant voters. For instance, in their unique formulation of ethnic parties, Thachil and Teitelbaum (2015) distinguish between the redistributive effects of “narrow” and more “encompassing” ethnic parties. Our hunch is that “catch-all” parties and more encompassing ethnic parties should be more likely to respond to migrant concerns and requests for assistance than their counterparts with more narrow ethnic bases of support. There have been several instances where political parties claiming to represent the interests of natives have unleashed xenophobic violence against migrant workers from other states (Rajan et al., 2012). Much like what regionalist parties like the Shiv Sena and MNS did in Maharashtra, the

Migration and inclusive elections  61 AGP in Assam spearheaded a violent agitation to rid the state of “illegal immigrants” mainly hailing from West Bengal and Bangladesh. Similar sentiments of hostility toward immigrants have also surfaced among the natives in Goa, Meghalaya, and Manipur, which has witnessed deadly clashes between Meitis (valley people) and the hill tribes over controversial legislation aimed at restricting the influx of outsiders in the state (Roy, 2015). Likewise, the northeastern states of Assam and Manipur have been engulfed in violent clashes between locals and “foreigners” over the inclusion of the latter in the electoral rolls. Kerala also presents an interesting case of migrant disenfranchisement. Over the past few years, the state has witnessed a steady inflow of migrants from West Bengal,Assam, and Odisha to work in its booming construction sector. Many also find work in the hospitality, manufacturing, trade, and agricultural sectors. One estimate puts the number of inter-state migrant workers in Kerala at around 2.5 million, with an annual average of 2.5 lakh migrants.5 However, few of these migrant workers make their way to the voters list; most prefer to vote at their native places. To make matters worse, political parties in Kerala have expressed reservations about proposals to grant voting rights to migrants from outside the state. In short, the registration of internal migrants for voting away from their native place has the potential of creating permanent fault lines between the natives/permanent residents and domiciled migrants. Besides increasing the likelihood of ethnic conflict, efforts directed at enfranchising migrants at the host region may also create perverse incentives for migrant voters to cast their ballots at multiple locations. Though Section 17 and 18 of the RPA (1951) says that “No person shall be entitled to be registered in the electoral roll for more than one constituency and no person shall be entitled to be registered in the electoral roll for any constituency more than once,” ethnographic evidence indicates that many migrants possess “multiple” voter IDs at both their place of origin and destination. This raises the possibility of electoral identity frauds and related electoral malpractices. Furthermore, it militates against the fundamental democratic principle of “one vote, one value;” and risks distorting the very idea of universal citizenship, which is founded on the normative claim that everyone ought to be subject to the same rules applied uniformly throughout the nation. At the same time, one might argue for a differentiated conception of citizenship, especially for the vast section of poor and marginalized migrants, in so far as deepening their participation in elections is concerned. These are difficult normative issues that lie beyond the scope of this chapter. Internal migration is quite a complex phenomenon involving various shades of mobility – low-skilled labor migration, high-skilled labor migration, seasonal, and circular migration, migration induced by ethnic civil wars or environmental distress, etc. The protection of civil and political rights of all such migrants across states/districts poses huge governance and logistical challenges which require envisioning a new “migration governance

62  Ashwani Kumar and Shashwat Dhar framework” for multi-level cooperative federalism in rapidly urbanizing countries like India. Even if policy makers choose to focus on rural to urban migration (the fastest growing stream of migration today), existing election management practices will have to be overhauled and endowed with robust technological capabilities to absorb the fast-moving urban flows.

Conclusion Though the Constitution of India does not restrict free mobility within the country, it is evident from the preliminary analysis presented in this chapter that internal migrants, in the absence of proofs of identity and residence, are unable to claim social protection entitlements at the place of residence and also remain largely excluded from the political process. In other words, India’s internal migrants are yet to realize the full potential of their “right to migrate” within constitutional provisions. The chapter provides suggestive evidence of migrant disenfranchisement in India’s states. Analysis of secondary sources strengthens our confidence in these findings. While inter-state migrants across occupational profiles and economic endowments may face political exclusion in the host state, it is largely the undomiciled migrants, mostly comprising people who work seasonally in sub-sectors of construction, domestic work, brickkilns, plantations, mines, and factories that face relatively greater hurdles in participating in elections. Seasonal and circular migrants are usually traveling around the country looking for work; they cannot vote from their home state due to the restrictive application of the term “ordinarily resident” contained in Section 20 of the RPA. Under the current law, migrant labor will have to travel back to their homes without paid leave or incentive, just to vote. Findings from small-scale studies also corroborate this. The chapter also briefly touches upon the accompanying costs and challenges associated with granting voting rights to migrants at the place of destination. Aside from increasing the likelihood of ethnic conflict between natives and immigrants and affecting the dynamics of political competition in ways we little understand, such a move also poses enormous governance and logistical challenges, many of which require electoral reform and a dramatic overhaul of election management practices. Added to this is the real risk of generating perverse incentives for migrants to exercise their franchise at multiple locations, in violation of the ­country’s election laws. While the chapter makes a rather modest attempt to explain why migrants may not be voting in large numbers, we believe that our understanding of the issues facing internal migrants is severely limited by the absence of nationally representative estimates of the enrolment and voter turnout rates for this elector segment and more so for short-term migrants. However, as more data on seasonal and circular migrant flows become available, future scholarship would do well to examine the political effects of migrant streams and migration drivers in both sending and receiving states.

Migration and inclusive elections  63

Notes 1 Handbook for Electoral Registration Officers, Election Commission of India, 2008, pp 14-15. 2 We anticipate that the number of short-term migrants is substantially higher than what these estimates indicate. 3 The study was carried out in 15 locations spanning over 5 states in India – Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Gujarat 4 Authors’ interview with the Chief Electoral Officer, Karnataka, July 10, 2015. 5 Kerala State Election Commission Report.

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64  Ashwani Kumar and Shashwat Dhar Roy, E. (2015). Old Insecurities and New Fears in Manipur Violence that Killed Eight. Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/ old-insecurities-and-new-fearsinmanipur-violence-that-killed-eight/ Sainath, P. (2004). The millions who cannot vote. The Hindu. Saiyed, K. (2017). Behind Gujarat’s Urban-rural Skew: Where Faith in BJP Overrode Traders’ Anger and Hardik appeal. The Indian Express. https://indianexpress. com/article/india/gujarat-elections-urban-rural-wherefaith-in-bjp-overrode-urban-traders-anger-and-hardik-patel-appeal-4998622/ Sharma, A., Poonia, S., Babar, M., Singh, V., Singh, P., & Jha, L.K. (undated). Political inclusion of seasonal migrant workers in India: Perceptions, realities and challenges. Aajeevika Bureau (Udaipur) in collaboration with GDS (Lucknow), GSVS (Ajmer), Disha (Nashik), GPSVS (Madhubani). Sridharan, E. (2014). Class voting in the 2014 Lok Sabha Elections: The growing size and importance of the middle classes. Economic and Political Weekly, 49(7), 72–76. Srivastava, R. (2011). Internal migration in India: An overview of its features, trends and policy challenges. Social and Human Sciences Sector, UNICEF. Thachil, T., & Teitelbaum, E. (2015). Ethnic Parties and Public Spending: New Theory and Evidence from Indian states. Comparative Political Studies, 48(11), 1389–1420. Thachil, T. (2017). Do rural migrants divide ethnically in the city? Evidence from an ethnographic experiment in India. American Journal of Political Science, 61(4), 908–926. Kumar, A. et al. (2015) Inclusive Elections in India: A Study on Domestic Migration and Issues in Electoral Participation: Tata Institute of Social Sciences -Election Commission of India Report. Retrieved from: http://www.shram.org/reports_pdf/ eci_report.pd UNESCO (2012). For a better inclusion of internal migrants in India: Policy briefs, UNESCO-UNICEF Internal Migration in India Initiative. Varshney, A. (1998). India defies the odds: Why democracy survives. Journal of Democracy, 9(3), 36–50. Weiner, M. (1978). Sons of the soil: Migration and ethnic conflict in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

5 Electoral participation in India’s metropolitan cities* Sanjay Kumar and Souradeep Banerjee

Electoral participation in India’s big, metropolitan cities has been observed to be comparatively lower than in semi-urban and rural areas. Empirically measured in terms of voter turnout, the turnout level among voters in cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, etc., has been found to be way below the average turnout of that state. This phenomenon has indeed puzzled the Election Commission and social scientists alike, especially, in a country which witnesses high electoral participation among people hailing from backward and rural areas (Banerjee, 2014). Commentaries by the media and by political commentators often attribute this to “middle class apathy” and a sheer lack of political engagement among India’s urban, educated voters. Is it, really, so? In the absence of any empirical evidence, it is difficult to explain why low lower levels of turnout persist in India’s big, metropolitan cities and thus, the popular perception prevails. However, empirical data gathered as a part of our National Election Studies (NES) indicate that the main reason behind lower voter turnouts in metropolitan cities is not because the so-called middle classes do not turn out to cast their vote. Rather, we observe that it is the urban poor residing in these big cities, which does not exercise their franchise in larger numbers. Further, using data from the State Election Study (SES) of Delhi, one of the largest urban agglomerations of India, we can argue that these urban poor are internal migrants, who do not form a part of India’s democratic upsurge due to low enrolment rates and hence, low turnout rates. We unfold our explanation in this paper through the following sections: in the first section, we attempt to highlight the extent of the problem of lower voter turnouts in India’s urban constituencies. In the second section, we address the main reason for the problem as reflected in common perception and our explanation for the same. The third section takes this argument forward and looks at the issue of internal migrants who face political exclusion due to low enrolment rates and lower voter turnouts. *  This chapter was first published as ‘Electoral Participation in India’s Metropolitan Cities: A Perspective’, in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 52(45), 2017, pp. 82–86, and is reprinted here with permission of the authors and with due approval from EPW.

66  Sanjay Kumar and Souradeep Banerjee We wish to add a caveat here. The evidence presented in this chapter is based on an empirical study conducted in Delhi, but Delhi being a large urban agglomeration could be argued to be representative of India’s big metropolitan cities. However, for better academic rigor, the authors would soon, extend the study to other big cities of India

Voter turnout in India’s metropolitan cities: the problem The success of Indian democracy is largely associated with its electoral vibrancy. Counted as an exception to democratic theory, India unlike many full-fledged democracies is said to have witnessed high electoral participation without certain pre-conditions such as a certain level of income, level of education, social class, or ethnic cohesion (Varshney, 2014). This democratic success as reflected in the average voter turnout in the country has been around 60 percent in the 16 Lok Sabha elections held till now (refer to Figure 5.1) and the average turnout for the numerous State Assembly Elections has been much higher at 65 percent. Despite the success, it still remains a cause of concern that on an average 40 percent of Indians do not exercise their franchise in both National and state elections (Kumar, 2009). Looking at the aggregate data, one infers that though, voter turnout did increase after 1960s, the official figures do not reveal a substantial decline or increase. But what makes the picture interesting is when the data is disaggregated by locality. Initially, India similar to other Western democracies adhered to the positive relationship that had existed between the level of urbanization and electoral turnout (Monroe, 1977). From 1952 till the 1980s urban voter turnout was higher than the rural voter turnout, but, from 1984 the rural turnout picked up surpassed the urban turnout as part of a larger change what came to be characterized as the “second democratic upsurge” (Yadav, 2000). Since then, rural voter turnout has been consistently higher than the urban voter turnout, despite, the saturation of the Lok Sabha Voter Turnout (1952-2014)

46

48

55

61

55

60

64 57

62

56

58

62

66 60

58

58

1952 1957 1962 1967 1971 1977 1980 1985 1989 1991 1996 1998 1999 2004 2009 2014

Figure 5.1  Voter turnout in India’s Lok Sabha elections, 1952–2014. Source: CSDS Data Unit.

Electoral participation in India’s metropolitan cities  67 “second democratic upsurge” (Kumar, 2009; Palshikar & Kumar, 2004) and has continued till the last general election which witnessed the highest ever electoral turnout of 66.4 percent (IndiaSpend, 2014). Interestingly, even within urban areas there is a wide gap in turnout levels between voters who reside in small town/cities and those who reside in big cities, with voters in small/town cities participating more than voters in India’s big, metropolitan cities (Refer to Table 5.1). However, recently, Chandra and Potter (2016) have questioned the empirical basis of such a claim and argued that this argument extends only to voters residing in big, metropolitan cities and electoral participation of voters from semi-urban constituencies is equally high as voters from India’s rural constituencies. Therefore, electoral participation across the big, metropolitan cities of India, in successive rounds of Lok Sabha elections has been substantially lower; on an average 14–15 percentage points lower than the state’s aggregate voter turnout (Refer to Table 5.2). This is a serious cause of concern as India’s urban population has increased from 28.6 percent (2001 Census) to 31.1 percent (2011 Census) over the past decade and due to accelerating pace of urbanization, India’s urban population is projected to be 60 percent by 2050 (Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India). Thus, in the context of growing Table 5.1  Voter turnout by locality (%) Locality

2009 Lok Sabha Election

Rural Constituencies Small Cities/Town (Semi-urban) Metros (Urban)

2014 Lok Sabha Election

59.1 52.5

69.4 62.5

48.9

57.3

Source: Lokniti-CSDS National Election Study 2009 and 2014 (Post-poll)

Table 5.2  Voter turnout in India’s metropolitan cities (%) Cities

2009 Lok Sabha Election

Mumbai Maharashtra Chennai Tamil Nadu Bengaluru Karnataka Hyderabad Andhra Pradesh Source: Election Commission of India

41.2 50.7 62.0 73.9 56.0 67.17 53.0 74.47

2014 Lok Sabha Election 53.0 60.4 61.1 73.7 48.0 58.8 52.7 72.6

68  Sanjay Kumar and Souradeep Banerjee urbanization, the low voter turnouts in India’s big cities remains a point of bafflement for policy makers and the Election Commission. During the past two–three general elections, media reports abound with commentaries of how the low voter turnouts in big cities a result of neglect by India’s has been well-off, educated middle-class voters. Political engagement among middle classes in big cities is presumed to have declined with changing political and economic changes in India’s big cities; the eclipse of working-class movements which once characterized India’s industrial cities and the rise of finance capital (Times of India, 2014). Other reports argue that for the middle class, the main cause of disengagement with politics lies in the fact that that unlike the economically lower classes and the poor, the middle class tends to be a beneficiary of the state system by payment of taxes and do not have to face the consequences of the dysfunctional nature of the state in India (DNA, 2014; Mint, 2014). This line of reasoning can be traced to the different relationship that is said to prevail between the entity called “state” and the poor and non-poor citizenry and consequently, the different motivations for voting that exist between these two economic categories. The state largely remains inaccessible and is known to misgovern and ignore the poorer masses. Thus, on the one hand, democracy in the form of electoral engagement is considered to be a source of empowerment for the urban poor and lower economic classes, and on the other hand, for the middle class it’s a quid pro quo in the hope of accessing material goods in exchange for payment of taxes or performing a civic duty (Ahuja & Chhibber, 2012). Others have also contested that the popular perception of middle-class apathy exists and have emphasized the need to look beyond caste or class behavior. But none of them provide any new argument (Aiyer, 2009). What does our evidence say?

Argument: is it really the middle class that doesn’t turn out to vote? Based on our data collected as a part of the National Election Studies (NES) of the 2009 and the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, we argue that the middle-class apathy is based on a fallacious assumption. Evidence shows that contrary to popular claims, there is a positive relationship between electoral participation and economic class. Voter turnout levels among the middle and richer sections residing in big cities have been much higher than among the lower economic and poorer sections. In fact, the voter turnout among the lower economic and poorer sections has been much below the average turnout in these big cities (Refer to Table 5.3). Popular and scholarly accounts often emphasize the disdain of the middle class toward electoral politics and their increasing participation in associational activities as an exertion of their citizenship rights (Fernandes, 2006). Even the recent political association of the middle class with Anna Hazare led Anti-Corruption Movement or the Nirbhaya protests have highlighted the positioning of social movement-based activism among the middle

Electoral participation in India’s metropolitan cities  69 Table 5.3  Class-wise voter turnout trends in India’s metropolitan cities (%) Economic Class

2009 Lok Sabha Elections

Poor Lower Middle Rich Average Turnout

43.7 50.4 52.1 57.1 48.9

2014 Lok Sabha Elections 50.4 55.9 57.4 69.2 57.3

Source: Lokniti-CSDS National Election Study, 2009 and 2014

classes in opposition to electoral politics (Sitapati, 2011). Electoral politics in urban spaces is often relegated to the domain of the poor for whom political expression though electoral means is a way of accessing patronage benefits (Chatterjee, 2004). However, our evidence compels us to rethink such arguments and make the contrary claim. There is no reason to believe that the middle class is disengaged from electoral politics. The middle class as a socio-economic category has been argued to have witnessed substantial expansion with the onset of liberalization and privatization; breaking the dichotomy of a small elite and the impoverished masses (Jodhka & Prakash, 2011; Sridharan, 2004). Given the trend toward urbanization, according to the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) Report the size of the middle class has swelled and there are currently 267 million individuals who constitute which is projected to increase to 547 million by 2025–26. In addition to its size, the middle class has a certain opinion shaping character that enhances to its salience in electoral politics (Sridharan, 2014). Therefore, in urban politics, the middle class in India’s big cities is said to be gradually replacing the slum residents as voters who can be mobilized for electoral purposes. This increased engagement with electoral politics has become a platform for the middle class to have a greater say in effective delivery of public goods and services such as better roads, cleaner drinking water, etc., by the local state, otherwise characterized as dysfunctional (Chakrabarty, 2016). This political expression of the middle class has also become electorally salient due to a growing intersection between associational structures and formal politics. The new literature abounds with instances where local Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) have contested municipal elections, backed specific candidates or organizations, and even mobilized voters at a local level enhancing local electoral turnout (Chakrabarti, 2016; Helene Zerah, 2007). Dispelling the myth that the depressed turnouts in India’s big cities are due to political apathy of the middle class, we return to our problem. Our surveys (Table 5.4) have highlighted that it is the lower economic and poorer sections whose participations are substantially lower. This leads us to look at possible reasons for low electoral participation among the urban

70  Sanjay Kumar and Souradeep Banerjee Table 5.4  Migrants constitute a large number of urban poor in Delhi (%) Residence in Delhi (No. of Years)

Rich

Middle

Urban Poor

1–5 years 6–10 years

29.4 27.8

23.5 20.0

47.1 52.2

Source: Lokniti-CSDS State Election Study, Delhi 2015

poor: a socio-economic category which includes the lower economic class and the poor.

Electoral participation among India’s urban poor: a case study of Delhi Given that middle-class apathy does not seem to be a possible explanation for low electoral participation in India’s metropolitan cities. The previous section has clearly shown that it is the urban poor consisting of the lower economic class and poor residing in cities whose electoral participation is considerably lower than the rich and the middle classes. But one wonders who these urban poor are and why is their electoral participation lower than the others? Evidence from our surveys in Delhi indicates that the urban poor are essentially internal migrants. Though, migrants residing in India’s cities might belong to different economic classes, across big cities, it is the internal migrants who are more likely to be poor than non-migrants (Kundu & Sarangi, 2007). We find that a large number of urban poor in Delhi were found to be migrants who migrated in the last 5–10 years or in the last 10 years (refer to Table 5.5). Even among, slum dwellers, which is another way of referring to the urban poor, a large number of urban poor reside in slum settlements, a large number among them are migrants (IIPS, 2009). There is a historical relationship between urbanization and migration. Big cities have been the dynamos of economic growth and attract large number of Table 5.5  Migrant voter turnout in Delhi assembly elections 2015 (%) Number of years living in Delhi 1–5 years 6–10 years 11–20 years More than 20 years Since birth Overall

Turnout in 2013 assembly election

Turnout in 2015 assembly election

44.0 52.0 67.0 73.0 66.0 66.0

62.0 64.0 64.0 64.0 71.0 67.0

Source: Lokniti-CSDS State Election Study, Delhi 2013 and 2015

Electoral participation in India’s metropolitan cities  71 domestic migrants from smaller cities/towns or rural areas, who migrate in search of a better livelihood. In India, 35.4 percent of residents in urban areas have been classified as internal migrants by last place of residence (NSSO, 2007–08). Even in urban migration, it is the rural–urban migration stream which exceeds the number of migrants from the urban–urban stream and is the real contributor to urban population growth (Bhagat, 2015). Apart from relatively longer periods of migration, urban areas also witness shorter periods of such as seasonal and temporary migration or commuting migration which are not easily encompassed by large-scale surveys (Bhagat, 2015; Chandrasekhar & Sharma, 2014). We further argue that India’s big, metropolitan cities witness low electoral participation due to low voter turnouts and low enrolment rates among internal migrants. The evidence provided for this is based on the Lokniti-CSDS Delhi State Assembly Election Studies (SES) and CSDS-Delhi Election Commission Study. The rationale behind selecting Delhi is that the urban agglomeration of Delhi including the National Capital Region (NCR) has had one of the highest positive net migration rate.1 (242) (Chandrasekhar & Sharma, 2014) and Delhi, historically, has had no native population; no group or community which can claim to be the “Sons of the Soil” and is largely constituted by people who came in from other parts of the country and settled at different periods of time (Weiner, 1978). What are the levels of electoral participation of these internal migrants? Evidence from Delhi shows that voter turnout among recent migrants (1–5 years and 5–10 years) is considerably lower than migrants who migrated much before (10–20 years or 20 years and above) and citizens who have been staying in Delhi, since their birth (Refer to Table 5.5). Further, one observes a similar pattern for migrants hailing from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, two states which account for the maximum number of migrants in Delhi – 45.16 percent and 19.9 percent, respectively (Kumar, A et al., 2015) (Refer to Table 5.6). Known as Poorvanchali voters in popular lexicon, migrants from these two states are said to constitute a “vote bloc” for political parties in Delhi. Therefore, we can infer that formal political participation among domestic migrants is lower than others and more so among recent and short-term migrants, who are likely to face greater political exclusion.

