The Migrant Worker As a Ghost Among Cititzens

Context: Avoidable misery of migrant workers endured during the lockdown was not an anomaly but an effect of their implicit exclusion from full citizenship.

Issues faced by the migrants:

• Lack of choices: The lockdown offered them only two options – starvation/charity or an arduous walk to their homes, risking starvation and death.
  • Absence of permanent home and belongings: of migrant workers has led to the tradition of shifting settlements.
• Lack of support: occasioned by the invisibility of migrant workers in government records;
• A state of ‘non-being’ marks the political existence of nomadic tribes extends to India’s migrant workers.
  • Colonial treatment: Indian state’s governance structure treats them nomadic tribes either as threat or nuisance. (under the Habitual Offenders Act, 1952).
  • No legal remedy: Section 4 of the Epidemic Disease Act 1897 provides protection to law enforcement officers adversely impacting the remedial rights of the migrants.
• Lack of income: The active production of migrant labour (by the violation of land rights) and their invisibilized exploitation (in low paid wage work) are two parallel processes that feed into each other.
  • A large portion of lowly paid labouring population has historically come from Adivasi, Dalit and socially oppressed castes as well as religious minorities.
• Lack of organized platform: The new labour codes make it nearly impossible to unionize.

Way Forward:

• Bridging the social distance: between mi­grant workers and the rest of urban society, including the ruling elites.
  • Process of claiming entitlements as citizens (such as decent pay, housing, and social protection requires migrant workers to get organized.