The perfect statement of Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez, The Salvadoran politician and businessman who is the 43rd and current president of El Salvador. In this blog post, I am only going to defend the statement that migration should never happen because no other option is left.
The challenge of migration is a problem associated with the improper temporary solution of the livelihood issue. In the Indian context, the migration which civil society organizations and governments address, is the movement of people from villages into the cities, usually as unskilled labour. This change of residence is often connected with the migration of labour and a career change from primary to the secondary or tertiary sector, not always true because the migrants are not always associated with agriculture or farming.
The objectives of CSOs are generally misunderstood, it is generally believed that they want to stop the migration or they don’t want the village youth to have aspirations of high standard life or they don’t want the villagers to leave agriculture and join the secondary or tertiary sector employments, in fact, migration is the rule and inherent character of the human race, neither the civil society organizations nor the government wants to discourage promotional migration.
As told by one of the senior executives of PRADAN, “The objective of working on migration issues is that first there should be the creation of enough income generation opportunities and options in the village itself, but we also understand that village has an upper limit, it becomes difficult to earn more than a certain limit in the village, but at least they should be able to reach that threshold. Another point is that, definitely, people can go to the cities, but there is no need to go there and work as construction labour or rikshaw puller, go there after proper education and skills so that they get respectful jobs and sufficient earning there. Our aim is not to stop the migration, instead what we aim is to stop the cases where people run away to cities half-naked and empty-stomach, instead, we lay our efforts to make sure that they go to cities after proper education, after acquiring a skill and after doing proper investigation, research and with a plan to live a decent life there, that is the objective.”
Here are some key points from the interview of Dr Aqueel Khan from the Association for stimulating Know How (ASK) which has been working with grassroots communities, NGOs, governments, and corporations in India and beyond. ASK’s work includes capacity building, research and evaluation, and corporate social responsibility projects working towards a more just, equitable, peaceful, and secure world:
Labour mobility for income opportunities is very prevalent within the country, which creates numerous corridors of migration from source to destination states. ASK has identified certain states as major source areas, including particularly impoverished areas like Odisha, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Assam and has researched destination states of Delhi, Haryana, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Tamil Nadu. Among these states, the most prominent internal migration corridors are Odisha and Jharkhand to Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana; and Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to Delhi and Haryana. These internal migration corridors are funnelling workers from some of the poorest parts of India to places with jobs like construction, harvesting, and businesses peripheral to India’s tech sector.
In addition, ASK has researched external corridors focusing on cross-border and unsafe migration, the conditions of migrant workers in the destination countries, and the challenges pertaining to making these pathways safe for all aspiring migrants. These corridors include Kerala to Gulf countries; Nepal to Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Delhi, and; Bangladesh to West Bengal.
West Bengal, Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, and Rajasthan are all states where women migrate from for work in high number. On the other hand, states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Gujarat witness significantly low rates of migration among women for work. These trends are affected by the social structures and the position that women have in their respective family structures. In certain regions, women are more reluctant to participate in income-generating activities. In those regions, men are expected to be the sole earning member of the family. However, some women who migrate with their husbands from their villages to cities, eventually start working due to the high cost of living in the city.
Certain sectors of work such as construction, domestic work, and brick kilns, receive more female migrant workers, either alone or with their families. The domestic work sector has the highest number of female workers in India. A majority of these workers are migrants who have settled in cities and semi-urban locations for work either within or outside of their state of origin. Being limited to the private sphere of a household, domestic workers are vulnerable to end up in situations of forced labour where they work for long hours at low wages, receive irregular or no payment, and are at risk for physical and sexual exploitation.
In India, children migrate to work in carpet weaving, informal eateries, small hotels, garment or shoe-making factories, domestic work, construction, brick kilns, begging, rag picking, or firecracker manufacturing. Children as young as five years of age migrate with their families to work in brick kilns, and girls of 10 to 12 years of age migrate for domestic work.
ASK learned that the vulnerabilities of migrant workers to human trafficking and forced labour can be reduced through the facilitation of safe migration. Governments need to collaborate to ensure that individuals migrating for better employment opportunities do so legally. Instead of trying to regulate or control migration outright, it is necessary to develop policies that ensure safe migration. It is a basic human right of an individual to move from one place to another to have access to better resources and build a better life.
In the age of globalization, where economies are not only exchanging goods and services but labour forces as well, it is important for any government to engage proactively in bringing about policy-level changes to match up to the changing migration trends.
Several organizations and projects like Migration & Asylum Project (M.A.P), Migrants Resilience Collaborative of Jan Sahas and Ajeevika Bureau of Rajasthan are performing tremendous work in the spectrum of migration, regarding migrants’ rights, migrants’ safety at work sites, etc.