What explains the lower political participation of migrants? The previous section clearly points out that migrants especially, the shortterm or so-called recent migrants are the least likely to exercise their voting rights. This may be attributed to low enrolment rates among internal migrants and the nature of occupational engagement of short-term migrants. Migrants who face social and institutional forms of exclusion due to the non-possession of identity-based documents such as Pan Cards, Ration Cards, Bank accounts, and Aadhar Cards also face similar problems while exercising their franchise (Sahoo, 2016). Excluded from their citizenship

72  Sanjay Kumar and Souradeep Banerjee Table 5.6  Migrants from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in Delhi (%) Years of residence in Delhi

Voter turnout in 2015 Delhi assembly election

Recent migrants from Bihar (1–10 years) Older migrants from Bihar (More than 10 years) Recent migrants from Uttar Pradesh (1–10 years) Older migrants from Uttar Pradesh (More than 10 years)

61.0 68.0 65.0 67.0

Source: Lokniti-CSDS state election study, Delhi 2015

rights, migrants are subject to a two-face discrimination; lower enrolment rate and among those who are enrolled, a lower level of electoral participation. Evidence shows that rates of enrolment (registration as a voter in a particular constituency) is substantially lower than average rates of enrolment and similarly, possession of voter identity cards is also much lower among migrants than overall voters who have registered as a voter but do not possess voter identity cards (Refer to Table 5.7). This form of political exclusion of migrants gets pronounced among migrants from vulnerable communities, who are also subjected to various forms of spatial and socio-economic forms of discrimination in India’s big cities (Sahoo, 2016). Thus, even among Muslims who are subject to lesser political engagement, it is Muslim migrants who are found to face greater political exclusion than the other vulnerable categories of Muslim women or economically poorer Muslims (refer to Table 5.8). Table 5.7  Enrolment among migrants in Delhi (%) Registration and Possession of Voter ID cards

Overall

Enrolled as a Voter Have Voter’s Identity Card

86.0 85.0

Recent migrants who migrated in the past 5 years (2003–2008) 64.0 65.0

Source: CSDS-Delhi Election Commission Study 2013

Table 5.8  Enrolment among Muslim migrants vis-à-vis other Muslims (%) Category of voters Overall All Muslims Muslim poor Muslim women Muslim migrants who migrated to Delhi (2003–08) Source: CSDS-Delhi Election Commission Study 2013

Enrolled as a voter 86 80 74 78 50

Electoral participation in India’s metropolitan cities  73 The second reason is the informal nature of occupation that migrants are usually engaged in. Internal migrants, especially, short-term migrants are engaged in the informal sector as construction workers, domestic servants, and security personnel; jobs which are seasonal and temporary in nature (Bhagat, 2015). Despite, the Election Commission’s diktat of voting day being declared as a public holiday, the nature of work prevents many to take a leave. It is difficult for migrant labor to forego a day’s earning and exercise their political right. Thus, a process of disenfranchisement starts taking place owing to the nature of their occupational engagement (Bhagat, 2011). Lastly, high mobility among short-term migrants within cities owing to the nature of their occupation and their economic status leading to inaccurate voter lists is also a reason why many migrant voters miss casting their vote even if they are enrolled as voters. Studies conducted in Delhi and other cities also confirm such inaccuracies in the voter list (Janaagraha, 2015).

Conclusion Through this chapter, we have attempted to understand why India’s big metropolitan cities witness low levels of electoral participation in comparison to rural areas and even smaller cities and towns. The myth of middle-class apathy and disdain toward politics that constitutes commentaries by the media and political commentators does not hold much ground, as empirical evidence points to the contrary. Despite, the so-called second democratic upsurge, electoral participation among the poorer economic classes is lower than the rich and middle classes. Based on our case study of Delhi, one of the largest urban agglomerations in India, we were all able to identify the urban poor as domestic migrants who often migrate to big cities in search of a better livelihood from either rural areas or other urban areas. Evidence from Delhi seem to suggest that this problem is more pronounced in the case of short-term migrants or people who migrated to the city in recent times. Beset with a lack of identity due to non-possession of requisite documents and the informal nature of their occupation they are unable to exercise their franchise. Therefore, big cities witness low electoral participation among the urban poor not just due to low levels of electoral turnout but due to low enrolment rates as well. Measures in the form of the Election Commission’s focused registration drives in migrant dominated areas, updated electoral rolls, setting up special electoral booths for migrant voters, and a better identification system for migrants would serve as policy prescription to address the problem. However, the larger political issue related to “domicile status” of migrant voters (pre-requisite for someone to get registered as a voter in a particular area) which is often a source conflict among the “natives” and “migrants” remains unaddressed. Yet, amid the celebration of India’s electoral democracy we must contemplate and find ways and means to include sections of the population that are excluded from the formal political process.

74  Sanjay Kumar and Souradeep Banerjee

Note 1 Net migration rate is the difference between out-migration and in-migration. For further details, refer to NSSO Reports.

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Electoral participation in India’s metropolitan cities  75 Nanda, P. K., & Anuja. (2014). India overcomes urban voter apathy. Live Mint. https:// www.livemint.com/Politics/DwqnIezdPx8mMK50p8PxlO/Indiaovercomesurban-voter-apathy.html National Sample Survey Organisation, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation Government of India (2007–08). Migration in India, Report No.533. Palshikar, S., & Kumar, S. (2004). Participatory norm: How broad-based is it? Economic and Political Weekly, 39(51). Sahoo, N. (2016). A tale of three cities: India’s exclusionary urbanisation, ORF Issue Brief. Sitapati, V. (2011). What Anna Hazare’s movement and India’s new middle class say about each other. Economic and Political Weekly, 46(30). Sridharan, E. (2004). The growth and sectoral composition of India’s middle class: It’s impact on the politics of liberalization. India Review (3–4). Sridharan, E. (2014). Class voting in the 2014 elections. The Economic and Political Weekly, 49(39). Kumar, A. et al. (2015) Inclusive Elections in India: A Study on Domestic Migration and Issues in Electoral Participation: Tata Institute of Social Sciences -Election Commission of India Report. Retrieved from: http://www.shram.org/reports_pdf/ eci_report.pd Varshney, A. (2013). Battles half won: India’s improbable democracy. Penguin Publishers. Weiner, M. (1978). Sons of the soil: Migration and ethnic conflict in India. Princeton University Press. Yadav, Y. (2000). Understanding the second democratic upsurge: Trends of Bahujan participation in electoral politics in the 1990s. In F. Frankel, Z. Hasan, R. Bhargava, & B. Arora (Eds.), Transforming social and political dynamics of democracy. Oxford University Press.

6 Inclusive exclusions Citizenship practices and circular migrants in India after 1989 Indrajit Roy

On March 25, 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a nationwide lockdown in a bid to stem the threat of COVID 19. The announcement triggered a mass exodus from cities across India, with panic-stricken migrant workers desperately trying to leave for their homes in villages. As employment opportunities shriveled up, landlords threatened to evict them from their homes due to impending non-payment of rents, and markets shut down without them getting a chance to purchase essential food items necessary for their survival, migrant workers across the country were left with little choice but to return to their homes. As transport services shut down, they were compelled to undertake their journeys on foot, traversing many hundreds of kilometers to get home. Over the next few days national and international newspapers reported gut-wrenching stories of migrant workers being harassed, humiliated, and brutalized by the Indian state. One video emerged of the police accosting migrant workers walking from Jammu to Bilaspur through Badayun in Uttar Pradesh (Economic Times, March 26, 2020) beating them up and forcing them to continue their journey leaping like frogs. Another clip emerged of police spraying migrant workers returning to their homes in Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly district ordered to strip and then being sprayed with chemical disinfectants purportedly to sanitize them (Times of India, March 30, 2020). Contrasted with the alacrity with which India airlifted hundreds of its citizens stranded abroad on public expense, the state’s bias against internal labor migrants is glaring indeed. Such a bias is not new of course. On December 16, 2012, a 23-yearold physiotherapy student was gangraped in Delhi, India’s national capital. Even as the country reeled from the details of the ghastly crime, its perpetrators quickly transformed into objects of hatred and contempt. Leading the charge was Raj Thackeray, chief of a Mumbai-based political party who had this to say: All are talking about the Delhi gang-rape, but nobody is asking where these men came from. No one is asking who did this. No one is talking about the fact that all these rapists are from Bihar. NDTV (January 6, 2013)

Inclusive exclusions  77 Thackeray’s tirade was of course only superficially linked with antipathy toward people from Bihar. Rather, it reflected the widespread suspicion harbored by millions of people around the world that migrants are to be held responsible for most ills that befall their localities. No less a dignitary than Sheila Dixit, Chief Minister of Delhi between 1998 and 2013, blamed the rising incidences of rape and other crimes on migrants. In an interview reported in India Today, she blamed “huge migratory populations and (Delhi’s) porous borders,” clarifying for her audience that one “can come into Delhi, commit a crime and just run back again” (India Today, April 12, 2012). Even P Chidambaram, India’s Home Minister between 2008 and 2014, did not shy away from blaming migrants for the ills plaguing urban India: Crime takes place because Delhi attracts a large number of migrants… There are large numbers of unauthorised colonies (in Delhi). These migrants who settle in unauthorised colonies carry a kind of behaviour which is unacceptable in any modern city. India Today, December 13, 2010 Not to be outdone, the respected politician of the Delhi unit of the BJP, Vijay Goel called for a halt in migration from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar into Delhi. Every day more migrants come to Delhi … Most of them are from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. They come here because they don't have employment opportunities in their states… These migrants settle in slums, which later become unauthorized colonies. If we have to solve the problems of Delhi, we need to stop this inflow of migrants. Times of India, July 31, 2014 Others were even more frank in their appraisal of migrants’ contribution to crime in the city. The Hindustan Times reported on June 10, 2017 the following evaluation offered by the former chairperson of the Haryana State Women’s Commission: It is no secret that most of the brutal crimes against women are committed by migrants in the unorganised sector, particularly in Gurgaon, Delhi and the neighbouring regions. Gurgaon, for instance, records an influx of thousands of migrants every year. They stay away from their families, drink a lot, watch porn and most importantly, have little to no fear. A member of India’s National Commission for Women claimed before the same newspaper that “not 90 but rather 95% of cases” of sexual assault could be traced back to migrants. Even as the evidence from the Delhi Police negates such charges, these views remain popular. An Indian Express report about Aman Vihar, a neighborhood in northwest Delhi, filed on

78  Indrajit Roy December 16, 2016 – 4 years after the horrific violence against the young woman in Delhi – is revealing about the attitudes of the police, bureaucracy as well as politicians. The report was headlined ‘Why this dark corner in Delhi has become rape’s Ground Zero’ to attract readers’ attention to the huge spike in incidents of rape here. The paper quotes a police officer, who previously served that neighborhood and was at the time of the interview with the National Institute of Criminology and Forensic Sciences: People migrate from different parts of the country and settle down in Aman Vihar. They don’t have permanent addresses. Their identity remains a mystery. The area has also seen a rise in land disputes, and there are 108 unauthorised colonies. The same person who commits a petty theft can be involved in rape. Also, job losses result in drug addiction and gambling. The report further cites the Aam Aadmi Party MLA representing the neighborhood, as attributing the incidence of rape to the fact that 95 percent of Aman Vihar’s population was migrant, with poor literacy and no employment. The bureaucracy concurs with this assessment. The newspaper reports Assistant District Magistrate (North–West) as holding the “floating population” responsible for the spike in incidents of sexual assault. This “floating population,” according to the bureaucrat, gets power from its anonymity. “People stay here for a very short period, due to which it is very difficult to establish their identities,” the newspaper reports the bureaucrat as having said.

Mobility: the 4th M in post-1990 politics in India The hostilities and suspicions displayed by settled urban populations against migrants exist alongside the increased circulation of people across India. Although Indian society has historically been far from the sedentary society that colonial officers and social scientists once suggested, there appears some agreement that spatial mobility in India has seen a particular upsurge since the 1990s (Bhagat, 2010; Economic Survey, 2016; Deshingkar & Akter, 2009; Kundu & Saraswati, 2012; Migration Working Group, 2017; Mishra, 2016; Srivastava, 2011; Tumbe, 2015). Indeed, it would not be inaccurate to say that, along with the iconic themes of “Mandir,” “Mandal,” and “Market,” “Mobility” is a key ingredient in the unfolding story of India’s politics. The structural changes that underpin mobility in India are by now wellknown. The 2011 Census enumerates 450 million internal migrants in India, up from 309 million in 2001 and 220 million in 1991. Moreover, a comparison of the 2011 Census figures with previous ones suggests that India’s workforce has become more mobile. Over 10 percent of India’s

Inclusive exclusions  79 workforce is mobile, according to the 2011 Census, compared with 8 percent in 1991 (Economic Survey, 2016, p. 266). However, these figures are likely to be underestimates, given the well-known fact that much of the internal migration in India tends to be circular, which is not captured in the census data. Using data from the sectoral workforce, Deshingkar and Akter (2009) estimate internal migration figures in India to touch 100 million. Mazumder et al. (2013) draw on the data provided by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) to peg this number at 70 million. Scholars also argue that India’s workforce is more mobile than suggested by the Census. Mazumder et al. (2013) suggest that 17 percent of the workforce comprises of migrant workers, while Tumbe (2015) argues that this figure reaches 20 percent. Srivastava (2011) pegs this figure at 29 percent, a figure endorsed by the Report of the Working Group on Migration (Migration Working Group, 2017). In terms of inter-state mobility, Bihar is regarded as one of the top sending States in India. According to the 2001 Census, out-migration from Bihar comprised nearly a tenth of all inter-state migration. As in the rest of India, migration from Bihar to other States witnessed a steep increase since 1991, as can be gleaned from census data on male migration between 1981 and 2001 (Tsujita & Oda, 2012, p. 5). The 1981 Census enumerated 610,988 men as having migrated from Bihar to other States. The 1991 Census counted 700,317 male migrants. However, by 2001, this figure has jumped to 2,182,328, or a jump of 211 percent, contrasted with an increase of 14 percent in the previous decade. Micro-level studies corroborate this huge increase (Brass, 1993; Jha, 1997; Karan, 2003; Wilson, 1999). Explanations of this increase have been sought in the collapse of Bihar’s economy after 1990 and growing economic opportunities in other States during the very same period (Deshingkar et al., 2009; Karan, 2003) an attempt by the underclass to escape caste oppression and increased violence (Karan, 2003; Wilson, 1999); and the persistence of a culture of migration among working classes in the State (Tumbe, 2015). Drawing on these works, scholars have examined the economic impact of the resources remitted by migrants, the impact of out-migration on social relations and the cultural influence of Bihari migration in destination areas, including conceptions of home and belonging. This chapter situates mobility from Bihar within the processes of political change and transforming practices of citizenship. It first explores the political factors for the sharp rise in migration from the State of Bihar. In doing so, it departs from structural, social, and cultural explanations outlined above and instead points to the politicization of social justice claims in Bihar during the 1990s. However, it cautions against romanticizing the experiences and circumstances of mobility by, in the following section, examining the ways in which labor migrants are continually denied the very “right to have rights” by being deprived of the right to vote as well as their entitlements. In conclusion, I suggest that an exploration of mobility and politics reveals the “inclusive exclusion” that characterizes the fragmented

80  Indrajit Roy practices of citizenship in an increasingly unequal India. My arguments in this chapter draw on combining an analysis of political change with ethnographic fieldwork conducted by researchers at the Center for Equity Studies under the aegis of the ongoing ESRC research project on Fragmented Transitions: Mobility, Growth, and Democracy in the Rising Powers, of which I am the Principal Investigator. By exposing researchers to what might otherwise be perceived as insignificant, ethnographic methods allow them to appreciate the quotidian ways in which people create new identities and forge new practices that interrogate (or affirm) existing relations of power, authority, and influence. They provide a window to the ways in which people forge their collective selves in tension and negotiation with one another as well as the structures they encounter. An ethnography of people on the move potentially unsettles several of the certitudes that social scientists hold in relation to such themes as citizenship, democracy, and modernity. Such ethnographies allow us to confront the ambivalences and the heterogeneities that attend to the migration process, while eschewing both unbridled optimism as well as nihilistic pessimism. The ethnographies on which this chapter draws build on fieldwork I conducted in a cluster of adjacent villages in north Bihar’s Araria district as part of my doctoral research in 2009–10. I returned to these villages for short periods in 2013, 2014, and 2016. In addition to fieldwork, I organized census survey covering approximately 5,000 odd households in 2015–16, the findings from which are reported. The present ethnographies were thus conducted in a locality to which I have returned several times over the previous decade. Two of the three researchers on the present study worked closely with one family of migrant workers each for a period (http://www. livesonthemove.com/shailendra-journal/2016/9/30/post-25-sargana) of 12 months as they traversed the country (Jayaswal and Anand), while the third lived in the locality throughout this period (Ajmal). This multi-sited fieldwork and a common approach among scholars undertaking ethnographies of mobility, provided granular insights into the reasons offered by people for their migration, their social practices, as well as the political ideas and narratives they held. In this respect, the ethnographies of mobility offer rich perspectives on ethnographies of citizenship or the ways in which people assert their belonging to a political community.

Dignified lives and people on the move A recurring theme from the fieldwork pertained to the vocabulary of “dignity” to which migrant workers turned time and again in their discussions of life and labor. An excerpt from Ajmal’s (2016) conversation with Harish Rishi, whose brother, sons, and nephews regularly travel for work to Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, and Jammu and Kashmir, is illustrative:

Inclusive exclusions  81 Work in Punjab is god-sent for us. Here in Sargana, there is hardly any work. Where there is work, there are no payments. Where there are payments, there is no dignity. At least in Punjab, they recognise our worth as human beings. Harish Rishi is from the Rishideo community, whose members are increasingly keen to shed the label of “Musahar” that has historically been ascribed to them. His family leases in a small plot of land (0.2 acres), on which they grow the sunflower crop to sell in the local agricultural market. His sons Shailendra and Ram Kishore Rishi both work as construction workers for gurdwaras on the outskirts of Ludhiana city in Punjab. As far as Harish Rishi can see, work in Punjab is valuable not only for the employment and wages that it brings, but perhaps more importantly the dignified conditions under which it is perceived to be organized. He does not fail to point out that not only are workers paid on time and without having to haggle them, but employers address their laborers by their names, do not use caste-specific slurs during an argument and sometimes even break bread with them. The vocabulary of dignity is hard to miss even among Bihari labor migrants outside of Bihar. Bablu Yadav, who operates a grinding machine in a flour mill in Ludhiana’s Abdullahpur Basti, invoked the term in conversation with Anand (2016) while complaining about the unreasonable expectations his employer held of him. One evening, as Bablu Yadav stepped out of the mill at the designated time of 7 p.m., his employer instructed him to continue working since there had been more orders of wheat consignments than expected. Bablu Yadav flatly refused and assured his employer that he would start work promptly the following day at the usual time of 7 a.m. On his way out, Bablu Yadav asked Anand: “I begin work at 7 a.m. and finish at 7 p.m. How can he expect me to work longer hours?” He then proceeded to complain about his employer’s alleged bias in favor of some workers: That [name of another employee with home in eastern Uttar Pradesh’s Gonda district] works up till 10:00. But he comes in to work at 9:30 a.m. [The employer] pays him an extra of INR 50-100 for the additional half an hour. But he never pays me if I stay on for a little while longer. A malik should treat all his employees as equals. He should respect his worker’s dignity. Juxtaposing Bablu Yadav’s complaint to Harish Rishi’s claim about the conditions of work in Punjab highlights the shared expectation of a dignified life they both hold. Indeed, throughout my fieldwork, references to ijjat have been galore. Accounts of laborers not giving ijjat to farmers, of people stigmatized as “low castes” demanding to be treated with ijjat by self-styled

82  Indrajit Roy “high castes,” of people wanting to lead lives with ijjat were strewn across my field notes.

Early migratory forays: reminisces A fascinating account of migration from one of the study villages, which I call Sargana, may be gleaned from one of Ajmal’s interviews with Himmat Mehta, who has been working in Punjab since 1975. Ajmal was particularly keen to interview Himmat Mehta since he was popularly said to be among the pioneers who sought and obtained work in Punjab. It was probably an exaggeration to suggest that he was among the first people to step out of the village, but it did excite Ajmal enough to seek an interview with Himmat Mehta. An excerpt from that interview is reproduced below: I was about 22, and happily cultivating my tiny plot of land. I had just got married and we had had a child. I was content with life. Then one day, a Musahar called Buchan Talwa- he must have been about 16 or 17 years of age- drove a buffalo into my plot. Everything was ruined. I lost all my season’s earnings. Naturally, I was upset. I thrashed the fellow soundly. He confessed that he did what he did at the behest of [Rajput landlord in a neighbouring village]. That man [the landlord] and I had a long-standing dispute. He hated me and others of my community. How could ‘Backwards’ like us do well? Whatever it was, I was devastated, and took out all my anger on that moronic Musahar. I thrashed him black and blue… Three years later, suddenly, out of the blue, I have a visitor- a young man wearing bright new clothes. A well-ironed shirt, neat pleated trousers, a pair of goggles. The fellow comes and touches my feet, greets me with respect. I am surprised. He looks familiar. I ask him to sit down near me. But he tells me he is in a hurry. He only came to thank me, he says. I am non-plussed. “Thank me for what? Who are you?” I ask. [Himmat’seyes widen with excitement] Turns out the man was none other than Buchan Talwa. I asked him why he was thanking me, when I had thrashed him so badly. Buchan tells me that was exactly why he had come. [The conversation turns more animated, with Himmat waving his hands about] You see, after that encounter, he was fed up of life in the village. He was dependent on the landlord, so he had to do the landlord’s bidding. If he did, he would get thrashed - like he did when he attacked me. If he didn’t, he was as good as dead. So, he ran away. “Where did you go”, I ask him. “Punjab”, he replies. “Punjab”, I ask? “What did he do in Punjab”, I wonder. “Worked as a farm labourer”, he answers.

Inclusive exclusions  83 “Farm labour?” I ask incredulously. He bought all those fancy clothes and accessories by being a farm labourer. I found it hard to believe. Buchan Talwa told me that I should go to work in Punjab as well. He had heard about my difficulties after he destroyed my crop. I had to sell that plot. Although I bought another one, this one was much smaller, so I had to supplement my farm income with agricultural labour. Both my wife and I- we worked on [A Kayasth landlord]’s farm. The fellow was extremely stingy. Buchan told me that if I had to work on someone else’s farm, I might as well work in Punjab. Life was better in Punjab. People treated one another with respect, he told me. They offered each other ijjat. I liked the idea. He told me he would take me. I said - great. Some fourteen of us went with him the next season. Some of us were Nais, others were Yadavs. And there were one or two Harijans as well. And here we were, trusting our lives with a Musahar who we didn’t even know. But it was great that he took us to Punjab. We loved it there. Ajmal, interview notes ZA.I.09.2017-01-17, Himmat Mehta, January 17, 2017 Himmat Mehta’s reasons for his and his neighbors “loving it” in Punjab resonate with the perspectives offered by Harish Rishi earlier in this chapter. Narratives of employers treating laborers with respect, offering them dignity, paying them in a timely way, addressing them by their given names rather than caste names, and refraining from hurtling casteist slurs abound. Certainly, the monies remitted by workers to their family members were important and are usually the most commonly cited reasons offered by the workers themselves for their migration. But intimate conversations suggest that wages and remittances seem to comprise only one among several reasons for workers aspiring to migrate. Indeed, if we were to situate the tensions between the Rajput landlord, the Backward peasant and the Musahar laborer to which the above excerpt points to the political goings-on in Bihar during the 1970s, a more comprehensive account of migration from Bihar may be possible. The political dominance by the self-styled “High Castes” of the State though their control over the Congress Party is well documented. It is also well-known that by the 1960s, this dominance was being politically challenged by the so-called “Backward Castes.” The Socialists provided the most effective vehicle for this challenge, with Karpuri Thakur becoming the first socialist Chief Minister of the State in 1970. Thakur was a teacher of a village school with origins in a peasant family of the Backward Caste Nai community. He had been a labor activist involved in the socialist movement whose spearheading of the twin cause of land reforms and protective discrimination for OBCs engulfed Bihar through the 1960s. He formed the first non-Congress government in the State but was ousted by a Congress Dalit politician within some 6 months. Although shortlived, Thakur’s fist tenure as Chief Minister continues to be celebrated for having interrupted three decades of Congress rule in Bihar commencing from 1937.

