Looking out for the vulnerable

Context: Latest SC order on the plight of migrants is enormously welcome. But implementation won’t be easy, as tasks set out by court challenge entrenched patterns of labour recruitment and employment.

Significance of recent SC order on the plight of migrants:

• Recognises the critical contribution of migrant workers to the economy, even though they are often employed in precarious jobs.
• It reminds us that workers in the unorganised sector (around 93%, including most migrants in lower-end jobs) need to be able to access numerous welfare schemes in existence. 
• The main barrier preventing access is the delay in registering workers on the national database of the Ministry of Labour and Employment.

Orders issued by the Supreme Court

• It called for registering workers under the three laws that are in place to protect labour and migrant workers, namely, the 1979 Interstate Migrant Workmen Act, the 1996 Building and Other Construction Workers Act and the 2008 Unorganised Sector Social Security Act, and issued a plea to intermediaries and contractors to do their duty in registering workers.
• The Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution has been ordered to allocate additional food grains to the states for disbursement of dry foodgrains to migrant workers under the One Nation One Ration Card scheme under the National Food Security Act.
• Flexible access: authorities shall not insist on an ID card and accept “self-declaration” from workers to access welfare programmes (a similar provision was made in the 2008 Social Security Act).
• The lack of documentation cannot be used as an excuse by the state to abdicate its responsibility, especially during the pandemic.

Challenges face by migrants:

• Impact of a pandemic: Employers and contractors collude to keep workers in perpetual precarity to protect themselves against losses caused by shocks such as Covid.
• Social factors: Control over workers belonging to marginalised communities is exercised through class, caste and gender hierarchies.
• Exclusion: Migrants experienced a variety of problems with registration ranging from digital illiteracy, corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency and the requirement of multiple documents (even where only Aadhaar would suffice).
• Lack of ministerial coordination in solving the issues: While we do have some understanding of interactions between the state and migrant subjects, we do not know enough about the inner workings of the government machinery.

• Jan Sahas, an organisation working with the most socially excluded groups across nine states, found that there are numerous barriers within the labour department, including a lack of guidelines on procedures related to registration and delays in uploading data submitted in hard copy on the portal as it cannot be directly updated by others.
• Underlying these problems is the fundamental reality that labour departments are seriously short of staff and capacity to carry out the Supreme Court order

Conclusion: Various NGOs have pledged to monitor progress against the Supreme Court order. Hopefully, there will be learnings from the experience that can be applied to further such efforts.