Overview of Informal and Migrant Labour in India
The repercussions of the COVID-19 crisis for low-skilled migrant labourers, and informal workers, have been devastating. Loss of jobs, lack of social security, and being stranded in an alien city or state will be problems that the country will have to grapple with well beyond the post COVID-19 world. This speculation might be true or might not be, that is for the time to decide. The government is taking necessary steps to ensure that such does not happen.
Article 22 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that every member of society has a right to social security. The International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) fundamental principles and standards protect workers in various sectors. They include freedom of association, equal pay for equal work, safe working conditions, the abolition of forced labour and sex-based discrimination, employment protection, provision of social security, protection of migrant workers, elimination of sexual harassment of women workers and others such facets.
The economic survey of 2018-2019 says that 93 percent workers are in the informal economy. While NITI Aayog’s ‘Strategy for New India’ in 2018 says that; “India’s informal sector employs approximately 85 percent of all workers”. While sources may differ on the precise numbers, the enormity of the informal workforce is an accepted and known reality. These workers contribute to 50 percent of India’s national income. It constitute a large part of the human capital base of the country. Considering the large percentage of the population trapped in the informal net. Providing legal and economic protection will be a massive undertaking during this pandemic. While India has numerous policies for social security when it comes to education, healthcare, skilling, food security and pensions. Most of these schemes are restricted to the organised sector.
The migration data from the 2011 census was analysed and released in the 2017 Economic Survey based on railway passenger traffic flows of the Ministry of Railways. New methodologies such as the Cohort-based Migration Metric (CMM). Estimates using the 2011 census and 2007-08 National Survey Sample place the share of migrants in the workforce to lie between 17 and 29 percent. There has been a steady increase in the number of internal migrants — annually. In inter-state labour mobility averaged 5-6 million people between 2001 and 2011. Therefore the inter-state migrant population comprises 60 million and inter-district migration is 80 million. Estimates of internal work-related migration for 2011-2016 shows that nine million people move between states.
Recent migration trends show that states like Maharashtra, Delhi, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat attract large swathes of migrants. Specially from the Hindi heartland of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh. West Bengal too attracts a large number of migrants from the neighbouring states of Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, and Odisha. Given the fact that Maharashtra and West Bengal are the largest regional economies. Also regional magnets for migrants in the southern and western regions, the northern and eastern zones, respectively. Here we particularly focus on how these two states have responded in safeguarding their migrants during the coronavirus scare.
Next steps?
The pandemic has jarringly exposed the fractures existing in the national attention given to safeguarding the rights of migrant labour. There is a glaring lack of focus on taking an updated stock of states’ migrant population and ensuring social security for them based on labour standards. There is scarce disaggregated internal migration data in India — the official statistics of the number of migrant labourers mainly comes from the dated census reports that define a migrant — as a person who lives somewhere that is not their place of birth or their last place of residence.
A focused drive to collate up-to-date data on migrants within states is important in order to correctly gauge the funds required to provide adequate access to food supplies, housing, sanitation, and financial services — all factors that migrant seasonal workers find difficult to access currently. Lack of granular data is an important reason why the nation seems to have just woken up to the migrant crisis. Nobody knows the magnitude of the situation. Because the data we have is derive from models on dated information.
Conclusion
States must now ensure that together with the growing interest in creating social security schemes for informal sectors, migrant labourers are differentiate and account for, due to problems like unavailability of identity proof and lack of cooperation with the state of origin. A roadmap for cooperation between states to mitigate the stress on inter-state migrants should be enacted without waiting for another pandemic to force its hand.
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