84  Indrajit Roy I have elsewhere recounted the repercussions of Thakur’s elevation as Chief Minister on the Backward Caste populations in north Bihar. Recalling that period, my interlocutors from Backward Caste communities narrated the ways in which the “High Castes” asked them to tell “their” Chief Minister to go to Delhi and open a barber’s salon (referring tastelessly to the Nai community to which Thakur belonged). Karpuri Thakur tum Dilli Jao, Dilli Jaakar Salon Chalao Such taunts notwithstanding Thakur’s ascendance as Chief Minister of the State provided an impetus to the social ascendance of the Backward Castes. Indeed, perhaps because of such taunts, it further politicized the Backward Caste population, perhaps imparting on them a cohesion they might not have perceived. That in his second tenure as Chief Minister between 1977 and 1979, he instituted reservations for a section of the Backward Castes in addition to – rather than at the cost of – constitutional safeguards for Dalits and Adivasis across Bihar’s Gram Panchayats made him a hero among sub-altern populations. But the first tenure, short-lived though it was, enabled Backward peasants such as Himmat Mehta as well as Musahar laborers such as Buchan Talwa to begin imagining a social existence wherein they were not encumbered by the claims placed on them by landlords professing to belong to “High Castes.”

Constraints on mobility Led by Buchan Talwa, Himmat Mehta and his neighbors began to frequent rural Punjab after their first trip in 1975. They worked as farm hands in different locations across the State and were content with the remittances they were able to send to their families in Sargana. That they were perhaps exceptional was conveyed during conversations I had with their neighbors over the last several years that I have been back in Sargana. For instance, Gunavati Yadav, who hosted me during my stay in Sargana, explained the way in which they were awed by stories of people who left Sargana to work elsewhere, even temporarily: We sometimes heard about so-and-so going to Punjab, another one going to Bengal. It was not common, so we were always surprised with their confidence. You need confidence [in English] to undertake journeys like that. Of course, people have travelled for pilgrimages and sometimes people did flee when there was a crisis and there was nothing to eat. But to just get up in the morning and leave for Bengal, for Punjab- that was something. I could never think of it. Neither could my neighbours. You need some confidence [in English] for this. Not too many people then could think about it. Roy, interview notes, Gunavati Yadav, September 3, 2013

Inclusive exclusions  85 Gunavati Yadav’s narration reminds us of the historical circuits of mobility with which people in Sargana and elsewhere were familiar, but also the novelty of the labor-related migration which she and her family members observed in their youth. Their neighbor, Sachin Rishi, who has worked in farms and factories across India, similarly highlighted the crisis in confidence that constrained mobility: Our people [referring to his neighbours in one of the Rishideo hamlets in Sargana] could not think about stepping outside Sargana. Where would we go? What would be do? [I opine that they would not have liked to leave behind the security provided by the familiarity of Sargana, a proposition with which he vigorously disagrees]…Oh no, no… it’s not that Sargana was a particularly secure place, no way- we were constantly troubled, the Musaharni [a reference to Rishideo women] were always harassed by the dabang people. But we didn’t know what else we could do. Going away like that, leaving your family behind, not seeing them for months on end- that needs confidence, you know. [Sachin’s neighbour, Bechan Rishi joins us]: We tolerated our life here, what else could we do, really? There were no mobile phones. And one heard horror stories of people being sold into slavery and what not. How could we just leave, leaving everything behind? Roy, hanging out, Rishideo tola, Sargana East, September 4, 2013 While some of our interlocutors highlighted the want of confidence in them to undertake the journeys away from Sargana, others feared for the well-being and safety of their family members who remained back home. This anxiety was conveyed to me during an interview with Shyamdev Mandal, who worked in Kolkata for several years from about 1982 to 1994 as a rickshaw puller. Speaking of the many early years of his iterations between Sargana and Kolkata, he reminisced: Life in the city is never easy: there are always many uncertainties. But what worried us even more was the safety of our family members back home. The landlords ruled the roost. We were never safe. They could do what they want. The police was in their pocket. So were the officers. And the politicians- ah, what can one say about them? The Congressmen were the gods of the devils. They were one huge family. Roy, interview notes, Shyamdev Mandal, September 4, 2013 It appears that such anxieties outweighed any aspirations that people might have had to leave Sargana in search of employment. During my own fieldwork in Sargana, I was frequently told of a particular case of the travails of a Yadav couple where the husband had left the village for a few months in search of work and the wife faced repeated harassment and worse from local landlords. It was never clear to me where this couple was based, as the location of the village kept shifting from the vicinity of Sargana to as far

86  Indrajit Roy away as Darbhanga. But it was always invoked in the context of discussions on people’s prospects of migrating for work in the past, perhaps reflecting the anxieties to which Shaymdev Mandal pointed out in the extract above. As with such cases, the stories differed in the location in which they were set, the work the couple did and the temporal aspect. Nevertheless, all versions related to the story about a Yadav couple, and all versions converged on one gory detail: the landlords took advantage of the husband’s absence, condemned the woman as a witch, and burnt her alive. Gunavati Yadav’s husband, Narendra Yadav, who narrated one of many versions of this story to me, used this tale to dismiss my initial suggestions that people in his State had always been mobile. “They were not. They could not,” he said emphatically. Referring to his own father’s economic desperation through the decade of the 1980s, he told me one night after dinner: My father had to work really hard. My mother had died, and he was the sole breadwinner in the family. His relatives told him to leave us with them, so he could go to Punjab and work. But he refused. He was always worried about what the landlords would do to them, to us. He was too afraid. And he had every reason to be. Roy, interview notes, Narendra Yadav, March 1, 2015 Even as people such as Narendra Yadav and Shyamdev Mandal recalled the anxieties harbored by actual and potential labor migrants, the erstwhile landlords looked back at that very same period with nostalgia. My interviews with them suggested that they longed for the stability they were assured during that era. The following excerpt of an interview I conducted with Pritam Singh, a Rajput landlord who continues to own vast properties in the adjacent village of Roshanar and was its Mukhya for over 35 years, is illustrative: Now, those were the days. The State enjoyed stability. There was prosperity. People lived in harmony. No one needed to leave their homes. There was plenty of work, and plenty of people to do it. Everyone knew their place. No one spoke out of turn. [Sighs] But good things rarely last long. Dark forces were gathering on the horizon, and we were engulfed before we knew it. An era was passing, and we were helpless. Roy, interview notes, Pritam Singh, February 7, 2010 Pritam Singh’s lament about the “passing of an era” was substantiated by other farmers who hired labor. For example, Harinath Yadav, whose father was one of the few Yadav landlords in the area, recollected a time when labor was abundant, and hirers of labor had plenty of choice. He was complaining to Dharmesh Srivastava, a Kayasth shopkeeper who introduced me to him as a researcher studying labor migration in Bihar. Barely had Srivastava completed his introduction that Harinath Yadav began: Ah Dharmesh, there was a time, it is difficult to believe, when this gentleman (he chuckles, pointing to me) would have been jobless.

Inclusive exclusions  87 My father- do you remember him [Dharmesh nods with enthusiastic certainty]- used to send word to the Musahar tola that he needed some work done. Could you believe it? All he did was send word to their tola. The Musahars and Musaharnis would start queuing up before dawn! Can you imagine- no you can’t- in the cold, beastly winter!!! And then, he would have a problem, because he could not hire them all, so he would give everyone a little work to do and food to eat. Today- ha [he guffaws]- it’s all different! Haven’t you seen me going with folded hands to their tola, begging them, pleading with them, asking them to come to work. And they take their own time to decide who they want to work for. Half of the time, they are not there- someone in Delhi or Punjab, another one in Bangalore, and a third in Kerala- “they have gone out,” the Musaharni says. [Guffaws again]. The world has changed babu [he looks at me, finally] and we have to keep pace, don’t we? Hanging out, Dharmesh Srivastava’s residence, September 5, 2013 Although Harinath Yadav’s narrative does not betray the same longing for the past as Pritam Singh’s, it does convey the sense of a break with a previous era. However, where Pritam Singh attributes the changes to “dark forces,” Harinath Yadav invokes the more generic “changing world” as a source of these changes. Other landlords were more explicit, however, and pinpointed the source of these changes – and, consequently, their own troubles with labor– to a single source. Hunny Singh, a 35-year-old Rajput landlord who had been Mukhya of Sargana between 2001 and 2006, and whose father had been Mukhya between 1962 till his death in 1990, was vitriolic: Bihar was a wonderful place, till that Lalua became Chief Minister. He and his Backwards destroyed the State. Now, the Backwards control the government. In return, the government pampers the Backwards (Sar pe chadha kar rakha hai). Not only that, they talk about empowering the harijans. They have both ruined the state. To top it all, they say they will protect the Pakistanis (an epithet to describe Muslims). After Lalua came to power, Bihar’s downfall begun. These people [he points his index finger to the ground, indicating he was talking about people of lower status than himself] thought they could do whatever they want- speak out of turn, look at us in the eye, keep sitting on their cots while we walked by, go wherever they want, whenever they want. It is that Lalua who was encouraging these people. Roy, interview notes, Hunny Singh, February 5, 2010 The reference of Lalua in the excerpt above is to Lalu Prasad Yadav of the Janata Dal, who was elected Chief Minister of the State of Bihar on March 10, 1990. He remained de jure Chief Minister of the State from 1990 to 1997, after which he abdicated in favor of his wife Rabri Devi, while retaining effective authority. The “dark forces” to which Pritam Singh above alludes is clarified by Hunny Singh without any mincing of words

88  Indrajit Roy when he holds responsible one politician for unleashing the devastating changes that undermined their social dominance: Lalu Prasad Yadav.

The politics of dignity: Lalu Prasad Yadav Chronicling his travels in rural Bihar at the turn of the millennium, William Dalrymple narrates this complaint by a landlord of one of the self-styled “high castes:” Laloo is always encouraging these low-castes to rise up against us. Now the Harijans refuse to work for us. The government will not protect us. It is on their side. The lower castes are rising up. This is the Kali Yug, the epoch of disintegration. Everything is falling apart. William Dalrymple, 2000 The ascendance of the Janata Dal famously changed the composition of the Bihar legislative assembly as well as the very practices of political organization. Perhaps more important, it changed the political discourse of the State, instilling the vocabulary of dignity among rural sub-altern populations. A particularly popular slogan to be heard across Bihar was: Vikas nahin, samman chahiye, which translates loosely in Hindi to say “we want dignity, not development.” But Yadav did more than sloganeering. His Janata Dal government eliminated tree and toddy tax, a move that benefitted members of communities who depended on such activities for their livelihoods. Slums in Patna were regularized, and milk suppliers were allowed to establish cowsheds freely in towns and cities. Speed breakers in Patna were removed to allow cyclists to ride comfortably. Charwaha schools for children of cattle-grazers, shepherds, and other pastoralists were introduced, so that they could attend school while tending to their cattle, goats, and pigs. 50 percent seats were reserved for OBCs in university-level decision-making bodies, and Bihar University was renamed as BR Ambedkar University after India’s foremost champion of civil rights. State holidays were declared to mark the birth anniversaries of Ravi Das, a sixteenth century saint who remained a fervent champion of social equality in his lifetime. Yadav also made it a point to extend official support to fairs commemorating the Dalit hero Chuharmal credited with battling dominant caste oppression. Yadav politicized the rural poor by convening public rallies through which they developed shared solidarities cutting across caste distinctions. This audience will have witnessed or at least heard of awareness rallies organized by the state government during the Lalu years in which peasants and the rural poor would be invited to travel to – some would say, invade – and demonstrate their collective presence in the heart of Patna. Under Yadav’s tenure as Chief Minister, “lower caste” and “untouchable” agricultural laborers became emboldened in their claims for fair wages and respect from their dominant caste landlords. They were also less willing to

Inclusive exclusions  89 quietly acquiesce in their own exploitation and discrimination. They were more willing and able to retaliate against dominant caste mistreatment of their persons and properties. As far as Bihar’s landowning classes could see – and Dalrymple’s interlocutor is quite a representative sample – the advent of Lalu Yadav was nothing short of a disaster. These perspectives were somewhat mirrored by sub-altern populations, including Dalits who otherwise had little love lost for the Yadav community, with which their Chief Minister was affiliated. During my own fieldwork in 2009 and 2010, a few years after Lalu Yadav was discredited on charges of corruption and routed in the elections, my interlocutors from the Rishdeo community recalled his early years with a warm smile and a glimmer in their eyes. It is pertinent to recall that by this period, Rishideos had decisively shifted their electoral allegiance to Lalu’s rival Nitish Kumar of a splinter Janata Dal faction. Nevertheless, the common refrain, as I have reported elsewhere was: Lalu allowed us to raise our voice. He recognised our dignity. Illustrative of this perspective is an exchange witnessed and reported by Ajmal during a memorial service for the aunt of one of the migrant workers with whom we are working for the ESRC project. We assemble for the prayers services to begin. As other attendees start streaming in and sit on the cots and plastic chairs arranged for them, Shailendra’s uncle Pradeep Rishi talks about the changes he has witnessed over the decades. He says that it was unthinkable for an earlier generation to organise memorial services such as this and have plastic chairs: members of Brahmin and Rajput communities would not allow it. “The chairs and cots were meant only for them to sit on. We would have to sit on the ground. We couldn’t enter their homes. We couldn’t even stand in their presence wearing chappals (open rubber footwear). “All this changed with Lalu. After he came to power, no Brahmin or Rajput could stop us from sitting on chairs.” Pradeep’s brother and Shailendra’s father, Harish disagrees. “He only got us to sit on chairs. What about jobs?” he chuckles. “Oh, come on,” Pradeep retorts, “Lalu inaugurated charwaha (literally: shepherd) schools for children of cattle grazers, agricultural labourers, for others. We could attend school while at the same time tending to our cows, pigs, goats, what have you. Have you forgotten? Didn’t this mean a great deal for us poor folk?” Turning to the others, he continues, “Lalu allowed us to raise our voice.” http://www.livesonthemove.com/shailendra-journal/2016/7/25/post-13sargana Clearly, the advent of the Janata Dal government in 1990, with Lalu Prasad Yadav as the Chief Minister signaled to Bihar’s population the advent of a new era, notwithstanding the widely differing ways in which it was interpreted by members of different social classes. Whereas Lalu’s

90  Indrajit Roy emergence was interpreted as the “beginning of the end” for Bihar’s landlords, it represented quite the opposite for the sub-altern masses, as the references to dignity above suggest: a new era in which they “could raise their voice” without fear or repression and act in accordance with their own interests rather than been constrained by anxiety of offending and annoying their social superiors. While Hunny Singh’s contention that Yadav incited people to migrate from the State to other destinations are undoubtedly an exaggeration, as is the opinion advanced by Dalrymple’s interlocutor that Yadav encouraged agricultural laborers to strike work, the resonances between the vocabularies of “dignity” offered by him and by our research interlocutors are impossible to ignore. Indeed, Yadav’s ascendance broke the back of the self-styled high-caste landlords in Bihar. By decisively weakening social hierarchies, his Janata Dal government loosened many of the constraints that inhibited people’s confidence. As Prabhat Ghosh, Director of the Pana-based Asian Development Research Institute put it in an interview to The Hindu Business Line, the very existence of a Janata Dal government headed by Yadav reduced the “fear psychosis among the backward and Scheduled Castes when it came to be dealing with upper castes.” Even as there is little evidence to suggest that Yadav incited the rural poor to take the law into their own hands – much less that he fomented “caste war” in the countryside as his critics alleged, his administration is known to have prevented the police from being deployed by the high castes against the sub-altern classes. Such support from the highest political levels, even if tacit, was quite unprecedented for them and went a long way to enhance their social confidence. The anxieties that fraught their lives were considerably dissipated, making it possible for them to imagine not only alternative futures but also to explore different livelihoods to that they had hitherto applied themselves. Shyamdev Mandal, no admirer of Yadav because of his perceived bias in favor of Yadavs and Muslims, was forthright: After Lalu [using his first name], our world changed. Things became different. You could feel the fear flee. You could see the enthusiasm in people’s steps. [I ask why people remained so poor if Yadav had been such a good Chief Minister. Mandal looks amused] You have to understand….you could see the confidence [in English] in people’s dealings with the upper castes. Does that not matter? [I nod in agreement still not convinced. A flicker of irritation appears on Mandal’s face]… well, it meant a great deal to people here. We could now do what was good for us, not what others wanted us to do for them. Roy, interview notes, Shyamdev Mandal, September 4, 2013 Mandal does not explicitly say that people started to migrate in larger numbers after Yadav’s ascendance. But his repeated reference to people’s enhanced social confidence after Yadav becoming Chief Minister, and the contrast he himself draws with their social diffidence in an earlier period are

Inclusive exclusions  91 revealing. Narendra Yadav, who by 2015 had been disenchanted by Yadav for the corruption scandals in which he had been embroiled, readily agreed with Mandal’s account and added: They preferred to work there. People who could never have dreamt to set foot outside of the village began travelling as far afield as Punjab. Many of our neighbours went there. By then the situation had considerably improved for us. We didn’t feel worried about the safety of our family members. Of course, there were difficulties. [Referring to a Rajput neighbor, with whom he and his wife have a long-running dispute, which I have documented in Roy, 2013] has harassed my wife in my absence. But he can’t get away with it any more. The old days are gone. My father, who was always so scared for us, started making plans too. But his health was failing … Roy, interview notes, Narendra Yadav, March 1, 2015 In emphasizing that people who had previously not considered out-migration as an option were doing so now, the account offered by Narendra Yadav allows us to appreciate the importance of social confidence and the vocabulary of dignity in shaping the decision to migrate. Such an account guards against an analysis that reduces migration from Bihar as a mechanical reaction to “pull factors” such as economic growth or “push factors” such as destitution and poverty. Rather, it enables us to appreciate the ways in which political inclusion enhances social confidence, thereby facilitating mobility. Bihar’s democratization is hardly unique within India. Rather, it is but an illustration of “second democratic upsurge” in India and labeled as “India’s silent revolution.” Not only has electoral participation since 1989 seen an upsurge, the participation of people from the sub-ordinate social and economic classes appears to have outstripped that of the more privileged and dominant classes. Enhanced mobility across India could thus be explained as one of the social implications of such far-reaching political changes.

Social exclusion: denying the “Right to have Rights” Notwithstanding the attention I have directed toward the political factors that enhanced sub-altern social confidence and enabled them to even consider working elsewhere, it is impossible to ignore the vulnerability and insecurity that mark their lives and livelihoods during their circulations. For instance, Srivastava (2011) shows as many as 94 percent of such migrants have no formal labor contracts, indicating a precarious life indeed. The majority of labor migrants live in fenced-in and guarded worksites, with conditions similar to those of labor camps. Many of them live under tarpaulin roofs with poor amenities. They work through day and night, with

92  Indrajit Roy little by way of “overtime payments.” The Author’s survey of nearly 6000 households in northeast Bihar also testify to labor migrants’ precarious working conditions as well as perilous conditions of life. His findings corroborate the social exclusion confronted by migrant workers, who cannot access their entitlements to subsidized food. Under the public distribution system (PDS), their ration cards are invalid in their destinations of work. Such migrants either depend on their employer/labor contractor for their food provisions or purchase it in the open market. Their dependence significantly increases the cost of living for them and reduces the additional earnings they might hope to remit to their families. The only social support their families possess is the compensation offered by the state government in case of their death at work. Because migrant workers are mostly in informal employment across several sectors and industries, they have very little spaces to voice their grievances and articulate even legitimate complaints. In-depth interviews with labor migrants bear testimony to this precarity. Dinesh Rai, whose family cultivates a tiny plot of land in Bihar’s Sitmarhi district, drives an autorickshaw in Delhi. He has been working in Delhi since 2004, beginning as a construction worker, before taking up a job as a head loader and finally driving cycle rickshaw he rents from an agency. Dinesh Rai circulates between Bihar and Delhi twice each year, since his family members –- including his wife and children –- live in the village. In his interview with us, documented at http://www.livesonthemove.com/ video/, Rai compares his circumstances in Delhi with that in Bihar. He praises the subsidized food grains provisioned to low-income households such as his under the Indian Government’s Public Distribution System as saving the lives of millions in villages such as his. Consequently, he laments the absence of such provisions for individuals such as himself while they are on the move in search of dignified employment. Because the BPL card is issued to his household and is valid only during their stay in their village, Rai has no option but to rely on the market to purchase food supplies while he is in Delhi. Rai’s circumstances are not unique, as becomes clear through interviews with other labor migrants who circulate several locations in any given year. Bismay Oraon, who complements his income from farming his plot of land in Chhattisgarh’s Bilaspur district, was interviewed by Jayaswal (Jayaswal, interview notes, AJ.I.01.2016-11-14) as a construction laborer at the worksite of the Punjab Agricultural University in Ludhiana during November 2016. Oraon was introduced into construction work by his brother who was a foreman in a construction company since approximately 1980. Since then, he has worked as a beldar at hundreds of worksites across India, interspersing his employment in construction with work on his farmland back in Chhattisgarh. Oraon echoes Rai’s complaint that, although the subsidized food grains provisioned by the PDS in his village prevent starvation, itinerant migrants such as himself find that they lose any entitlement to such provisions the moment they leave their village. As a beldar, Oraon has been left with little option but to meet his food expenditures from advances

Inclusive exclusions  93 borrowed from whoever happened to be his jamadar (labor supervisor). Those advances are adjusted against his wages, leaving him with too little to either save or invest. The result has been further borrowing, leaving Oraon trapped in a cycle of debt. Similar to the circumstances reported by Rai and Oraon is the narrative offered by Harilal Kashyap to Anand as the latter assembled his life history (Anand, life history notes, AA.LH.01.2016-09-25). Kashyap vends lemon soda on a mobile cart at a traffic crossing near Kitchlewnagar in Ludhiana. He has been in Ludhiana since 1999, when he first arrived in the city with his father. Kashyap first found employment in one of Ludhiana’s several garment sewing factories where he and his coworkers would often work 18–20 hours through the day and night, with little or no overtime. After falling out with his supervisor in the factory, Kashyap took up a job with construction companies as a painter. Finally, about 3 years ago, he decided to set up his present enterprise. Because he circulates between his village in Uttar Pradesh’s Unnao district and Ludhiana, Kashyap has retained his BPL card at his rural home so his family members can benefit from the provisions of the PDS. The consequence has been his exclusion from such provisioning and him having to rely on the open market in order to meet his food requirements. The general precariousness of work combined with the specific denial of social entitlements to millions of labor migrants such as Dinesh Rai, Bismay Oraon, and Harilal Kashyap provide a stark contrast with the aspirations unleased by the substantive democratization of the Indian polity after 1989. Even as labor migrants such as Pradeep Rishi, Narendra Yadav, and Shyamdev Mandal – all of whom celebrate the advent of Lalu Prasad Yadav in 1990 as enhancing their social confidence and enabling them to even think about leaving their village in search of dignified livelihoods – circulate between different employments across the country, they confront an ensemble of precarity and informality that not only constrains their livelihood options but also the social entitlements that provision food for them at prices they can afford. Underpinning such social exclusion is political exclusion. Despite the adoption of universal adult suffrage at its foundational moment, the Indian state remains impervious to the need to make such suffrage meaningful to a population that is increasingly mobile. Voting rights in India continue to be restricted to the places of people’s usual domicile. For migrant laborers, who give the best part of their working lives to multiple locations in urban and rural India, such restrictions have two implications. On the one hand, this reduces their value to the destination locality’s politicians, who do not need their votes to win elections at all. On the other hand, migrant laborers are not able to always go back to their homes during election time to cast their votes: ample reportage on the political exclusion of migrant workers from the 2015 Bihar Vidha Sabha elections bears this out: a point more generally made about the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. A survey I conducted for a related project resonates somewhat with these reports. Just

94  Indrajit Roy under half of the 6000-odd rural out-migrants interviewed during that survey were reported to have voted for the 2015 Vidhan Sabha elections (held October/November). The figures for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections were comparable: slightly fewer respondents reported being able to return home to cast their vote during the elections held in April/May of that year. Indeed, a study conducted by the NGO Ajivika and their partners (Ajivika Bureau, 2012) revealed that over 60 percent of labor migrants were unable to cast their vote in at least one election held during their adult life for the simple reason that they were away from home. While the Bihar figures might be interpreted as representing the greater enthusiasm of migrants in that State for elections compared with migrants from others, it remains a matter of shame for the world’s largest democracy that some of its most precarious populations are unable to exercise their franchise.

Inclusive exclusion: mobility, citizenship and the right to have rights in an unequal India The exclusions from electoral participation and social entitlements wrought upon internal labor migrants bring us back to the prejudiced narratives engulfing them in an increasingly unequal India. Such exclusions not only frustrate the social confidence of migrant populations, but actively deny them the foundational rights that constitute citizenship. These foundational rights exceed the de jure civil–juridical rights that outline the relationship between individuals and the nation-states which confer the status of “citizen” on them. Rather, as Hannah Arendt (1951) would have it, the foundational rights to which citizenship pertains are to do with the right of recognition, inclusion, and membership in society. Citizenship thus refers to, in Arendtian terms, the “right to have rights. The effective loss of the right to vote and of the social entitlements to which internal migrants are eligible only so long as they are domiciled in the villages in which they are registered undermines their ‘rights to have rights.” What does this mean? Margaret Somers (2008) helpfully distinguishes the formal rights attached to the legal status of citizen from the right to human personhood, which entails the recognition of people as moral equals endowed by a full inclusion in the social and political community. Accordingly, citizenship studies typically intimate a two-sited field: one, which refers to the geopolitical borders of exclusion that distinguishes “insiders” from “outsiders”; and two, which fleshes the differential practices of membership within those designated as “insiders,” privileging some as “interior” whereas others as “exterior.” In a similar vein, Bryan Turner (1990) suggests that citizenship has to do with, on the one hand, social membership or belonging to a community and, on the other hand, with the right to the allocation of resources. Applying this perspective to her study of China’s floating population, Dorothy Solinger (1999) similarly finds that although internal migrants in that country hold formal citizenship on account of

Inclusive exclusions  95 their being Chinese nationals, they are effectively excluded from both the social membership in the host cities as well as state-provisioned social entitlements. Like India’s labor migrants, they too find themselves in a situation where their very right to have rights has denied them. In her magisterial work, Niraja Gopal Jayal (2013) reminds us of the complicated relationship of the three Ms of post-1989 India – Mandir, Mandal, and Market – with the practice of citizenship in India. While the politics of Mandir have exposed majoritarian tendencies, the politics around Mandal have spurred an egalitarian promise. The politics of liberalizing markets has exacerbated inequalities in India even as the vocabulary of rights has become ever more entrenched in the body politic. This chapter has illustrated the ways in which the fourth M – mobility– intimates the ambiguities of citizenship in an India of growing inequalities. On the one hand, the enhanced mobility among sub-altern populations such as Pradeep Rishi, Narendra Yadav, and Shyamdev Mandal reflects the heightened social confidence inspired by their subscribing to politicized ideas of human dignity. On the other hand, their increased mobility compels them to lead precarious lives, bereft of the social protections and electoral rights to which they are formally entitled, to which such individuals as Dinesh Rai, Bismay Oraon, and Harilal Kashyap testify. Such circulations call attention to the “inclusive exclusions” that have to come to characterize India since 1989.

Epilogue On November 23, 2010, members of India’s Lok Sabha assented to a bill amending the Representation of People Act, 1951. The amended legislation extended the franchise to approximately 11 million non-resident Indians (NRIs), members of the Indian diaspora in other countries. Adding substance to form, the then Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government issued a gazetted notification in this regard. Although the initial plans envisaged NRIs to have to be physically present in their constituencies to cast their ballot, subsequent developments suggest a considerable reconsideration of this original position. The Times of India reported on January 13, 2015 that India’s Election Commission had recommended the use of electronic ballots to enable NRIs vote on election day, dispensing with the need to be physically present. Thus, not only has the franchise been extended to Indian diaspora communities, but provisions for casting their vote electronically have also been specified (Rajagopal, 2015). The “inclusive exclusions” to which India’s internal labor migrants are subjected became even starker after this development. The massive exodus from Indian cities triggered by Prime Minister Modi’s ill-planned lockdown – likely to outstrip the displacement wrought by the 1947 Partition – revealed such starkness even further.

96  Indrajit Roy

References Arendt, H. (1951). The origins of totalitarianism, New York: Haircourt Brace. Bhagat, R. B. (2010). Internal migration in India: Are the underprivileged migrating more? Asia Pacific Population Journal, 25(1), 31–49. Brass, T. (1993). Migration, tenancy and bondage in Purnea District, Bihar. In B.N. Yugandhar & Iyer, K. G. (Eds.), Land reforms in India (Volume 1): Bihar: The institutional constraints (pp. 283–293). Delhi: Sage Publications. Deshingkar, P., & Akter, S. (2009). Migration and human development in India. New York: United Nations Development Programme. Economic and Political Weekly, 48(10), 54–64. Economic Survey (2016). India on the move and churning. In Ministry of Finance (Ed.) Economic Survey (pp. 264–284). Delhi: Government of India. Jayal, N. G. (2013). Citizenship and its discontent: An Indian history, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Jha, P. (1997). Devil take the hindmost: Economic reforms and agricultural labourers in India. Economic and Political Weekly, 32(20&21). Karan, A. K. (2003). Changing patterns of migration from rural Bihar. Labour and Development, 9(2), 155. Kundu, A., & Saraswati, L. (2012). Migration and exclusionary urbanisation in India. Economic and Political Weekly, 47(26–27). Mazumdar, I., Neetha, N., & Agnihotri, I. (2013), Migration and gender in India. Mishra, D. (2016). Introduction: Internal migration in contemporary India: An overview of issues and concerns. In D. Mishra (Ed.), Internal migration in contemporary India (pp. 1–26). Delhi: Sage Publications. Srivastava, R. (2011). Labour migration in India: Recent trends, patterns and policy issues. Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 54(3), 411–440. Solinger, D. (1999). Contesting citizenship in urban china: Peasant migrants, the state and the logic of market, Berkeley: University of California Press. Somers, M. (2008). Geneologies of citizenship, knowledge, the market and statelessnes and the right to have rights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tsujita, Y., & Oda, H. (2012). Caste, land and migration: A preliminary survey in an underdeveloped state in India. Institute of Development Economics Discussion Paper54. Tokyo: Institute of Development Economics. Tumbe, C. (2015). Missing men, migration and labour markets: Evidence from India. Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 58(2), 245–267. Turner, B. (1990). Outline of a theory of citizenship, Sociology, 24 (2):189–217. Wilson, K. (1999). Patterns of accumulation and struggles of rural labour: Some aspects of agrarian change in Central Bihar. Journal of Peasant Studies, 26(2–3), 316–354. Working group on Migration (2017) Report of the working group on migration, Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, Government of India.

7 Indigene, outsider, and the citizen Politics of migration in Assam Smitana Saikia and Ravindra Chowdhary

Assam is often described as a land of migrants, which over centuries has attracted streams of immigrants from different races and cultures and assimilated them to build a composite civilization. Paradoxically, immigration, while enriching the land with modern novelties and trades, has also been a source of conflict. Assam too has experienced intermittent conflicts arising out of competition over resources between local population and immigrants. In contemporary times, the state has witnessed large-scale immigration from its neighboring countries. While some of these immigrants are refugees fleeing political and religious repressions back home, others are economic migrants escaping grueling poverty and a bleak future. Assam has been a generous host to all these immigrants but large-scale, undocumented immigration from Bangladesh has become a source of conflict and tensions in Assam (Baruah, 2007; Das, 2016). The magnitude of immigration has been too huge and protest against it too violent, making infiltration, as illegal migration is termed officially, one of the most politically contentious issues in the state and its borderland. In borderland regions of modern nation-states, the ontological status of legal subjects is often fraught with competing assertions. In India’s northeastern state of Assam, this is particularly true due to historical movement of peoples from then East Bengal and now Bangladesh. Assam’s own nativist movement against ‘illegal’ immigrants in 1980s catapulted the issue into national prominence thereby reiterating the anxiety that nation-states feel while defining its citizens particularly in its frontiers. The “sons of the soil” movement in Assam underlines a fundamental socio-political fissure that has shaped many conflicts in India as well as in its northeastern region. This region has witnessed innumerable political movements for autonomy based on this fissure – ranging from demand for autonomous councils within existing states to demand for statehood as well as complete separation from the Indian Union. Scholarship on conflicts in the region has emphasized long-term state formation processes starting from colonial intervention in the region to development of asymmetrical institutional arrangements to accommodate “tribal” aspirations after independence, and historical marginalization of the region by the Indian state to intergroup resource conflict as key explanatory factors for this kind of politics. The grammar of this

98  Smitana Saikia and Ravindra Chowdhary politics may be located in a particular form of identity politics that of territorial indigeneity wherein ethnic groups make competing claims of being original inhabitants of a piece of land. As Baruah (2009, para 4) argues, when a tribal political organisation protests that a state government has failed to protect tribal lands, and demands separate statehood or greater autonomy, there is often a subtext: that territory in the hands of interlopers [outsiders/migrants] could be reclaimed as tribal lands under a reformed pro-tribal political dispensation. [emphasis added] Underlining these territorial demands is a complex matrix of rights and identity assertion that are deeply imbricated in India’s history of patronage democracy (Chandra, 2013). Unsurprisingly then, movements of autonomy in the northeast are often confronted with ‘strong counter-mobilizations by groups that fear being legally marked as interlopers in a new political dispensation (Baruah, 1986.) [emphasis added]’. Since assertion of rights and articulation of identities form the contents of citizenship (Jayal, 2013) competing claims result in what is an essentially contested terrain of citizenship in this region. It is in this context of contested citizenship regimes that this chapter situates contemporary politics of migration in Assam. The state of Assam is situated in a region comprised of eight relatively small states, connected to the rest of the country by a narrow land corridor of 22 km, sharing about 90 percent of its boundaries with China, Bhutan, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. Assam is linguistically and ethnically a very diverse state: 61.47 percent of the total population in Assam is Hindu and 34.2 percent Muslims while Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) represent 7.15 percent and 12.4 percent, respectively (Chandramouli, C., & Registrar General, Census of India, 2011). Major linguistic groups are Assamese (48.38%) and Bengalis (28.91%) (Baruah, 1999). Historically, the multi-ethnic population of Assam has cultural and linguistic overlaps, but in recent decades mobilization has brought these identities into sharper divisions and the issue of immigration has emerged to be one of the most salient and enduring features of state politics.1 In this context, the recently concluded exercise of updating the 1951 National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam becomes particularly central to this conversation since it is at the heart of the political debate on migration. The NRC process was a massive bureaucratic exercise that lasted 10 years involving over 50,000 state government officials and costing about Rs. 1220 crores and rendered about 19 lakh people stateless. First organized in Assam in 1951, the NRC is a record consisting of names of all genuine Indian citizens residing in the state. The current controversy is a result of an attempt to update this list to include the names of those persons and/or their descendants appearing in the “original list” of 1951 or any electoral rolls/admissible documents up to midnight March 24, 1971.2 The NRC list has dual purposes: the purported aim of the state is to identify

Indigene, outsider, and the citizen  99 and hence constitute the Indian citizen and it also seeks to detect illegal migrants and hence non-citizens/aliens. Since this is a frontier state sharing borders with Bangladesh and cross-border migration has been a historical norm in this region, post-partition saw this issue acquiring an international dimension, i.e., migrants are viewed as illegal aliens from the neighboring country. The NRC update process in Assam has thrown back into the ring questions that have occupied the political narrative of the state in recent times. The process was touted to be a method of identifying “Bangladeshi infiltrators” in the state as the updated NRC is expected to be a reference point against which an individual can check his/her citizenship status. This chapter thus explores migration politics in Assam through a historical examination of the issue. Furthermore, it unpacks the complexities of the NRC by situating it at two levels: one, as the Assamese elite’s historical attempt to create the ethnic “other” in struggle for regional political power in post-partition India; and second, more recently, the ideological and electoral appropriation of the NRC by the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP] in a bid to identify/create the “ethnic” [Hindu] citizen in the borderlands.

The ‘migration problem’ in Assam: migrants succeed, natives fail? Historically speaking, Assam’s society is a society of migrants. Some came earlier, some came later. (Monirul Hussain, 2019) Assam is one of India’s most diversified states, linguistically and ethnically, as a result of long-term migratory flows into the region. Scott (2009, p. 19) describes the region as a “shatter zone” on account of constant migration and movement of people, “where the human shards of state formation and rivalry accumulated willy nilly, creating region of bewildering ethnic and linguistic complexity” with historically no fixed ethnic or territorial boundaries. As opposed to this organic movement of populations earlier, colonial state’s interaction with the region led to a more organized settlement of outside populations, particularly the East Bengali Muslims as wet-rice cultivators, Bengali Hindus as part of the colonial administration, and other communities such as Adivasis from Central India recruited as tea plantation workers. This history has been discussed in detail in the extant scholarship on the northeast and we need not labor the point further. The issue of the migration of Muslim peasants from East Bengal started gaining a fierce momentum in Assam politics as early as 1920s.3 The figures of Census 1921 suggest that the population growth of Assam by migration in the period between 1911 and 1921 was 44.3 percent (Baruah, 1999, pp. 57–58). However, it was as early as in 1911, even before Assamese leaders took this issue up, that the Census Commissioner first observed, “a peaceful invasion of Assam by the advancing hordes of Mymensinghia army” was taking place (Baruah, 1999, 17). The following decade saw a dramatic increase in migration rates as reported by the Census Report of 1921. Growth rate in Assam

100  Smitana Saikia and Ravindra Chowdhary for the decade 1911–21 was 20.48 percent against an all-India growth of 0.03 percent – a variation of 20.78 percent (Baruah, 1999, p. 51). In the Brahmaputra valley, growth of population by migration was 55.6 percent (Ibid.). What began as a sub-nationalist movement due to resentment against the dominance of Bengali (primarily Hindus) in the Assam province in colonial India had soon widened to include the question of land settlement policies of the government. A popular leader of the non-co-operation movement in Assam had decried at the time, “our national identity will disappear’ under the onrush of the alleged ‘foreign settlers” (Gohain, 1985, p. 47). Assamese Congressmen moved a resolution in the provincial legislature which said, “A piece of land is the only source of wealth for the ordinary people…If, however, no provision is made for preserving lands for future development, our future generations will be jeopardized for lack of new avenues” (Gohain, 1985, p. 41, Kar & Sharma, 1997).4 Thus the British policy of increasing revenue generation by encouraging East Bengali peasants to come to Assam and cultivate vast swaths of “wasteland,” acquired a deeply political dimension with the realities of settling these peasants on these lands.5 A fear of being outnumbered by Mymensinghias in terms of land ownership and being swamped by Bengali Hindus in middle-class occupations became the focal point of the nascent Assamese sub-nationalist movement. The fear among the Assamese leaders was also a result of the prospect that Assam could be incorporated in the new state of Pakistan. The Cabinet Mission Plan provided for Assam’s representatives to the Constituent Assembly to sit separately with Bengal representatives to frame the Zonal constitution for Group C, which included Muslim majority provinces. Though there was a balance of General seats (34) and Muslim seats (36), the Plan provided for a simple majority to decide on the issues of zones and groups. So the fears of Assamese elite were twofold – on one hand, of new possibility of being overwhelmed by Muslims and on the other, the old fear of Bengali domination over the Assamese (Gohain, 1984, p. 50). The fear became palpable when in January 1946, Liaquat Ali Khan addressed a meeting at Gauhati to campaign for Pakistan. As Gohain argues, “this sense of external danger unites the Assamese as never before, disarms the Bengali intellectuals whose misguided early cheers for grouping fall silent…and gives a fresh momentum to further advance of popular Assamese nationalism” (Gohain, 1984, p. 51). In its election manifesto of 1946, Congress put forward all the basic demands of Assamese nationalism: Unless the province of Assam be organized on the basis of Assamese language and culture, the survival of the Assamese nationality and culture will become impossible. The inclusion of the Bengali-speaking Sylhet and Cachar (plains portion) and the immigration of importation of lacs of Bengali settlers on wastelands had been threatening to destroy the distinctness of Assam, and has, in practice, caused many disorders

Indigene, outsider, and the citizen  101 in its administration. For an appropriate solution and redress of this big problem, the Congress party should be installed as the Majority party in the Assembly. (cited in Bhuyan & De, 1980, p. 303) Thus, the public discourse on protection of land for “indigenous” or “plaintribal” communities was completely subsumed in the electoral politics and sub-nationalist narrative of the dominant Assamese. In the name of cultural nationalism, the Assamese had sought to iron out the complexities that a political loaded term like “indigenous” entailed in an inherently multi-­ ethnic setting. This term would become deeply contentious in the post-­ independence era when Bodos would claim that they, and not the Assamese, are historically “more indigenous” or the “original autochthones” of Assam. Myron Weiner’s seminal work on Indian politics poses a central argument that the modernization process results in antagonism between two emerging contradictory forces namely: increased opportunities and incentives for mobility leading to increased migration on one hand, and the growth of ethnic exclusiveness and cohesion, on the other. Three concepts seem to emerge from this argument: first, the notion of territorial ethnicity, i.e., an ethnic group rooted in a particular space; second, the notion of the dual labor market, i.e., a dichotomy between those with low skills and low wages that engage in traditional or unorganized jobs and others in a modern/ organized sector with high labor skills at higher wages; and third, the “ethnic division” of labor wherein this dual labor market is ethnically stratified. Weiner argues that in a typical case, migrants from an ethnic group move from the periphery to work in sub-ordinate positions while the indigenous group dominates the core. In Assam, he argues, the opposite was the case (Weiner, 1987). Weiner contends that an ethnic division of labor in which the migrant communities are on top of the labor hierarchy is a pre-requisite yet not a sufficient condition for an ethnic strife. Along with this factor, there must also be a competition for control over economic resources, political capital, or social status. A middle-class nativist movement like that in Assam may emerge when the local population has recently produced its own middle class aspiring to move into occupations held by migrant communities like the Bengalis [particularly Hindus], Marwaris, and other communities from North India. Similarly, when ethnic division of labor becomes divergent with the political division of labor, it becomes a breeding ground for conflict (Weiner, 1993). Weiner’s thesis does explain the trajectory of Assam politics immediately after independence. Despite the fact that immigration was a politically salient issue, it was the Assamese language movement that had overshadowed concerns of the regional elite. Cultural chauvinism emerged in the form of the Official Language Act of 1960, when the predominantly Assamese elite decided to make Assamese as the official state language. Language riots broke out in the 1960s thereby marginalizing not only Bengali Hindus but many other “indigenous” tribal groups in the state as well. On the contrary,

102  Smitana Saikia and Ravindra Chowdhary in the first two decades after independence, the Bengali Muslims were politically allied with the Assamese against the Bengali Hindus. Bengali ­Muslims even returned Assamese as their language in the Census and sent their children to Assamese-medium schools (Baruah, 1999). It was only in the late 1970s that the issue of illegal immigration and inclusion of aliens in electoral rolls began to gain traction – the kind that was seen in 1930s–40s, in the polarized/communalized context of partition. The tipping point of the anti-foreigner agitation was the growth in the number of registered voters from 6.3 million in 1972 to 8.7 million in 1979. These staggering numbers, Weiner (1983a) argues, played an immense role in drilling a sense of insecurity among the Assamese who began to explain their backwardness in relation to migrants as a consequence of political factors. Thus, there had grown a dual fear in the Assamese mind, “that Assamese Hindus would be dominated by Muslims politically, and that Assamese culture and identity would be obliterated in a predominantly Bengali state,” greatly exacerbated by the continuing trends of long-term migration into Assam (Weiner, 1983b, p. 75). Through the 6-year agitation, AASU sought a resolution of the foreigners’ problem triggered by revelations that more than 60,000 names of recently registered people who could not prove their Indian identity were detected in the electoral lists for the Mangaldoi Parliamentary constituency. After 27 rounds of talks, the Assam Accord was signed in 1985, which determined January 1, 1966 as the cutoff date for the purpose of detection and deletion of foreigners and allowed for citizenship for all persons coming to Assam from “Specified Territory” before the cut-off date. It further specifies that all persons who came to Assam after January 1, 1966 (inclusive) and up to March 24, 1971 (midnight) shall be detected (in accordance with the provisions of the Foreigners Act, 1946 and the Foreigners (Tribunals) Order, 1939) and their name will be deleted from the Electoral rolls in force. “Foreigners” who came to Assam on or after March 25, 1971 shall continue to be detected, deleted, and expelled in accordance with law.

Appropriating the migration debate: rise of the RSS and BJP in Assam Besides providing a regional alternative to the Congress in the form of the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), an enduring feature of the Assam agitation was the embedding of the issue of illegal immigration in state politics and collective psyche. As argued earlier, politics of indigeneity links territory with identity in that loss of territory, perceived or real, is seen as a loss of cultural identity as well. The Assam agitation began rightly as a critique against an exploitative Indian state and a historically skewed representation of the native communities in government and economy. It acquired an anti-outsider (bahiragata) character and targeted Bengalis (Hindus and Muslims) as well as communities from other parts of India who were entrenched in the state’s political economy. At the same time, Assam politics was organized

Indigene, outsider, and the citizen  103 around complex crosscutting cleavages of caste, linguistic, and tribal identities that had thwarted the growth of religion as a singular fault line.6 Over time, however, the narrative transformed as religious fissures became part of the anti-immigrant’s discourse in Assam. How did this happen? This question is best answered by examining the role the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), BJP’s ideological parent, played in Assam. The RSS believed in creating a dedicated network of activists in the long run in order to create a fertile ground for its ideology of Hindu majoritarianism (Jaffrelot, 2002, 2017). RSS’ keen interest in the northeast region was a result of what it considered to be strong influence of Christian missionaries in the region, particularly in tribal areas. The Sangh established its first shakha in Guwahati as early as 1946, and Thakur Ram Singh, a pracharak from Punjab played a crucial role in laying foundation of the Sangh in the state with its relief work during the devastating Assam earthquake of 1950.7 The RSS played a key role in transforming the narrative from “being anti-bahiragat (outsiders) to being an anti-videshi (foreigners) movement” (Sethi, 2017, p. 71).8 For instance, during the agitation, the Sangh’s General Assembly passed a resolution in 1980 (Kaushal, 2007, p. 93) The Assam problem of today is the result of a deep-laid political conspiracy of planned Muslim infiltration carried out over the last several decades. The problem assumed an additional dimension when a large number of Hindu refugees entered Assam after being perpetually persecuted in E. Pakistan, later Bangladesh, leaving them with no choice than crossing over to Bharat forsaking their all behind them. Bharat, it must be remembered, remains the only country in the world, which the displaced Hindus consider as their home and where they can never be considered as foreigners. [emphasis added] The Sangh historically differentiated between two kinds of immigrants in post-partition India: Hindus who they claimed were “sharanarthis,” i.e., asylum seekers and Muslims as “anupraveshkaaris,” i.e., infiltrators (Archives of RSS). In the 1980 resolution on the Assam agitation, the RSS, for example, urged the Central Government to take responsibility of Hindus entering India while at the same time pressed upon it to expel the “infiltrators” (Kaushal, 2007). The RSS was indeed troubled by the non-communal focus of the Asom Jatiyabadi Dal, a collective of sub-nationalist voices in Assam, and hence it continued to seek an inflection of the Hindu-refugee/Muslim-­ infiltrator binary into the Assam agitation (Gupta, 2016).9 In the immediate aftermath of the Nellie violence, which primarily targeted Bengali Muslims, the RSS framed it as (Kaushal, 2007, pp. 112–113): Deployment of tens of thousands of security personnel in the name of protecting those who wanted to participate in the imposed elections, gave an opportunity to the foreign infiltrators and other foreign-inspired

104  Smitana Saikia and Ravindra Chowdhary forces to carry out their nefarious designs…the main problem in Assam is that the Hindus there are being reduced to a minority by both infiltration and proselytization…it is essential that Assam remains a predominantly Hindu-majority area as that alone will ensure the identity of each group and save those life values, which form the common bond between Assam and the rest of the country. The growth of the RSS in Assam had been sluggish until the anti-foreigner’s movement gave it the much needed fillip, and by 1980, Sangh shakhas had mushroomed across Assam (Sethi, 2017, p. 66). Its language of religious polarization had begun to creep into the official discourse, as is evident from a 1998 report of the then Assam Governor (cited in Supreme Court judgement Sonowal versus Union of India 2005, pp. 12–13). The silent and invidious demographic invasion of Assam may result in the loss of the geo-strategically vital districts of lower Assam. The influx of these illegal migrants is turning these districts into a Muslim majority region. It will then only be a matter of time when a demand for their merger with Bangladesh may be made. RSS has worked patiently and assiduously to make its Hindu-nationalist ideology gain some potency in Assam politics, albeit in a form that was adapted to local nuances. Interestingly, the first ethnic constituency to respond to saffron politics were Bengali Hindus of the Barak Valley. Increased feelings of insecurity during the “sons of the soil” movement began to push Bengali Hindus to find newer political constellation. The BJP over time has reaped electoral benefits of this politics of communal polarization in Assam since 2014 (See Tables 7.1 to 7.3) particularly in its attempt to weaponize NRC and the issue of citizenship.

Table 7.1  Assam Lok Sabha Election Results, 2009–2014 Parties

Congress BJP AIUDF AGP Others

Seats Contested Seats Won Seat Change 2014 2014 from 2009 13 13 10 12 126

3 7 3 0 1

−4 3 2 −1 1

Source: Election Commission of India (Total seats: 14).

Vote (%) 2014 29.61 36.51 14.83 3.83 12.63

Vote (%) Change from 2009 −5.27 +20.30 −1.27 −10.77 −0.16

Indigene, outsider, and the citizen  105 Table 7.2  Assam State Assembly election results, 2016–2011 Parties

Congress BJP AGP AIUDF

Seats contested 2016

Seats won 2016

Vote (%) in seats contested 2016

Vote (%) change in seats contested from 2011

122 89 12 74

26 60 0 13

32.06 42.12 3.83 21.34

−7.36 +30.03 −15.89 +1.47

Source: Election Commission of India (Total seats: 126).

Table 7.3  Consolidation of Hindu vote in Lok Sabha and state assembly elections in Assam (%) Community Assamese Hindu Congress BJP–AGP–BPF BJP alone Bengali Hindu Cong BJP–AGP–BPF BJP alone

2011

2014

2016

38 42 10

19 73 63

21 67 43

31 51 42

27 68 62

28 65 54

Source: Lokniti-CSDS state election study, Assam 2016 (Post-poll).

Situating the NRC within BJP’s politics The NRC was revived by the BJP as an electoral promise after 2014 given its possible use for religious polarization and further cementing of the Hindu vote. The BJP with help from the RSS, its ideological parent, tends to benefit electorally when votes are polled on religious rather than linguistic grounds. However, while the NRC can potentially fit the Hindutva agenda, the final list yielded results that went against BJP’s interests in the state. After a complex bureaucratic exercise spanning over many years, costing a whopping Rs. 1,220 crores, the final list released on August 31, 2019 excludes more than 19 lakh people, of which over 12 lakhs are Hindus (Business Standard, 2019). Thus, there is a panic among not only Muslims of East Bengal origin but also many Bengali Hindus and “indigenous” communities whose names are missing in an exercise heavily dependent on documents and an inefficient bureaucratic apparatus.10 Despite assurances that those missing in the NRC would not be dumped in detention centers, the NRC has made the

106  Smitana Saikia and Ravindra Chowdhary political climate in Assam volatile and past experiences have put residents of Assam, particularly the Bengali (Hindu and Muslim) community in fear of possible retaliation.(Das, 2018).11 In order to deal with this tricky situation and safeguard the interests of its core constituencies in the state, the BJP further legislated the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) in the Lok Sabha in 2019 to amend the existing law of 1955. The Act seeks to grant citizenship to persons belonging to six persecuted faiths – except Muslims – from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan after 6 years of residence (reduced from 11 years) in India. As mentioned earlier, this is partly in keeping with BJP’s poll promise in 2014 to welcome Hindu refugees and is based on the binary constructed by the RSS: the “Hindu refugee” and “Muslim infiltrator.” The logic given by BJP leaders was that those Hindus left out of the NRC would be granted citizenship through the amended legislation (Scroll.in, 2019). While the Act has garnered criticism from many quarters, its most vocal opponents come from Assam and other states in the northeast. The AGP had exited the alliance with the ruling BJP government in Assam, arguing that the CAA is in direct violation of the clauses of the Assam Accord which does not use any “ethnic category” to differentiate among immigrants (Government of Assam).12 Though the two parties came back together for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, existing tensions in the ruling alliance show that engineering neat religious polarization in multi-ethnic states can yield undesirable results. The BJP is facing a strong backlash from political activist and civil society in the state owing to fears that the CAA would encourage disproportionate settlement of refugees in Assam thereby fundamentally negating the anti-foreigner movement. Thus, a move to consolidate its Hindu vote in Assam has misfired in ways that the party had not predicted. A vocal opposition to the government’s move suggests that the acceptance of the BJP’s otherwise sectarian rhetoric is ultimately contingent in its ability to persuade the public in Assam about the necessity of the new citizenship law and its fallout for the state. Interestingly, the criticism of the CAA and the NRC results still stems from the fears that the indigenous communities have about immigrants dominating their land and culture.

Conclusion NRC is a legacy of Assamese sub-nationalism that reached its zenith in 1970s and galvanized a diverse section of the Assamese society to determine the “rightful” claimants to land, natural resources, and cultural capital. It emanates from the Assam Accord, a political compact that is entrenched in the politics of indigeneity in the state. As mentioned earlier, ought to detect foreigners who had come to the state on or after March 24, 1971, to have their names deleted from electoral rolls and deported in accordance with law. Deporting so-called “illegal immigrants” would require an agreement with Bangladesh which does not exist at the moment and is highly unlikely

Indigene, outsider, and the citizen  107 to materialize in the future. Furthermore, since India cannot offer documentary proof to establish the nationality of these individuals, Bangladesh has no reason to accept anyone who is deported after the NRC exercise. Given this political reality, why is the BJP as well public discourse in Assam so shrill about detecting and deporting illegal immigrants? This question should bring focus to the third D – deleting the names of such individuals from the electoral rolls and strip the alleged aliens of their voting rights. In any case, disenfranchisement is already a political reality in the state in the form of the “D” voter or doubtful voter category – these are individuals who are standing trial in foreigners’ tribunals or who have been declared foreigners by the tribunals and are hence not allowed to vote. Citizenship, as Arendt (1951) famously argued, guarantees the right to have all other rights and hence it is essentially contested, particularly in borderland spaces such as the state of Assam. Politics of indigeneity and migration in Assam are deeply imbricated in the citizenship discourse which has a fraught history due to colonialism and partition politics. This chapter put in historical perspective the politics of migration and the implications of the current political debates of the NRC on it.

Notes 1 Within the ST category, there are many groups, such as, Barmans in Cachar, Bodo, Deori, Rabha, Miri, Tiwa, Garo, Sonowal-Kachari, Mikir, and Dimasa, while six communities are demanding the ST status (tea tribes or “Adivasi,” Koch-Rajbangsi, Ahoms, Morans, Mataks, and Sootias). 2 As will discussed later, these cut-off dates were decided as part of the Assam Accord signed between the leaders of anti-foreigners’ movement and the Indian government in 1985. 3 Migration was slow and imperceptible till the first decade of the century. Earlier in 1874, about a hundred signatories of the Assamese middle-class community expressed to the Viceroy Lord Northbrook a desire in increasing the population of Assam by importing people from outside (Rafiabadi 1998, p. 21). The powerful Assamese landed gentry initially stood to gain from immigration as it promised more income and even supported British policies of settling Bengali Muslim peasants in Assam (Gohain 1985, p. 41). 4 Apprehending the possibility of friction between the Assamese and the “immigrants” in a communally charged environment, the administration inaugurated the “Line System” in 1923 under which villages in certain areas were specially demarcated for the purpose of settling “newcomers” only. Villages were thus grouped under different categories such as, Assamese villages, Muslim villages, mixed villages, and unsettled villages reserved for Assamese and unsettled villages reserved for Muslims (Kar and Sharma 1997, p. 21). 5 The government was expecting this migration to be spontaneous but soon realized that economic forces alone were insufficient push factors for movement of population (Baruah 1999, p. 55). “The coolies (sic) for tea gardens come to Assam because they are…specially recruited and brought to the province at the expense of the persons for whom they are to labor. No such inducements exist to bring ryots (cultivators) to Assam to take up land for cultivation and they therefore do not come” (Gait quoted in Baruah 1999, p. 56). 6 In Indian politics, James Manor (1996) argues that multiple identities have relatively prevented singular fault lines from becoming politically salient.

108  Smitana Saikia and Ravindra Chowdhary 7 The Marwari community in Assam that had settled in the region as a trading class played an important role in expanding the RSS network in the state (Personal interview of BJP activist, Party office, Guwahati May 2, 2019). Also, for a detailed exploration on the moral complexity of the Sangh’s relief work and “seva,” see Bhattacharjee 2019. 8 Hiren Gohain, one of the most vocal critics of the Assam movement, emphatically articulated this point in a personal interview, November 18, 2013 conducted during my doctoral fieldwork in Guwahati. 9 Incidents in Gohpur, Sipajhar, and Khoirabari in Assam targeted Bengali Hindus (Gupta, 2016). 10 The Indian government has no bilateral agreement with Bangladesh regarding deportation of aliens and has not detailed out a policy regarding this highly contested issue. 11 Such uncertainty and anxiety have tragically also driven residents of Assam to suicide  (https://thewire.in/rights/number-of-suicides-allegedly-linked-to-nrcexclusion-in-assam) 12 https://assamaccord.assam.gov.in/portlets/assam-accord-and-its-clauses

References Arendt, H. (1951). The origins of totalitarianism. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace. Baruah, S. (1986). Immigration, ethnic conflict, and political turmoil Assam, 1979– 1985. Asian Survey, 26(11), 1184–1206. Baruah, S. (1999). India against itself: Assam and the politics of nationality. Oxford: University of Pennsylvania Press New Delhi. Baruah, S. (2007). Postfrontier blues: Toward a new policy framework for northeast India. Washington, DC: East-West Center. Baruah, S. (2009). The partition’s long shadow: The ambiguities of citizenship in Assam, India. Citizenship Studies, 13(6), 593–606. Bhattacharjee, M. (2019). Disaster relief and the RSS: Resurrecting ‘Religion’ through humanitarianism. New Delhi: Sage Publication India. Bhuyan, A. C., & De, S. (1980). Political history of Assam: 1940–1947 Vol III, Dispur, Government of Assam, Constituent Assembly Debates. Census of India (2011). State wise tables on individual Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST). Chandra, K. (2013). How ethnic identities change. In K. Chandra (Ed.), Constructivist theories of ethnic politics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Chandramouli, C., & Registrar General. Census of India. (2011). Provisional population totals (pp. 409–413). New Delhi: Government of India. Das, G. (2018). Suicides of people excluded from NRC in Assam Trigger Alarm Bells. The Wire. Retrieved from: https://thewire.in/rights/number-of-suicidesallegedlylinkedto-nrc-exclusion-in-assam Das, P. (2016). Illegal migration from Bangladesh: Deportation, border fences and work permits. Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses. Gohain, H. (1984). The Baboo and the Brown Sahib: Enemies or partners?. Economic and Political Weekly, 19(34), 1469–1471. Gupta, S. (2016). Assam’s 35-Year Saffronization. Business Standard. Retrieved from: https://www.businessstandard.com/article/opinion/shekhar-gupta-assams-35year-saffronisation-116040800961_1.html Gohain, H. (1985). Assam: a burning question. Spectrum, 27–95.

Indigene, outsider, and the citizen  109 “Government of Assam Implementation of Assam Accord.” Assam Accord and its Clauses | Implementation of Assam Accord | Government of Assam, India. https://assamaccord.assam.gov.in/portlets/assam-accord-and-its-clauses#:~:text=Constitutional%2C%20legislative%20and%20administrative%20 safeguards,heritage%20of%20the%20Assamese%20people Hussain, et al., (2019). Statelessness and marginalisation in assam, the citizenship amendment bill and the national register of citizens: Report of The Public Hearing of February, 2019 At Guwahati, Assam. https://hrln.org/uploads/2019/06/Reportof-Public-Hearing-on-NRC-and-CAB.pdf Jaffrelot, C. (2002). A specific party-building strategy: The Jana Sangha and the RSS network. In Z. Hasan (Ed.), Parties and party politics in India. Oxfod University Press. Jaffrelot, C. (2017). India’s democracy at 70: Toward a Hindu state? Journal of Democracy, 28(3), 52–63. Jayal, N. G. (2013). Citizenship and its Discontents: An Indian history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press USA. Kar, B. K., & Sharma, H. N. (1997). Socio-economic transformation in the tribal society of Assam. North Eastern Geographer, 28, 32–41. Manor, J. (1996). Ethnicity and politics in India. International Affairs, 72(3), 459–475. Press Trust of India (2019). Exclusion of Hindu Bengalis from Assam NRC changing political. Business Standard. Retrieved from: https://www.businessstandard.com/article/ptistories/exclusion-of-hindu-bengalis-from-assamnrcchanging-political119092200259_1. Saikia, A. (2019). Bengali Hindus left out of Assam’s NRC are not convinced citizenship bill will help them. Here’s why. Scroll.in. Retrieved from: https://scroll.in/ article/946430/bjp-claims-citizenship-bill-will-save-those-leftof-nrc-but-bengalihindus-in-assam-are-sceptical. Scott, J. C. (2009). Stilled to silence at 500 metres: making sense of historical change in Southeast Asia. SPAFA Journal (Old series 1991-2013), 19(3). Sethi, R. (2017). The last battle of Saraighat: The story of the BJP’s rise in the North east. Gurugram: Penguin Random House India Private Limited. Weiner, M. (1983a). The political consequences of preferential policies: A comparative perspective. Comparative Politics, 16(1), 35–52. Weiner, M. (1983b). The political demography of Assam’s anti-immigrant movement. Population and Development Review, 9(2), 279–292. Weiner, M. (1987). Sons of the soil: Migration and ethnic conflict in India. Princeton: University Press. Weiner, M. (1993). Rejected peoples and unwanted migrants in South Asia. Economic and Political Weekly, 28(34), 1737–1746. Retrieved from: http://censusindia.gov.in/Tables_Published/SCST/scst_main.aspx.

8 Migrant voters and political parties Notes on an analytical framework Eswaran Sridharan

Migrant populations from other states, if spatially and/or occupationally clustered, are easier for parties to reach out to in seeking political support. On the other hand, the character of the party also becomes an important determinant of their propensity and willingness to reach out to migrant communities: clientelist parties, for example, would be inclined to offering certain material and economic benefits in exchange for electoral support, while left-oriented parties may be sympathetic to marginalized or proletarian migrant groups. While ethnic parties may either reach out to or deliberately alienate certain ethnic migrant communities by virtue of their loyalties, catchall parties, which carry no inherent affiliations, may mobilize migrant communities that form a substantial electorate. Similarly, the organizational capacity of parties – whether low (as in the case of charismatic leader-driven parties or clientelist parties), medium, or high (as in the case of cadre-based parties) prove an important determinant to electoral mobilization. The patterns of party competition, whether bipartisan (e.g., as in Congress versus BJP states), bipolar coalition-centric (e.g., as in the case of Kerala), or multi-polar (e.g., as in Uttar Pradesh), also determine possibilities for drawing electoral support from migrants. Migrants might be seen as a political opportunity or as a threat by political parties depending on the circumstances. Let me briefly outline the four types of variables below.

The character of migrant populations Migrants can be international migrants as in the case of Bangladeshi or Nepali migrants to India or refugee populations like Tibetans, Sri Lankan Tamils, Afghans, and most recently Rohingyas from Myanmar, or can be inter-state Indian migrants. In the former case, only those eligible to vote, that is, those who have acquired Indian citizenship or documents that make them eligible for citizenship rights, would be of interest to political parties as potential voters. In the case of inter-state migrants, several variables would be relevant in determining their interest to political parties and their potential to be mobilized. Seasonal and short-term migrants would probably be registered as voters in their place of origin while long-term or permanent migrants from other states would register locally, which would make them

Migrant voters and political parties  111 of interest to political parties. If migrants are spatially clustered in terms of residential areas or places of work that would make them easier to mobilize and at lesser cost. Likewise, they would tend to be easier to mobilize if they are occupationally clustered. If the migrants are clustered in a Lok Sabha or assembly constituency in the state, they would be easier to mobilize by state units of political parties in campaigns for general elections or state assembly elections. If they are concentrated in particular pockets of Lok Sabha or assembly constituencies, they would be still easier to reach in campaigns. Occupational clustering, for example, migrant laborers in particular industrial areas in cities or rural areas, would make them easier to reach.

The character of political parties There is a vast literature on the possible ways of classifying political parties.1 However, for our purposes, the following categories are relevant. 1. Catchall parties that are multi-ethnic and secular like the Congress party and Congress splinter parties like the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) of Maharashtra and the Trinamool Congress of West Bengal, which share such a character, for example. 2. Hindu nationalist parties (the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP] and the Shiv Sena, though the Shiv Sena also has the character of an ethno-regional party as in point (5) below). 3. The communist parties, also termed the Left Front (including the Communist Party of India Marxist [CPI(M)] and the Communist Party of India [CPI], and the various CPI [Marxist–Leninist] splinters). 4. The agrarian/lower-caste populist parties (the Janata Party, the Janata Dal, and its offshoots like the Samajwadi Party, Rashtriya Janata Dal, Rashtriya Lok Dal, Biju Janata Dal, Janata Dal [Secular], and Janata Dal [United]). These are also regional parties in the sense that they are all limited principally to a single state. 5. Ethno-regional or ethnic parties based on particular regional linguistic groups or lower-caste blocs or tribes (in the northeastern states, in particular). Examples of such ethno-regional parties are the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) of Tamil Nadu, the Shiromani Akali Dal of the Sikhs in Punjab, the National Conference and People’s Democratic Party of Jammu and Kashmir, Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) of Assam, Telugu Desam Party (TDP) of Andhra Pradesh, the tribal Jharkhand Mukti Morcha of Jharkhand, and various small ethnic parties of the Northeastern rim states and the Scheduled Caste–based Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Most regional parties, and a larger number of even smaller parties, are single-state parties and are officially termed state parties. In the last general election (2019), there were eight national parties, 53 state parties, recognized by the Election Commission, and over 300 registered minor parties. Rather than demonstrating political fragmentation alone, these large numbers reflect the underlying diversity of India and the political mobilization of groups that were hitherto not politically empowered.

112  Eswaran Sridharan As far as attitudes to migrants are concerned, one can expect the Hindu nationalist parties to be indifferent or hostile to Muslim migrant groups, as, for example, in Assam. Catchall parties are expected to be willing to mobilize migrants although they would not be a priority compared to the base population of the state or the constituency. Communist parties could also be expected to be willing to mobilize migrants, particularly as regards working-class or marginalized migrants. As far as agrarian/lower-caste populist, ethnic, and ethno-regional parties are concerned, their mobilization would be focused on their core ethnic or caste/tribal base and their attitudes to migrants would be determined by whether the migrants in question are seen to be a threat to their bases’ identity and interests, or otherwise; they could be expected to mobilize migrants like catchall parties. However, if the migrants in question, for example, voters of Bengali origin in Assam, are seen as an identitarian threat by the ethno-regional party in question, for example, the AGP, one can expect indifference or hostility to the migrants. The basic point is that the above five types of parties could be expected to have different attitudes to migrant voters and varying strategies.

The organizational capacity of parties Organizational capacity typically varies across parties and across the various types of parties outlined. Catchall parties tend to have looselystructured clientelist organizations built of patronage networks.Material inducements are offered in exchange for political support and votes within a loose normative consensus on inclusive politics. Agrarian/lower-caste populist parties of the so-called “Janata parivar” tend to be similar in their organizational capacities. Ethnic/ethno-regional parties would also tend to be similar except that their catchment pool would be limited to the ethnic base. However, they could vary a lot, with some parties like the DMK and the BSP being relatively well-organized. The above three types of parties could be expected to have a limited organizational capacity and penetration in terms of full-time and active workers at the grassroot level. By contrast, the other two types of parties – communist parties and Hindu nationalist parties – tend to be cadre-based, that is, based on penetrative corps of full-time, active, and ideologically motivated workers.2 Such parties are better prepared to mobilize voters to turnout as has been demonstrated by the BJP in particular in recent times, particularly in 2014 and in subsequent state assembly elections in various states. As far as migrants are concerned, such parties, if they want to mobilize the migrants in question, are better equipped to do so.

The type of party competition The type of party competition at the state level, for both Lok Sabha elections and assembly elections, matters for the issue of mobilization of migrant voters.

Migrant voters and political parties  113 Party competition in India’s states can be of several types.3 Broadly, one can have either Duvergerian-type bipolar competition as has increasingly been the case in more and more states over 1967–89 and continued on the same lines since then, or multi-polar competition. Within bipolar competition one can have two types – two-party competition (e.g., between Congress and BJP as in many states or Congress and a regional party in some others) or competition between two coalitions (e.g., as in Kerala between the Congress-led United Democratic Front and the Left Democratic Front since 1982, or the BJP–JD(U) coalition versus the RJD-led coalition in Bihar) or between a party and a coalition (e.g., between the Congress and the Akali Dal–BJP coalition in Punjab). Within two-party competition, one can have a dominant party winning two or more times, that is, a relatively hegemonic system like the Left’s dominance in West Bengal from 1977 to 2011; Odisha under the BJD since 1999; Gujarat under the BJP since 1997;and Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh under the BJP from 2003 to 2018, for example. Or we can have bipartisan competition like the alternating Congress versus BJP contests, for example, in Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, and Uttarakhand. Or we can have a multi-polar competition scenario with three or more major parties in serious competition like in Uttar Pradesh since 2002. If both competing parties or coalitions are catchall in character, there could be stiff competition for the votes of migrant communities. Particularly so if the vote share gap between the parties is narrow making the race a very close one and hence making additional votes of migrants/new voters that could be mobilized that much more valuable. This could also happen in a multi-polar competition scenario if most of the competing parties are catchall in character or at least not hostile to the migrants. However, if one of the major parties/coalitions are hostile to the migrants in question on religious,ethnic, or other grounds and have managed to successfully polarize public opinion on this issue then the competing party/coalition might also shun the migrants so as not to be painted as pro-migrant and lose the votes of the majority/major communities in the state. What I have outlined in this brief chapter are how four clusters of variables affect the relationships between political parties and inter-state migrant voters at the state level. The above points are definitely not conclusions but only a framework and variables which can be used to analyze the necessarily complex relationships between political parties and migrant communities in India’s states.

Notes 1 For a discussion of party typologies see Gunther and Diamond (2001). For adaptations of the Gunther-Diamond typology to India see Sridharan and Varshney (2001) and Gowda and Sridharan (2007). 2 For a description of the BJP’s formidable organizational capacity see Jha (2017). 3 For types of party competition in India’s states see Palshikar (2015). Also, Farooqui and Sridharan (2016); Sridharan (2017).

114  Eswaran Sridharan

References Farooqui, A.,& Sridharan, E. (2016). Can umbrella parties survive? The decline of the Indian National Congress. Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 54(3): 331-361. Gowda, M.V.R., & Sridharan, E. (2007). Parties and the party system, 1947–2006. In S. Ganguly, L. Diamond, & M. Plattner (Eds.), The state of India’s democracy.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gunther, R., & Diamond, L. (2001). Types and functions of parties. In L. Diamond & R. Gunther (Eds.), Political parties and democracy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jha, P. (2017).How the BJP wins: Inside India’s greatest election machine. New Delhi: Juggernaut Books. Palshikar, S. (2015). Surviving sans politics: Congress in the times of the post-­ congress era. Economic and Political Weekly, 50(19): 39-46. Sridharan, E. (2017). The shifting party balance. Journal of Democracy, 28(3), 76–85. Sridharan, E., & Varshney, A. (2001). Toward moderate pluralism: Political parties in India. In L. Diamond & R. Gunther (Eds.), Political parties and democracy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Part III

Migrants, development, and social change

9 Livelihood diversification and out-migration An appraisal of rural Bihar Nandan Kumar and R. B. Bhagat

Changing scenario of rural livelihood: deagrarianization and diversification The census data of 2011 has revealed a dramatic rise in the figure of migration in India, which requires to be explained in terms of the ongoing developmental process. Between the census years 2001–11, the number of male migrants has grown phenomenally, by almost 51 percent. Thus in 2011, the proportion of male migrants is 22.6 percent of the total male population, substantially higher compared to the 17.5 percent of all men in 2001. Although, there are several socio-cultural factors contributing to the process of migration, it is needless to say that economic factors play a critical role. Also, to explain the precursor of migration for a country like India, the development process of the rural areas needs to be highlighted first. It is an established belief that, the rural area of a country like India thrives over subsistence agriculture exclusively, where non-agricultural activities largely revolve around agriculture. Migration is largely viewed as a disruption in this normalcy (De Haan, 1999). This paper argues that the rural area is not as agrarian as previously thought and the rural livelihood patterns have become diversified as much as they may not be characterized by any one activity; currently, migration is an integral part of this livelihood diversification strategy. According to ­Bryceson (1998), “Deagrarianization” of rural areas can be defined as a process of: (i) economic activity reorientation (livelihood), (ii) occupational adjustment (work activity), and (iii) spatial realignment of human settlements (residence) away from agrarian patterns. Although, any major spatial realignment is not visible in the Indian context, as merely 31.2 percent of population resides in urban areas, other macro level data indicate that the process of deagrarianization is indeed taking place in rural India. In 1980–81, the share of agriculture and allied activities in the GDP was 35.7 percent; in 1990–91, it went down to 29.5 percent; in 2000–01, it declined further to 22.7 percent; and in 2010–11, it was merely 14.6 percent (Source: http://statisticstimes.com/economy/sectorwise-gdp-growth-of-india.php). However, the census data shows that, the decline in workforce participation in agriculture has not been as sharp as expected. Workforce participation

118  Nandan Kumar and R. B. Bhagat in agriculture was 60.5 percent in 1981, which dropped to 54.6 percent in 2011. This figure hides the process of dispossession of farmers in the rural area as the proportion of farmers declined from 37.8 percent in 1981 to 24.6 percent in 2011. The fall was more dramatic in the last decade as the proportion of farmers came down to 7.1 percent (Salve, 2014). This decline has led to rise in the proportion of agricultural laborer from 22.7 percent to 30 percent of the workforce. Thus, in India, the process of “deagrarianization” and “depeasantization” of rural areas are going on hand in hand. Further, once the share of agriculture has declined sharply it is palpable that the farmers are able to gain very less income from the agriculture particularly those who are the smallholders. The 70th Round of National Sample Survey (NSS) survey conducted in 2013 shows that an average household of cultivator receives merely Rs. 3,081 from cultivation and Rs. 763 from animal husbandry in a month. The 65 percent of the farmers who hold below 0.4 hectares of land earned merely Rs. 687 monthly from agriculture and Rs621 from animal husbandry (NSS, 2014). Thus, the dismal agrarian condition is arguably a precursor or the push factor behind the livelihood diversification. There is enough evidence to show that livelihood diversification is taking place in Global South. Davis et al. (2010) on the basis of the Rural Income Generating Activities (RIGA) database has shown a clear picture of multiple activities across rural space in countries of the Global South. For most countries included in the sample, the largest share of income stems from off-farm activities, and the largest share of households have diversified sources of income. Rigg (2006) has pointed out that with the process of “deagrarianization” or “depeasantization” some common trends are emerging all across the rural Global South. First, occupations and livelihoods in the countryside are diversifying. Second, occupational multiplicity is becoming more common and more pronounced. Third, the balance of household income is shifting from farm to non-farm. Fourth, livelihoods and poverty are becoming delinked from land (and from farming). Landholding or productivity is losing its potential to explain poverty or prosperity in the rural areas of Asia and Africa. Thus, land distribution as a measure to decrease poverty in rural areas has lost its relevance. Education and infrastructure development are being considered as more effective measures that secure the access to opportunities in the non-farm sector. Fifth, along with the diversification of livelihood, societies are becoming more mobile and livelihoods are correspondingly getting delocalized. Sixth, remittances are playing a significant role in rural household incomes. Seventh, the average age of farmers is rising, as agriculture is mostly on the shoulder of elders, while the younger workforce sees its future in the non-farm sector, and finally, cultural and social changes are implicated in livelihood modifications, and in newer ways.

Livelihood diversification From theoretical standpoint, diversification is described not as the new normal of the rural area in the Global South but has been inherent in the

Livelihood diversification and out-migration  119 livelihood strategy since ages. The popular framework of sustainable livelihood suggests that people have the tendency to diversify their livelihood as very few people draw all their income from any one source, hold all their wealth in the form of any single asset, or use their assets in just one activity (Barrett et al. 2001). Ellis (1998) defined livelihood diversification as the process by which rural families construct a diverse portfolio of activities and social support capabilities in their struggle for survival and in order to improve their standards of living. Barrett et al. (2001) define that diversification patterns reflect individuals’ voluntary exchange of assets and their allocation of assets across various activities so as to achieve an optimal balance between expected returns and risk exposure conditional on the constraints they face. According to Ellis (1998), diversification is not merely a transient phenomenon, which takes place amid the process of sectoral transformation, but also a desperate struggle for survival in a declining economy. It may be associated with success at achieving livelihood security under improving economic conditions as well as with livelihood distress in deteriorating conditions. However, the most cited motive of diversification is increasing risk or vulnerability of the sources of livelihood in rural area, particularly agriculture, as described by economists. Income diversification as a risk strategy is usually taken to imply a trade-off between a higher total income involving greater probability of income failure, and a lower total income involving smaller probability of income failure- in other words, households are risk averse, and they are prepared to accept lower income for greater security. However, the missing land or labor market may also create a situation of diversification in the developing country. It may create a situation, where a household may find itself unable to transfer all of its critical resources in one activity. As it is explained by (Barrett et al., 2001) “Missing land markets, for example, can help explain why a skilled blacksmith who inherits land spends scarce time farming although his comparative advantage lies in smith work. Were land markets to be operative, he might rent out or sell his land and devote all his time to blacksmithing” (Little et al., 2001) The major proximate economic determinants of diversification (which is applicable for the motive of migration also) such as – seasonality, land market, labor market or credit market imperfections, risk, coping, credit, and accumulation – may be conceptually distinct but are rarely separable in practice. Together, they often represent multi-faceted experience of the same situation of poverty and all such determinants are mediated through social institutions (Bebbington, 1999). Thus, it is hard to ascertain one factor which plays the critical role in determining diversification. Therefore, this paper doesn’t attempt to single out the motive of livelihood diversification. Instead, tries to explain the evolving process of diversification with migration.

120  Nandan Kumar and R. B. Bhagat In recent scholarship, the issue of diversification has been discussed as a household livelihood strategy; however, a macro-economic explanation is also required to put the entire changes evolving in rural areas into a broader socio-economic perspective. The rural growth linkages model, originating in the mid-1970s emphasize that agricultural development is critical for the emergence of non-farm employment in rural areas. Its central tenet is that growth in agriculture itself provides the stimulus for the growth of rural non-farm activities. This is said to occur due to the rising expenditure of farm households on locally produced non-farm commodities and services, including consumer goods and services (expenditure linkages), inputs and services to agricultural production (backward linkages), and processing and marketing services related to farm outputs (forward linkages). Studies of rural growth multipliers mainly concur that consumption linkages tend to dominate over forward and backward linkages in explaining total linkage effects (Hazell & Haggblade, 1993). The linkage model is based on a sound concept but has little explanatory power to analyze the ongoing developmental process, as the recent development in non-farm activities are occurring in a post-green revolution era when agriculture is showing the tendency of long-term stagnation, if not decline. FAO (1998) characterizes three broad “stages” of transformation of the rural economy. In the first stage both production and consumption linkages between the farm and non-farm sectors are very strong and rural–urban links still relatively weak. During this stage, non-farm activities tend to be mainly in areas upstream or downstream from agriculture. The second stage is characterized by a lower share of households directly dependent on agriculture, and greater rural–urban links. Services take off more strongly, while labor-intensive manufacturing in rural areas finds increasing competition from more capital-intensive urban enterprises and imported goods. The third stage is characterized by a maturing of these trends’ stronger links with the urban sector, migration, employment, and income increasingly generated in sectors with little or no relation to agriculture (Winters et al., 2009). Therefore, the theory of World Bank presume that growth and development in rural areas may take place, delinked from agriculture; non-farm employment may grow without finding impetus from agriculture, likewise migration may also take place as intensifying rural–urban linkages and greater dependency on urban area. The objective of the study is to assess the trade-off between the sources of livelihood in the rural area where the smallholder’s subsistence agriculture is considered as a typical way of life and livelihood. In this study, it is tried to understand how a household may pileup different sources of livelihood in their income portfolio and how the migration and remittances may play a crucial role in this process.

Concepts and data sources The study focuses on the state of Bihar, which is the province of middle Gangetic plain, where agricultural is typically a smallholder’s and

Livelihood diversification and out-migration  121 subsistence-based practice. From this area, the chains of out-migration have established since distant past. Thus, the trade-off between agriculture and out-migration is established (Kumar & Bhagat, 2012; Yang, 1979). To explore the process of diversification and out-migration in such a setting, a field study was conducted. Barauli block in Gopalganj district in the state of Bihar was selected as the area of study on the basis of two criteria. Firstly, there is higher out-migration from the area compared to other adjacent areas. The area has been selected on the basis of higher proportion of females as compared to males in the study block (947 males per 1,000 females according to census 2001), which is considered as proxy indicator for single male out-migration for wage earning. This area depicts a rich history of out-migration, dated back to the colonial period, continued in the independent India with the most recent wave of out-migration to the Gulf Countries (Kumar & Bhagat, 2012; Sasikumar & Thimothy, 2015). In this block, according to census of India 2001, among the main male workforce, 47 percent are cultivators and 30 percent are agriculture laborers. There are 71 villages in this block out of which ten villages are selected according to probability proportion to size (PPS) method. Household is the unit of sampling, and head of the household is the respondent. Circular systematic random sampling method has been adopted for sampling. Survey was conducted in 450 households. Income, work participation, and migration were the major topics covered in the survey. The field survey was conducted between August 2013 and December 2013. To capture the phenomenon of livelihood diversification, an income survey is the most essential exercise, as income can be considered as the most featured outcome of livelihood activity or livelihood strategy (Ellis, 1998). However, capturing income accurately is a major challenge; it is not only more susceptible to response bias, but in rural settings there is seasonal and annual variation in agricultural output and other activities, also it is not as easy to assess the income from agriculture or self-employment like wage or salary due to difficulty in assessing the cost of all kinds of input and value of output. In this study livelihood diversification is understood by income diversification, although, livelihood is more than just income. Livelihood includes income, as well as tangible and non-tangible assets such as social relation, property rights, and kinship networks (Ellis, 1998). However, income may be considered as one of the most important outcomes of the livelihood strategy (Scoones, 1998). Income refers to the cash earnings of the household plus payments in kind that can be valued at market prices. The cash earnings components of income include items like crop or livestock sales, wages, rents, and remittances. The in-kind component of income refers to consumption of own farm produce, payments in kind (for example, in food), and transfers or exchanges of consumption items that occur between households in rural communities (Ellis, 1998). Classification of sources of income and income diversification may vary according to the purpose of the study. In this study, income which is not earned through any activity is

122  Nandan Kumar and R. B. Bhagat classified into two categories: “other sources” which includes income from pension, rent, selling property, and land rent and income from “cash transfer schemes” of government which mainly includes widow and elderly pension schemes. Income earned from activities is classified into “remittances” which are earned from activities not found locally (within the boundary of the block) and locally available activities. Locally available employment can be classified into wage employment and self-employment. Wage employment is classified into daily “wage earning” [agricultural and non-agricultural (as practically agricultural and non-agricultural laborer are hardly separable as group) including employment in the scheme of MGNREGA] and salary. Self-employment can be classified further into employment in agriculture and allied activities (classified further as cultivation and animal husbandry) and self-employment in non-agricultural activities [termed as business (all kind of trading activities including patty trading and hocking) and services (including caste occupation)]. Thus, we obtain eight categories of sources of income in total, and if income from agriculture and animal husbandry is merged (as income from agriculture and allied activities) we have a total of seven categories. Income from agriculture, animal husbandry, and business and services are assessed on the basis of reduction of cost of input from value of output, wage income has been calculated by multiplying number of days with wage rate, and income for rest of the sources are based on the reporting of the respondents. Total income has been calculated by adding the income from each source. How the household is doing the sequencing of different sources of livelihood in their income portfolio have been observed through aforementioned categories. To understand the interrelation between the sources of livelihood and inequality of income in the area, the Gini Decomposition method has been used. It reveals the distribution of income from each source separately. Further, the determinants of out-migration and livelihood diversification have been observed through multinomial logistic regression analysis.

Findings Income from locally available sources and other sources Income from agriculture In the area, 71.8 percent of households had ownership of land and 71.1 percent were engaged in cultivation. Table 9.1 shows that, out of 71.1 percent of households, which cultivated in 2013, 98.4 percent produced wheat, 97.8 percent produced paddy, maize was cultivated by 27.2 percent, potato by 17.5 percent, sugarcane by 15 percent, mustard by 6.9 percent, and tobacco by 3.8 percent. Multiple cropping is the norm in the area and thus, crop intensity was 1.80. The productivity of paddy was 24 Quintal/ Hectare, wheat was 28 Quintal/Hectare, sugarcane was 1028 Quintal/­ Hectare, maize was 25 Quintal/Hectare, potato was 79 Quintal/Hectare,

Livelihood diversification and out-migration  123 Table 9.1  Area cultivated and production and productivity of different crops Proportion Total Proportion Productivity Average of Area (in of Net (in Quintal/ price Cultivators hectare) Shown ha.) (in Rs./ Area Quintal) Paddy Wheat Sugarcane Maize Potato Mustard Tobacco Other crops

97.8 98.4 15.0 27.2 17.5 6.9 3.8 __

79.55 78.96 15.67 9.86 3.69 1.78 0.91 2.77

74.5 73.9 14.7 9.2 3.5 1.7 0.9 2.4

24 28 1,028 25 79 15 __ __

1,310 1,350 245 750 1,000 2,000 __ __

Proportion of total output 23.2 28.4 37.3 2.8 2.8 0.7 3.8 1.0

Source: Field survey, August–December 2013.

and mustard was 15 Quintal/Hectare, which can be considered as good harvest comparing with national or state average. Table 9.2 shows expenditure on agriculture, value of output, and net income from it by different size-class of land holdings. Around 21.9 percent of farmers has 0.01 to 0.1 hectare of holding, the ratio of input and output is 185, net annual income is Rs. 1,888, and proportion share in total income by this size-class is only 2.4 percent. Around 25 percent of farmers has 0.1 to 0.2 hectare of holding, the ratio of input and output is 129, net annual income is just Rs. 2,052, and proportion share in total income by this sizeclass is only 3.0 percent. Therefore, around 47 percent of cultivators earn very minimal income from farm. Again around 31.9 percent of farmers has 0.2 to 0.5 hectare of holding, which can be considered as medium size of

Table 9.2  Expenditure and income from agriculture by landholding size Size-class of Percentage Total Value of Ratio of Value of Proportion cultivated of expenditure agricultural output agricultural share in area size-class output to input output – income expenditure 0.01 to 0.1 0.1 to 0.2 0.2 to 0.5 0.5 to 1 Above 1 Total

21.9 25.1 31.6 16.6 4.8 100

2,229 7,138 14,676 30,339 83,222 15,948

4,117 9,190 23,890 65,932 234,786 32,980

Source: Field survey, August–December 2013.

185 129 163 217 282 207

1,888 2,052 9,213 35,593 151,563 17,031

2.4 3.0 17.4 35.0 42.1 100

124  Nandan Kumar and R. B. Bhagat holding, in reference to the area, the ratio of input and output is for this class is 163, net annual income is Rs. 9,213, and proportion share in total income by this size-class is around 17.4 percent, still much lesser than the proportion of farmers in this size-class. Around 16.6 percent of farmers has 0.5 to 1 hectare of holding, the ratio of input and output for this class is 217, net annual income is Rs. 35,593, and proportion share in total income by this size-class is around 35.0 percent. However, it is still around Rs. 3,000 per month. In the highest size-class, more than 1 hectare, around 4.7 percent of farmers comes, the ratio of input and output for this class is 282, which is highest among all the size-classes, net annual income is around Rs. 1,51,600, and proportion share in total income by this sizeclass is around 42.1 percent. The average monthly income of farmers of this category is around Rs. 12,600, which can be considered sufficient. Cultivators in this size-class are mostly sugarcane cultivators, which is a high yielding cash crop. Overall, an average cultivator expends around Rs. 15,948, value of agriculture output is Rs. 32,980, gains almost twice compared to expenditure in normal circumstances, and average net annual income of farmers of this area Rs. 17,031, with high level of inequality in income distribution. Through field observations, it has been found that satisfying household requirement is the main objective of cultivation in the area. Animal husbandry Crop–livestock integration is one of the most common forms of livelihood diversification in rural areas as it is realization of strategic complementarities between activities (Barrett et al., 2001). Although, 69.1 percent of the households of the area is engaged in animal husbandry, Table 9.3 shows that, only 51 percent of them get milk from them. Mostly these households Table 9.3  Mean income and expenditure in animal husbandry Proportion of total household

Production of milk Selling of milk Selling eggs and chickens Selling livestock Expending on animals Mean income

Proportion Annual income or of household expenses per household possessing animals (engaged in animal husbandry) (in Rs.)

35.0

50.5

14,217

18.3 1.5

26.4 2.2

7,579 102

15.6

22.5

1,136

42.6

61.5

5,229

Source: Field survey, August–December 2013.

10,227

Livelihood diversification and out-migration  125 possess one cow or buffalo, thus, the scale of the activity is totally subsidiary. Merely 26.4 percent of the total household in this area sold milk and the rest have utilized it for their own consumption. The households which are engaged in animal husbandry having the average value of output around Rs. 15,500/annually (including the value of produced milk and selling livestock) the average annual expenditure is Rs. 5,200, thus the average annual net output is around Rs. 10,200. Thus, compared to agriculture, the ratio of input and output is higher (2.96 times) in animal husbandry. Wage earning Around 39.5 percent of household is participating in wage earning activities, Table 4.8 shows that in 34.2 percent of household males are wage earners and in 11.8 percent of household females are also getting involved. It is worthy to note that female wage laborers were confined in agricultural activity. Table 9.4 shows that average man-days of work in a year for male are 132 days and for female it is 79 days. Average wage rate for male is Rs. 183/day and for female it is Rs. 57/day. In MNREGA, just one member from 17 households (3.8%) got work. Average man-days of work are 49 and average wage rate is Rs. 148/day. Salary In the area around 8 percent of households are getting salaried income which is 36 in number. Out of 36 households from six households, two persons are salaried and from 30 households only one is salaried. Table 9.5 shows that, a total 42 salaried employees were recorded in the study, out of which 17 were working with a local body of self-governance (Panchayat) on payroll basis, eight were working as teachers in government schools and seven in private schools, five were doing other government jobs, and remaining five were working on regular salaried basis with some private job providers. Therefore, it can be said that most of the salaried jobs in this area are associated with strengthening local bodies, and rural industrialization has very little role in this context. Table 9.4  Mean income of a wage laborer Male Proportion of household involved Man-days a household got worked Wage rate Wage earned

Female

MGNREGA workers

34.2

11.8

3.8

132

79

49

183 24,156

57 4,503

148 7,252

Source: Field survey, August–December 2013.

126  Nandan Kumar and R. B. Bhagat Table 9.5  Mean annual income from different forms of salaried employment Activities

Number of persons employed in different trades

Working in Panchayat Teaching (Govt.) Teaching (Private) Govt. Job Private Job Mean

17 8 7 5 5 __

Annual income (in Rs.) 36,120 103,800 42,000 92,000 40,000 55,296

Source: Field survey, August–December 2013.

Business or providing service Self-employment (in non-agricultural activities) in the area can be classified into two categories: business (such as hocking, owning small, or big shop) or trading activities and providing services (including caste and occupation). There is 16.4 percent or 74 households engaged in business or providing services; 31 or 41.9 percent of households are providing services, and 43 or 58.1 percent of households are engaged in some kind of trading related activities. In these households around 90.5 percent are engaged in just one venture. The average annual expenditure of service provider’s household for their venture is merely around Rs. 3,916, the value of their output is around Rs. 42,568, and average annual income is around Rs. 38,653. Trader’s household expends annually around Rs. 96,000 and get the return of around Rs. 283,750 and therefore their annual income is around Rs.187,750 Cash transfer schemes Such government scheme includes mainly widow and elderly pension. Around 12 households (2.7%) are getting such benefit in the area of study for one member and getting the benefit of Rs. 3,600 annually. Other sources Other sources include renting land, other kind of rents, pension, and selling property. Around 33 households show that they are getting income from other sources, around 19 households mentioned land rent as their source of income (although 21 households rented out their land), and average annual income from it is around Rs. 10,200. Seven households are getting pension and mean annual income from it is Rs. 56,700 and seven households are getting income from renting or selling property and mean annual income from it is Rs. 124,500.

Livelihood diversification and out-migration  127 Migration and remittances Out-migration for employment related reasons is taking place from as much as 65 percent of households. The average number of migrants from a household is around 1.5 per household. Figure 9.1 shows that million plus cities are attracting the major chunk of out-migrants from the area; out of 448 migrants, around 65.2 percent of the total out-migrants are going to the major million plus cities of India, and merely 16.4 percent of migration is taking place in the other cities of India. A sizable proportion of 18 percent is going overseas. Figure 9.2 shows the states of India where internal-migrants from the area are staying are Delhi (23.7%), Maharashtra (12.9%), Gujarat (11.6%), West Bengal (8.4%), Uttar Pradesh (8%), Haryana (6%) Punjab (6%), Rajasthan (4.8%), and Bihar (4.4%). The major direction of out-migration is toward north and west.

18.0

16.4 65.2

Million Plus Cities

Other Cities

International Migration

Figure 9.1  Out-migrants by destination (%). Source: Field survey, August–December 2013.

4.4

2.8

2.4 2

6.8

23.7

4.8 6 12.9 6 8

11.6 8.4

Delhi

Maharashtra

Gujarat

West Bengal

Uttar Pradesh

Haryana

Punjab

Rajasthan

Bihar

Karnataka

Chandigarh

North - East

Other States

Figure 9.2  Internal migrants by destination (%). Source: Field survey, August–December 2013.

128  Nandan Kumar and R. B. Bhagat Out of 65 percent of out-migrants, around 41 percent of household in the area was receiving remittances from internal migrants, while 15 percent were receiving remittances from international migrants. Table 9.6 shows the amount of remittances sent by an out-migrant, in case of internal migrants, around 32.6 percent send less than 20,000 in a year, 54.3 percent send 20,000 to 50,000 in a year, and merely 13 percent send more than 50,000 in a year. In case of emigrants, around 62 percent send one lakh to two lakhs in a year, 20 percent send fifty thousand to one lakh, and 16 percent send more than two lakhs yearly. Aggregate income from different sources Figure 9.3 shows aggregate income from different sources of participant households. From agriculture mean, income is around Rs. 17,000 annually, while median income is merely Rs. 3,600. From animal husbandry, Table 9.6  Amount received by household in last 1 year Amount received (in Rs.)

National

0–20,000 20,001 – 50,000 50,001 – 100,000 100,001 – 200,000 200,000 and above All

International

32.6 54.3 11.4 0.5 1.1 100

Total

0.0 2.0 20.0 62.0 16.0 100

25.6 43.2 13.2 13.7 4.3 100

Source: Field survey, August–December 2013.

140

121.9

120

121.4

102.2

100 65.8 48.0

80 60 40 20

17.0 3.6

21.8 10.2 5.9 5.4

28.5 28.2

42.0

69.4

55.5

44.3 3.6 3.6

20.8

0

Mean

Median

Figure 9.3  Annual household income from different sources of participant households (in Rs. 000). Source: Field survey, August–December (2013).

Livelihood diversification and out-migration  129 mean income is Rs. 12,700 while, the median is Rs. 5,400 (higher compared to agriculture). The mean income from agriculture and animal husbandry combined is Rs. 21,800 annually, while median income is just Rs. 5,900, which again confirms very inequal distribution of income from agriculture and allied activities. Mean and median income from wage earning is Rs. 28,500 and Rs. 28,200, which is higher than income from agriculture and allied activities and distributed equitably. Mean income from business and providing services is Rs. 1,21,900 is highest, while median income is much lower, about Rs. 42,000. The highest median income was obtained from remittances, which is Rs. 55,500 and mean income from this source is Rs.1,02,200. Therefore, mean household income in the area is Rs.1,21,400 annually and median income is Rs. 69,400 annually.

Sequencing of the sources of income As it is explained in above tables, household get very less income from agriculture, the market value of food grain that the household is producing is not sufficient enough to fulfill the household requirement. At the most agriculture can be a source of home-grown grains. Therefore, to meet the consumption requirement and to fulfill the requirement of cash, a household has to depend upon the other sources except cultivation. Table 9.7

Table 9.7  Matrix of economic activities taken up by households Cultivation

Cultivation Animal Husbandry Wage Earning

320 (71.1)

Animal Wage Salaried Business Remittances Other Benefit Husbandry Earning and sources from Services government scheme 236 (52.4)

123 (27.3)

27 (6)

53 (11.8)

192 (42.7)

14 (3.1)

9 (2)

311 (69.1)

135 (30)

19 (4.2)

50 (11.1)

193 (42.9)

17 (3.8)

10 (2.2)

178 (39.6)

7 (1.6)

21 (4.7)

84 (18.7)

_

_

36 (8)

2 (0.4)

9 (2)

10 (2.2)

_

74 (16.4)

36 (8)

9 (2)

5 (1.1)

267 (59.3)

12 (2.7)

9 (2)

33 (7.3)

3 (0.7)

Salaried Business and Services Remittances Other sources Benefitted from a government scheme

Percentages are shown in parentheses. Source: Field survey, August–December 2013

12 (2.7)

130  Nandan Kumar and R. B. Bhagat is a matrix of different kind of activities owned by household. It explains the combination of activities adopted by a household in their livelihood portfolio. The table shows that, 71.1 percent households are engaged in cultivation, in the same group, 52.4 percent of total household are engaged in animal husbandry also, and as much as 42.7 percent of them depends on remittance, 27.3 percent in earning wages, 11.8 percent in business or services, 6 percent are earning salary. Therefore, the household which depends upon cultivation, most of them depends upon animal husbandry and remittances as well. Again, around 69.1 percent of household, which depends upon animal husbandry, in the same group 52.4 percent of the total household are engaged in agriculture also, and as much as 42.9 percent get their income from remittances and around 30 percent get their income from wages. As much as 59.3 percent households which are getting remittances, in the same group, 42.7 percent of the total household depends on cultivation, 42.9 percent on animal husbandry, 18.7 percent on earning wages and 8 percent are engaged in business too. Around 39.6 percent of household depends upon wages, in the same group, 30 percent of the total household depends upon animal husbandry, 27.3 percent depends upon cultivation, 18.7 percent depends remittance also. Therefore, agriculture, animal husbandry, remittances, wage earning and business or services are the major sources which are combined together in the household income in the area. Table 9.8 shows the rank of different sources of income in sampled households. The table shows that agriculture and animal husbandry together is the first or main source of income only for 15.6 percent of households in the area, in around 36.4 percent of household it is the second most important source of income, while in 17.8 percent of household its importance is third Table 9.8  Ranking of different income sources (%)

Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Labour Salaried employment Business Remittance Other sources Government benefits

1st

2nd

3rd

4th

No Income

Negative Income

15.6

36.4

15.1

2.7

5.8

12.2

19.1 4.9

14 2

6 0.7

0.4 0.4

10 45.3 3.1

5.8 12.2 2.2

0.7 1.8 2.2

1.1

0.4

0.4

Source: Field survey, August–December 2013.

All 87.8 39.6 8 16.4 59.3 7.6

0.2

2.2

Livelihood diversification and out-migration  131 or below, around 5.8 percent of household got no income from it, and 12.2 percent of the household in the area got negative income from doing this activity. Wage is the primary source of income for 19.1 percent of household, for 14 percent of household it is the second most important source of income, and for 0.4 percent of household it is the third most important source of income. On salary around 4.9 percent of households depend as their primary source and it is a complementary source for around 3.1 percent of households. Business or providing services emerged as the most important source of income for around 10 percent of households and for remaining 6.4 percent of household it is a secondary source of income. Remittance emerged as the most important source of income in this area as it is the main source of income for around 45.3 percent of households in the area, and for around 12.2 percent of household it is the second most important source of income. Other sources are the main source for around 3.1 percent of households and cash transfer scheme is the prime source for no one.

Relative contribution of different sources to household income Figure 9.4 shows the share of different activities in household income. The table shows that the contribution of agriculture and animal husbandry is not substantial in households which are participating in this activity. Among the total 450 surveyed household, merely 14.5 percent is getting more than half of their income from agriculture. From wage earning activity, around 11.3 percent of surveyed households get more than half of their income. In case of salary, the proportion is around 4 percent of total households. In case of business and services 9.1 percent and in case of remittance the proportion of such household is 43 percent of all surveyed households.

43 29.7 14.5 8.5

17.7 11.3 4 2.4

50 percent or more

9.1

5.8

0.4 0

2.7 2

75 percent or more

Figure 9.4  Share of different economic activities in household income. Source: Field survey, August–December 2013.

132  Nandan Kumar and R. B. Bhagat It establishes the significance of remittance earning of household income of the area of study. Table 9.9 illustrates the results of decomposition of the Gini index. Total income can be disaggregated in multiple ways, depending on the characteristics of the information and on the question that we are trying to answer. In this case, total income from household data is divided into seven sources as given in previous table. Sk represents the share of source k in total income, Gk is the source Gini corresponding to the distribution of income from source k, and Rk is the Gini correlation of income from source k with the distribution of total income. Sk shows that remittances contribute almost half of the total income earned in the area. Business and services contribute 16.8 percent of total income. Agriculture and animal husbandry together contribute 16.1 percent, contribution of wage is 9.5 percent, contribution salary is 4.4 percent, other sources contribute 2.7 percent, and the contribution of cash benefit is less than 0.01 percent. Rk suggests that the correlation of remittances is highest (0.84) with total income, closely followed by business and services (0.81). Agriculture and animal husbandry (0.61), other sources (0.63), and salary (0.52) also shows high correlation with total income. The final result suggests that, 1 percent increase in income from business and services, remittances, and other sources is bringing inequality by 0.06 percent, 0.04 percent, and 0.03 percent successively. The most equalizing effect is brought by wage earning (−0.09 percent) and agriculture and animal husbandry (−0.02 percent) with 1 percent increase in income. In Table 9.10, the determinants of diversification of livelihood and out-migration have been compared. Coefficients have been derived through multinomial logistic regression method. The dependent variables are income diversification (considering cultivation and animal husbandry as agriculture and allied activities) and out-migration, both are classified into three categories; categories of diversification are one source of income, diversification

Table 9.9  Gini decomposition of income sources Source Agriculture and allied activities Wage earning Salaried employment Business and services Remittances Other sources Cash benefits Total income

Sk

Rk

0.161

0.609

−0.0177

0.095 0.044 0.168 0.505 0.027 0.001

0.082 0.523 0.806 0.835 0.632 −0.063

−0.0845 −0.0052 0.0619 0.044 0.0025 −0.0009

Source: Field survey, August–December 2013.

Percentage Change

Livelihood diversification and out-migration  133 Table 9.10  Determinants of livelihood diversification and out-migration Livelihood Diversification 2 sources Religion Hindu Muslim Caste SC/ST OBC General Status of land possession No land 0.01 to 0.20 hectare 0.21 and Above Education of HH Up to primary Middle and secondary Higher secondary and above No. of young members (15–44 years.) 0 1 2 3 or more Complexity of Households one marital unit two marital units three or more units

3 or more sources

Out-migration Internal migration

Emigration

1.36

0.564

1.052

8.479***

0.365* 0.149***

0.985 0.337

4.273*** 2.869

3.522* 4.545*

14.720*** 6.613***

14.965*** 3.698*

0.816 0.666

0.841 0.728

1.437 0.751

0.691 0.427

0.421*** 0.274***

1.037 0.32

2.41 1.475 1.182

3.787* 2.759 4.001*

8.990*** 9.682*** 45.626***

4.8 6.762* 46.009***

2.293 1.957

3.859* 3.475*

2.293** 2.933*

3.809** 5.717**

Source: Field survey, August–December 2013. * Significance at 0.05 for a two-tail test. ** Significance at 0.01 for a two-tail test. *** Significance at 0.001 for a two-tail test.

in two sources and diversification into three or more sources, in which one source of income is considered as reference category, similarly in case of out-migration, the reference category is no migration from household and interest categories are internal migration and emigration. Independent variables are religion, caste, status of land possession, educational achievement

134  Nandan Kumar and R. B. Bhagat of head, number of young members in household, and complexity of household (complexity of household is defined as number of couples in household including ever married but not currently in union, one couple or one widow/widower/separated is considered as one marital unit). Religion is playing a very significant role in emigration, if a household is headed by Muslim; the likelihood of emigration is 8.5 times higher from such household. Caste also plays an important but contradictory role in the process of livelihood diversification and out-migration, as caste hierarchy increases, the likelihood of diversification decreases but the likelihood of internal migration is found highest for Other Backward Caste (OBC) [4.3 times higher compared to Schedule Caste (SC)] and the likelihood of emigration is highest among general [4.5 times higher compared to Schedule Caste (SC)]. The land is not a significant predictor of out-migration, but livelihood diversification, those who possess small size of landholding (less than 0.2 hectare), shows very high likelihood of livelihood diversification in two sources (14.7 times compared to landless) and in three or more sources (15 times and higher), probably such household need to supplement their income from agriculture and other sources. Education decreases the likelihood of internal migration, when the head is educated with higher secondary and above, likelihood of out-migration from such household become just around one-fourth, compared to head with no education. If the number of youth (between 15 and 44 years of age) is higher in a household, it shows higher likelihood of diversification in three or more activities and very high likelihood in participation in migration. Those households have three or more youths, shows around 46 times higher likelihood in participation in internal migration or emigration. Again, as the complexity of household increases, it the likelihood of diversification in three or more activities and participation in migration increases.

Discussion and conclusion Currently the stress on agriculture has been increased due to growing climatic uncertainty, increasing cost of input, unfavorable terms of trade, and negligence of state policy. The study shows that the contribution of agriculture to the rural economy has been significantly downsized. Output from agriculture and animal husbandry became so thin that it cannot provide the smallholders any commercial gain. It may still have its usefulness in filling-up household granary and to meet their food requirements. But in the increasingly monetizing economy, while need of human being is also diversifying, the subsistence agriculture is quite insufficient to meet the ends. While the value of agricultural produced is low, the livelihood strategy of agricultural intensification and increasing productivity alone cannot help the household. Therefore, in this study small-holdings have emerged as good predictor of livelihood diversification at household level. Currently it is being argued that the smallholders agriculture should be promoted for the food security of the household (Bosc et al., 2013), while it can be

Livelihood diversification and out-migration  135 done, the need of a viable alternative for livelihood diversification cannot be denied. The study shows a typical area of diversified livelihood, centered around migration with agriculture in supplementary role. Although, the motive of diversification has not found out in the study, the household is showing a typical characteristic of risk averse household, which try to supplement their income from multiple sources to averse the risk of income or consumption failure. Although, diversification may take place for the purpose of accumulation also but given the spread of poverty in the area, diversification of livelihood seems concomitant to casualization of employment and instability of livelihood. Given the dependency on migration, better knowledge, healthy and capable workforce, strong social network, and protection of migrant’s labor rights at destination become so important for the development of the area of origin. Formation of appropriate policies is required for utilization of remittance in productive purposes. Further studies are required to understand economic, sociological, and cultural characteristics of rural areas, where migration is becoming a new way of life, pushing agriculture in background. The study indicates that at macro level, agriculture may not generate the sufficient impetus for non-agricultural activities in the area through the production and consumption linkages, should potentials be explored in migration and remittance earning. A strong policy is needed to inspire the emigrant’s household (which get a huge sum of remittance) to invest their income in productive activities rather than using it for conspicuous consumption. Also, the findings indicate that the social relation in the rural area needs a new set of inquiry. As land alone may not predict the accumulation of wealth and social relations in the rural area of the day (Rigg, 2006; Winters et al., 2009), the role of variables like access to education and enabler of migration opportunities should also be examined further, which may reorient or reinforce the old social relations in the rural area.

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136  Nandan Kumar and R. B. Bhagat Ellis, F. (1998). Household strategies and rural livelihood diversification. Journal of Development Studies, 35(1), 1–38. FAO (1998). The state of food and agriculture: Rural non-farm income in developing countries. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization. Hazell, P., & Haggblade, S. (1993). Farm-non-farm growth linkages and the welfare of the poor. In M. Lipton & Van Der Gaag (Eds.), Including the poor (pp. 190–204). Proceedings of a Symposium Organized By The World Bank and The International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC: World Bank. Kumar, N., & Bhagat, R. B. (2012). Out-migration from Bihar: Causes and consequences. Journal of Social and Economic Studies, 22(2), 134–144. Little, P. D., Smith, K., Cellarius, B. A., Coppock, D. L., & Barrett, C. (2001). Avoiding disaster: Diversification and risk management among East African Herders. Development and Change, 32(3), 401–433. National Sample Survey (NSS) Office (MoSPI), Government Of India. (2014). Key Indicators of Situation of Agricultural Households in India, January–December 2013. Rigg, J. (2006). Land, farming, livelihoods, and poverty: Rethinking the links in the rural south. World Development, 34(1), 180–202. Salve, P. (2014, August 11). How many farmers does india really have? The Hindustan Times. Retrieved from: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/how-manyfarmers-does-india-really-have/story-431phtct5O9xZSjEr6HODJ.html Sasikumar, S. K., & Thimothy, R. (2015). From India to the gulf region: Exploring links between labor markets, skills and the migration cycle. GDC Country Office Nepal, GIZ. Scoones, I. (1998). Sustainable rural livelihoods: A framework for analysis, IDS Working Paper 72, Brighton: IDS. Winters, P., Davis, B., Carletto, G., Covarrubias, K., Quinones, E., Zezza, A., Azzarri, C., & Stamoulis, K. (2009). Rural income generating activities: A cross country comparison. World Development, 37(9), 1435–1452. Yang, A. A. (1979). Peasants on the move: A study of internal migration in India. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 10(1), 37–58.

10 Domestic migration and multiple deprivations Cycle rickshaw pullers in Delhi Naresh Kumar

The Constitution of India (Article 19) gives the right to all citizens to “to move freely throughout the territory of India.” Evidence reveals that migration rates are high among both the highly educated and the least educated groups with high proportion contributed by the illiterate among the seasonal migrants (UNESCO–UNICEF, 2012). Migration has been considered an important aspect of regional and national development. In the cities, it has been generally seen that migrants have belonged to different occupational categories, that is, skilled, unskilled, and semi-skilled. The majority of them are not well educated or do not poses skills in urban cities like Delhi. According to the Census of India (2001), 2.22 million in-migrants entered in Delhi during 1991–2001 from mainly neighboring states of Delhi. A significant proportion of them got employment in the urban informal sectors such as construction workers, cycle rickshaw pulling, small hotels or motels, and roadside dhabas. Many unskilled in-migrants opted cycle rickshaw as an instant occupation for livelihood. (A cycle rickshaw is a type of tricycle that provides an important mode of transport service to daily commuters in cities; the person who runs or plies such a rickshaw is usually known as the cycle rickshaw puller or driver.) In the absence of the formal statistics of this occupation, it is providing livelihood for more than 8 lakh migrants who are directly or indirectly involved in this occupation in Delhi. Cycle rickshaw pullers are one of the highly neglected segments of migrants’ population in Delhi. Many of them suffer from multiple derivations. As per the NCEUS (2007) reports declared that 836 million Indians remain economically marginalized. The cycle rickshaw is a less expensive and convenient form of public transport, especially for short-distance daily commuters. It is a major means of transportation in cities and small towns. It provides door to door transport services to all classes of residents in Delhi. It is non-polluting and hence an environmental friendly means of transport or sustainable form of transport. This chapter has the following objectives: to discuss the various reasons of out-migration from the place of origin in case of cycle rickshaw pullers in Delhi; to analyze their socio-economic and demographic aspects and occupational problems faced by them in Delhi; to study and examine the multiple deprivation level among cycle rickshaw pullers in Delhi; to assess

138  Naresh Kumar the gaps between government policies and the real situation of these poor migrants, and to find out what measures can bridge this gap.

Data sources, research methods, and context of study Primary information was collected with the help of a questionnaire scheduled (total sample comprised 450 respondents) with the help of purposive sampling method in various Delhi MCD zones. Quantitative and qualitative data have been analyzed using a mixed-methods approach. Deprivation Index has been computed among rickshaw pullers and analyzed with the help of scoring scaling methods. Other statistical techniques like cross-tabulations, logistic regression, graphical representation, case studies, and focused group discussions have been used. Besides, analysis of the law about cycle rickshaw pullers and review of the available documents, newspaper reports, and other publications was undertaken. Although limited research work has been conducted on cycle rickshaw pullers, some sources address their hardships and agonies along with other urban poor. Study on rickshaw pullers cannot be done in isolation without having a thorough understanding of urbanization, migration, growth of informal sector, and conditions of urban poor in Indian cities. Deshingkar and Farrington (2006) in their paper have reported that the out-migration of rural labor has a role in poverty reduction. They have found that agriculture wages have remained relatively low, a few rural labor households have been able to break out of poverty through household diversification strategies that use the combination of two or more of the following: accessing regular work inside or outside the village, leasing of land being given by a patron for cultivation, and starting up a small business enterprise. One of the mandates of NATRSS (National Academy for Training and Research in Social Security) is to research all facts of social security including micro- and macro-level policy and implementation issues. Keeping in view the above mandate, the NATRSS has conducted a study on social security schemes for rickshaw pullers in Delhi in 2007 which was sponsored by the Ministry of Labour and Employment, Government of India. The survey showed that most of the unlicensed rickshaws are also being operated by thekedars or contractors and an actual number of rickshaw pullers is much higher than the demand for their services. This survey shows that many rickshaw pullers are not registered or placed under security schemes due to the informal nature of their business. They have no financial resources to purchase rickshaws. There is also no active organization or association to take up their cause. The National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector (2007) report has highlighted the plight of rickshaw pullers; they are mainly fresh migrants in cities. Most of them migrated from rural areas due to abject poverty and in other cases due to unemployment or lack of suitable jobs. Before migration, they were mainly small farmers, landless, or casual agricultural laborers. Begum and

Domestic migration and multiple deprivations  139 Sen (2004) have conducted a primary survey on 402 rickshaw pullers in the city of Dhaka in Bangladesh. According to the scholars, rickshaw pullers migrate mostly from those pockets of Bangladesh which are poverty-stricken. Ninety percent of rickshaw pullers migrate to the city straight from the villages. The occupational background of rickshaw pullers, who are mostly engaged as casual laborers, marginal farmers, and petty businessmen before migration, has been also dealt with within this article. The working and living environment of rickshaw pullers, their well-being, and various necessities have also been discussed. Morbidity pattern, the prevalence of diseases, treatment behavior, relationship with ill-health, and poverty has been also presented and discussed by the authors. Efroyonson and Bari (2005) have discussed the Rickshaw ban in Dhaka City. The article provides the importance of non-motorized transport including rickshaws as the modes of transport in Dhaka city. According to them rickshaws have been considered as eco-friendly, energy efficient, economically viable, and require significantly less road space than other motorized vehicles. They have also discussed the rickshaw ban in some parts of the city and its impact on the rickshaw puller’s income. Rickshaw puller’s incomes have decreased due to the ban imposed on rickshaws in some places in Dhaka city. According to them, rickshaws should not be considered as a cause of traffic congestion because they require less space than motorized vehicles such as cars. According to them, rickshaw pulling should not be considered as an inhuman profession as it depends on the economic condition of people as well as that of the concerned city.

Results and discussion Migration in Delhi Migration to Delhi for work remains on a high even today. Increasing prospects of finding a job have attracted a large number of job seekers to Delhi, and a majority of them do get employment in the informal service sector. According to Census 2001, Mumbai attracted the largest number of in-migrants followed by Delhi. However, Delhi receives the largest number of in-migrants from other states of India and ranked first in terms of the proportion of in-migrants to the total population. According to Census 2001, 2.22 million migrants came to Delhi between 1991 and 2001 (substantially higher than the 1.64 million who had come in between 1981 and 1991). Mainly unskilled migration to Delhi is a male-dominated process because young men come to Delhi in search of a better livelihood. Most of the in-migrants to Delhi come from the backward rural areas. Extreme poverty leads to migration of poor people from rural to urban areas in search of a better life, better job opportunities, and better services. A good proportion of these migrants comprise of unskilled or semi-skilled laborers and they enter informal sectors due to the push factors of overpopulation and stagnation of agriculture at their place of origin. Many

140  Naresh Kumar unskilled male migrants get absorbed in the marginal transportation sectors like rickshaw pulling, construction works, street vending, petty trade, and other low-grade services since most of them do not get proper employment in Delhi. Out of 450 respondents, 95.8 percent of them stated that their places of birth were outside Delhi (Migrants) and 4.2 percent reported that their place of birth and the place of enumeration were the same, that is, Delhi (non-migrants). Mainly migrants are engaged in cycle rickshaw pulling as their occupation, but some non-migrants also take up this job due to lack of functional skills and scarcity of gainful employment. Empirical results show distribution of rickshaw pullers in Delhi by place of birth data. It shows that the highest percentage of rickshaw pullers (43.3%) belong to Bihar followed by Uttar Pradesh (31.8%) and West Bengal (13.1%). Delhi has been recorded as the place of birth and the place of enumeration by 4.2 percent of the respondents only. Some people from Nepal too are plying rickshaw in Delhi and they contribute 2.4 percent of the total sample population. People belonging from Rajasthan, Punjab, Uttarakhand, and Haryana all together contributed about 2.7 percent of the total sample population. These states individually show insignificant (less than 1%) contribution. This indicates that Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal are the most important source regions of the rickshaw pullers in Delhi (Table 10.1). The study reveals that some of the important districts have contributed more rickshaw pullers. Out of the total 195 rickshaw pullers who hailed from Bihar, the bulk of them belong to Samastipur (7.9%), Banka (6.03%), Araria (4.87%), Purnia (3.48%), and others. It can be said that rickshaw pullers mainly come from the flood-affected districts of Northern Bihar where natural calamity impoverishes poor cultivators. Most of them are Scheduled Castes and are landless. Out of the total respondents, 143 respondents are from Uttar Pradesh. Rickshaw pullers come to Delhi from different districts of Uttar Pradesh, like Bareilly (2.55%) Badaun (3%), Unnav (1.86%), Buland Saher (1.39%), and Varanasi (1.6%). Primary data reveals that West Bengal is the third largest state in terms of out-migrant respondents in the case of cycle rickshaw pullers in Delhi. It is interesting to note that Maldah generates the bulk of the migrant rickshaw pullers. More than 8 percent of migrant rickshaw pullers reported Maldah as their place of birth. Incidentally, Maldah is one of the highest migrant rickshaw pullers generating districts contributing to Delhi. Out of the total migrant rickshaw pullers in Delhi, Maldah district is followed by Barddhaman (1.39%), Medinipur (1.16%), Murshidabad (0.70%), Jalpaiguri, and Birbhum. Maldah, Murshidabad, and Jalpaigudi districts lie near India-Bangladesh border and have an agrarian economy. Maldah is the most backward district of West Bengal and has the lowest Human Development Index (HDI) value (see West Bengal Human Development Report 2004). Other states contribute less in terms of in-migrants rickshaw pullers in Delhi (Schaefer, 2008, p. 69).

Domestic migration and multiple deprivations  141 Table 10.1  Residence and state of birth of rickshaw pullers in Delhi, 2009–2010 States Bihar Uttar Pradesh West Bengal Jharkhand Madhya Pradesh Other States (Rajasthan, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Haryana) Delhi (UT) Nepal Total

Rural N

Urban

Percent

N

Percent

195 135 58 5 5 8

46.2 32.0 13.7 1.2 1.2 1.9

0 8 1 1 0 4

5 11 422

1.2 2.6 100

14 0 28

Total N

Percent

0.0 28.6 3.6 3.6 0.0 14.2

195 143 59 6 5 12

43.3 31.8 13.1 1.3 1.1 2.7

50.0 0.0 100.0

19 11 450

4.2 2.4 100

Source: Author’s fieldwork in Delhi, October 2009–January 2010.

Reasons for out-migration Factors of out-migration vary from country to country and even within a country from area to area. Out-migration depends on the socio-economic, demographic, and cultural factors of the region. The high unemployment rate, low income, high population growth, unequal distribution of land, demand for higher education, previous migration pattern, and dissatisfaction with housing conditions have been identified as some of the prominent determinants of rural male out-migration. Rickshaw pullers are no exception; most of them have left their villages due to economic adversity. The scarcity of agricultural land and low productivity in the agricultural sector drive out young males from villages toward big cities like Delhi. During the survey, rickshaw pullers have given various reasons behind their migration. Most of the rickshaw pullers are seasonal migrants (23%) who come to Delhi during the lean season of agriculture and go back to villages at the time of harvesting and sowing. Out of the total respondents, 23 percent have come to the city due to the low wage rate and irregularity of jobs in the agricultural sector. Moreover, 16 percent of respondents reported that they do not possess agricultural land, 15 percent of them have small and marginal land holdings which are unproductive for cultivation, and 7 percent have left their rural homelands due to natural calamities like severe floods

142  Naresh Kumar or droughts which have destroyed their lands and properties. Among them, only 2 percent have reported that they came to Delhi because their parents or families have decided to shift their residences to the city. Socio-economic and demographic profile of rickshaw pullers It is evident that of the 450 rickshaw puller respondents, 78 percent belong to the Hindu community sub-divided into Scheduled Castes, Other Backward Castes, and General castes. Another 20.4 percent belong to the Muslim community and only 1.5 % respondents belong to Sikh and Christian communities. Even in the twenty-first century, caste still plays a crucial factor in choosing an occupation, especially in those areas where traditional socio-cultural setup is still prevalent. Caste mainly indicates a person’s social status as well as economic affluence. Thus, without a detailed study of the rickshaw pullers caste composition, one cannot identify the major socio-economic and demographic features of these poor people who provide cheap and quick transport in our everyday life. Empirical results further show that 49.8 percent of respondents are Scheduled Castes, 34.7 percent are from other Backward Castes, and only 14.9 percent are general caste people. The sample provides a negligible proportion of respondents who are from the Scheduled Tribe community and only 11 respondents are Nepalese by origin. It is generally considered that manual work is not for the so-called upper caste people. But in the field survey, it has been found that some of the respondents belong to general castes also. In the case of rickshaw pullers, migration is mainly age-selective and young male working-age people tend to migrate to developed areas in search of a livelihood. This has a two-way impact, that is, decline in the working-age population in the place of origin and increase of working-age population in the place of destination. In developing countries like India, male-selective migration to urban areas is a reality. Most of the respondent rickshaw pullers are in the age group 25–34 years. The average age of the sample rickshaw pullers is around 31 years. The age profile indicates that rickshaw pullers are primarily concentrated in the age interval of 25–34 years (33%) and below 25 years age group, dropping sharply after the age of 45 years. The minimum age is 15 and the maximum age is 60 years. If we look at education aspects in case of rickshaw pullers, most of them (more than 60%) are illiterate, only 13.3 percent have completed the primary level of education and only 20 percent of them have studied up to the middle level (i.e., up to Class 8th), while only less than 8 percent have completed matric or higher levels. On investigation, it was found that most of the illiterate rickshaw pullers come from the rural areas where they had been working as agricultural laborers or from urban areas where they had worked in factories in their childhood. Due to poverty and lack of awareness they had remained out of school without proper education.

Domestic migration and multiple deprivations  143 16%

4%

28%

18% 17%

3% 14%

To Earn More Money

Closure of Mills and Factories

Non-Availability of Others Jobs

Livelihhod

Pears Influence

Easy Entry in this Occupaon

Cannot Afford Hevy Investment Figure 10.1  Reasons for choosing rickshaw pulling as an occupation (2009–10). Source: Author’s fieldwork in Delhi, October 2009–January 2010.

Reasons choosing rickshaw pulling as an occupation There are many reasons for choosing this menial job as a source of livelihood. During the field survey, 28 percent of the total respondents stated that they wanted to earn more money and that was why they have chosen this as an occupation. 18 percent have stated that their relatives or friends were already plying rickshaws in Delhi and their economic prospect lured them to take this job. Displaced factory workers or laborers from the closed mills take up this job as an alternative source of income. Hence, 17 percent of respondents stated that earlier they were working in factories and mills, but after losing their jobs they have no other option for sustaining their families. It has been already stated that rickshaw pulling attracts poor migrants because it requires little skill and capital and hence 4 percent of the respondents have taken it up for this reason. Another 14 percent respondents stated that scarcity of other jobs encouraged them to take up this profession and considered this as an easy job, and only 3 percent of respondents thought that rickshaw pulling provides livelihood (Figure 10.1 and Table 10.2) reflecting on his experience Jagat Ram (SC), a 33-year-old rickshaw puller from the district of Badaun in Uttar-Pradesh. I'’ll pull rickshaw for a few months in Delhi before returning to my native village in winter. We work in the farms during winter and store grains for the rest of the season. I have a small piece of agricultural land but it does not yield sufficient income to feed my extended family where my old parents, four little kids, wife, and one unmarried sister are directly dependent on me. As I am the sole bread earner of my

144  Naresh Kumar family, I have to work in others’ farms. During the lean period when I do not get a job in farms, I come to Delhi and earn at least Rs. 4000 to 5000 per month. (Uttar Pradesh) Table 10.2  Place of residence of rickshaw pullers in Delhi 2009–2010 (%) Place of Stay Own house, not in Jhuggi-jhopdi Own house but in Jhuggi jhopdi Rented room Contractor’s rickshaw shed Footpath Railway station/bus stand Relatives/under flyover Staircases, Subway Rain Basera (Temporary shelters) Total

Total N

Percent

18

4.0

55 233 49 69 1 17

12.2 51.8 10.9 15.3 .2 3.8

8

1.8

450

100

Source: Author’s fieldwork in Delhi, October 2009–January 2010.

Ownership of rickshaws In Delhi, most of the rickshaw pullers are seasonal migrants and come from other states of India, and therefore, they are not interested to buy rickshaws. Their plea is that in case they purchase their vehicle, the problem of keeping it and handing over to some responsible person would arise when they would go back to their villages. The hired rickshaws could be returned to the owners and the responsibility gets minimized. Out of the total surveyed rickshaw pullers (450), only 14.2 percent of respondents are the owners of their rickshaws. On the other hand, about 85 percent of the rickshaw pullers hire their rickshaws on a daily rent basis. Less than 1 percent of respondents reported that they take rickshaws from their relatives or friends without paying rent. Results exhibit different sources of finance for purchasing rickshaws by the respondents. About 50 percent of the respondents have purchased rickshaws from their pockets, while 44 percent of them have received financial assistance from their friends and families. Only 6 percent of rickshaw pullers have taken loans from banks, as they are generally permanent residents of Delhi and have their existence in the city. Very few rickshaw pullers have taken a loan from the bank. Proper institutional

Domestic migration and multiple deprivations  145 support and financial assistance from the rickshaw banks, NGOs, Government Aids, etc., are absent in Delhi. Income The average monthly income of the rickshaw pullers varies from time to time. It has been found that during the survey period (October to December 2009) most of the respondents earned between Rs. 3,000 and 4,500 per month. Their average income was Rs. 4,375 per month. Earning directly depends on how many days in a week the rickshaw puller carries his job and how long he can work per day. The lowest income reported was Rs. 1,050 and the highest was Rs. 6,750. Out of the total surveyed rickshaw pullers, about 60 percent of the respondents earned between Rs. 3,001 and 4,500; 23 percent of them obtained Rs. 4,501–6,000 per month; only 4 percent earned more than Rs. 6,000 per month and 13 percent of them less than Rs. 3,000 per month. Residing places of rickshaw pullers It has already been stated that rickshaw pullers cannot afford to have proper housing facilities for themselves. Out of the total respondents, 51.8 percent live in rented rooms while 15.3 percent sleep on footpaths; 12 percent reside in unauthorized colonies (it’s semi-legal colonies in which buyers possess the legal documents as a form of General Power Attorney (GPA), and 3.8 percent reside under flyovers, staircases, and subways. Only 4 percent of the total have their residences in the city. Another 1.8 percent of the respondents stated that they live in the night shelters. Rickshaw pullers, who can neither afford to rent a room nor can afford to have a secure shelter for themselves, have to stay under the sky. They prefer to sleep in any open space, under balconies, market areas in each MCD zone, under flyovers, water pipelines, buildings, and also on the footpaths. They are the worst hit during winter and rainy seasons. I stay in Old Delhi railway station during the nights with other fellow rickshaw pullers. Though I prefer to take a nap on my vehicle only but during the rainy season we have to arrange for temporary shade with plastic sheets. My rickshaw is my home; I keep my humble belongings at the back of the rickshaw. Delhi is too expensive to have a rented room here and I have to send remittances back home. replied Jai Prakash, a young migrant rickshaw puller from Bihar. He further stated that I prefer to go for open-air defecation because the public toilets take charges and have bad odors. Though once in a week I have to pay for washing my clothes and bathing, but usually, I choose open spaces for toilets.

146  Naresh Kumar Drinking water Out of the total respondents, 33 percent get drinking water from the roadside taps from which local people take water. They have to wait long in the queue for getting water. Another 23 percent of respondents have stated that they get drinking water from hand pumps. Some of them have no access to potable drinking water because 7.6 percent of respondents collect water from the leakage in the pipeline and 5.8 percent get water from the MCD water tanks (Delhi Jal Board’s water tank). Homeless rickshaw pullers are the worst victim of water-borne diseases, even those who are residing in slums or low-income colonies do not get access to safe drinking water. Most of the colonies have taps or tube wells far away from the housing sites. Sanitation Another 23 percent use open space like vacant lands, forested areas, roadsides, and even the banks of the Yamuna River. Only 20 percent of respondents use flush latrine (Septic Tank) and 18 percent use pit latrine in their homes. Those who have either flush or pit latrines are mainly permanent residents of Delhi and live in rented rooms with their families and colleagues. Those who are living in slums, mainly use pit latrine and homeless rickshaw pullers use public toilets for latrine purpose as well as for bathing and washing their clothes. During the survey, it has been found that rickshaw pullers carry water bottles in their vehicles for toilet purposes. They have to pay Rs. 2 per bottle. Latrines adjacent to the night shelters are also used by some respondents. Health Questions have been asked on the occurrence of diseases in the last 1 year for finding out the pattern of morbidity among respondents. More than 90 percent of respondents stated that they have various health problems; only 10 percent stated themselves as physically well. It was also found that 18 percent respondents suffered from cold and fever; 15 percent respondents felt weakness; 10 percent respondents recently had jaundice; 11 percent rickshaw pullers had chest or body pain; 9.3 percent had diarrhea or dysentery; 9 percent had skin problems; 5 percent respondents had asthma; and 5.6 percent had tuberculosis (TB). Apart from HIV/AIDS and TB, they are also prey to various water-borne diseases like jaundice and diarrhea/dysentery, because many of them do not have access to potable drinking water and drink from the leakages in pipes in roadside taps. Unhygienic living conditions and inadequate diet increase the chances of tuberculosis. Physical weakness, fever, and respiratory problems are the symptoms of TB. If one person’s immune system has been broken down by HIV, diseases like TB further deteriorate health. TB spreads through sneezing and coughing. Rickshaw pullers generally share their

Domestic migration and multiple deprivations  147 residence with other fellow rickshaw pullers or live in one overcrowded room. Therefore, they have high chances of getting this disease from other rickshaw pullers. Poverty is another major obstacle that prevents them from getting proper medical care and rest because they are the major bread earners of their families. Those who are plying rickshaws for a long time, generally suffer from various infectious diseases. Availability and accessibility of medical care Rickshaw pullers in Delhi generally depend on private health care facilities due to inadequate primary health centers (PHCs) or dispensaries in the city. PHCs generally remain crowded and they do not have enough time to waste in the queue. Moreover, doctors do not treat them in a friendly manner in the hospital. Therefore, most of them prefer to go to the pharmacists directly. Most of the rickshaw pullers go for treatment only when they have serious health problems. Out of the total respondents, 24 percent rickshaw pullers go to private clinics and 23 percent go to the pharmacists for getting medicine directly. They neglect their health during the initial stage of infection, 21 percent go to the government hospitals, and 9.3 percent go to the quacks (Hakim Baba, Pehalwaan, Bengali Davakhanna), because they provide cheap medicine. Those who live in slums get medicines from the “mobile health van” of Delhi Government (7%) and those who are recent migrants visit their home (13%) during illness. It can be concluded that rickshaw pullers mainly depend on informal sources of medicine since they are easily accessible and provide medicines at a lower cost. Only 2.4 percent goes to the charitable hospitals and most of the respondents state that they visit government hospitals only when they have severe illness or injury. Occupational health hazards Occupational health is an interdisciplinary area that aims at providing safety, health, and welfare of people engaged in a particular work or employment. Occupational health and hazards not only affect the workers but also affects co-workers, family members, customers, suppliers, and other people directly related to the work environment. International Labour Organization and the World Health Organization have adopted a joint definition of occupational health in 1950. This definition reads “Occupational health should aim at the promotion and maintenance of the highest degree of physical, mental and social well-being of workers in all occupations.” Rickshaw pulling is an informal activity and rickshaw pullers are generally self-employed persons, therefore, there is no organizational body for monitoring their occupational health and related hazards. Pulling heavyweight tricycles and passengers almost every day across the roads with fast traffic make these poor rickshaw pullers prone to various catastrophes. If one lists those hazards one by one then road accident is the first and

148  Naresh Kumar foremost kind of occupational hazard that a rickshaw puller is expected to face. Road accidents and injuries When a young migrant arrives in Delhi, he starts earning money by rickshaw pulling as soon as possible. Therefore, because of the lack of training and experience in the initial period of working life, a rickshaw puller faces most of the accidents. More than 12 percent of the total respondents have stated that they face accidents during the working hours. Most of them cannot maintain their vehicles properly, therefore, failure of breaks, horns, and tyres also cause accidents. Apart from road accidents, rickshaw pullers often suffer due to body aches, muscle pains, and internal injuries. It has been found during an interview with the respondents that due to the forward bent position continuous tension is placed on the muscles, tendons, joints, and supporting ligaments, from the hands through the shoulders and the back. Hence, body pains are a common ailment among the rickshaw pullers. There is no separate lane for non-motorized transport in Delhi and conventional cycle rickshaw’s design is faulty that creates an adverse impact on the puller’s health. Thus, rickshaw pullers in Delhi are more exposed to road accidents. Health problems Rickshaw pulling is a tedious/arduous job that not only requires physical fitness but also compels workers to work in an adverse situation. Rickshaws enjoy high demand during rainy seasons, hot summer days, night time, and any odd time when people cannot walk a short distance or do not get any other form of transport. They often carry excess loads and more than two passengers for extra income. Therefore, most of the respondents complain about bad health, fever, cough, and cold. Nearly 17 percent of the respondents have complained that they have suffered from fever, cough, and cold frequently in the past year. Police harassment Most of the rickshaw pullers have complained about the MCD officers and traffic police at the time of the interview. Most of them have complained that they do not have rickshaw licenses, and the officers of the hackney carriage department take a bribe to make rickshaw licenses. Rickshaws are impounded by the hackney carriage department if the pullers do not possess valid licenses. They have to pay heavy charges to get back their rickshaws from the authority. Rickshaws are also banned in the arterial roads such as the Ring Road. Most of the rickshaw pullers have complained that the city does not have proper rickshaw stands in busy areas from where they can pick up their passengers and park their rickshaws during off time. Most of

Domestic migration and multiple deprivations  149 the time respondents have faced physical assault as well as verbal assault by the police and passengers.

Deprivation and rickshaw pullers Deprivation is a feeling or experience of being deprived of something which one thinks he or she is entitled to get. It is always defined in the relative term. Schaefer defines deprivation as “the conscious experience of a negative discrepancy between legitimate expectations and present actualities.” Deprivation also looks at the relative loss of avenues for using or enhancing capabilities. Deprivation takes many different forms in every known society. People can be said to be deprived if they lack the types of diet, clothing, housing, household facilities, fuel, environmental, educational, working and social conditions, activities, and facilities which are customary, widely encouraged, and approved, in the societies to which they belong. Deprivation is a situation where people cannot obtain the necessities for life and poverty is the basic cause of the situation. Deprivation refers to people’s unmet needs, whereas poverty refers to the lack of resources required for meeting those needs. Rickshaw pullers in Delhi who are treated as one of the most deprived segments of the workers working in the land transport sector cannot be termed as “poorest of the poor” in terms of income indicator only. Most of them earn more than Rs. 5,000 per month and their daily income exceed the “Poverty Line,” therefore, their poverty is not the absolute poverty but it is “relative poverty” or deprivation. Based on primary data collected during the field survey it has been found that rickshaw pullers do not lead a well-to-do life according to their income. They live in utterly deplorable conditions, sometimes without proper shelter and a nutritious diet. Despite hard physical work, they hardly can afford to have proper rest, food, and clothing, because a good proportion of their income is sent back home in form of remittances, and in Delhi, they try to survive on a small amount of money. Therefore, rickshaw pullers in Delhi are not poor, but they are deprived in many basic needs of life. Construction of the “Deprivation Index” will help to understand the magnitude and intensity of deprivation among the rickshaw pullers in Delhi. For the construction of the Deprivation Index “composite scoring” or scaling method has been used. With the help of the computer software Statistical Package for Social Sciences, this index has been constructed and different variables have been given weightage for convenience. For example, different caste groups have been given weightage according to their exposure to deprivation, that is, Scheduled Castes is assigned two indicating most deprived among all other caste groups, Other Backward Castes is assigned one, and general caste zero. Another example is alcohol consumption. Those who drink alcohol frequently or regularly are more prone to health problems than those who do not drink. None of the respondents is left out from the index. The mean value shows (19.07), which means below these, respondents come under the less deprived category. Those respondents above the

150  Naresh Kumar Table 10.3  Deprivation Index of rickshaw pullers in Delhi S. No. 1 2 3 4

Deprivation Category Less Deprived (