Chalalo aamhi zagayala (We are off for our survival) is how the Adivasis of Maharashtra describe their migration for work. The number of migrants is increasing steadily, hitting a high not seen even during the three years of drought in the seventies, as global capital insidiously penetrates the sleepy Adivasi tracts across the state. Trans-national corporations, claiming their superior ability to bring about the most efficient mix of land, labour, capital and technology, have succeeded in eroding the fragile ecosystem that forms the cradle of survival for tribal communities and in disrupting the robust social system, the concentric circles of solidarity, that formed the arms of the cradle. Relentless globalisation has widened the gulf between the Adivasis and the rest. The number of dispossessed has grown in leaps and bounds. A few Adivasis desert their homes in search of new pastures in the slums at the fringes of the towns whereas others come and go as unwelcome, but not unwanted, visitors to toil in building new urban symbols of growth.

The large-scale, direct and indirect displacement of the Adivasi poor, in the name of development, has contributed to creating a huge army of disaggregate, casual workers, pushed into the migrant sector while the state completely abdicates all responsibility to regulate or govern this most vulnerable section of society. Intelligent estimates put the number of workers in the unprotected sector at approximately 97 per cent of the work force; in the case of the vulnerable groups, it hovers around 99.99 per cent. These are the disinherited workers doomed to toil in inhuman conditions, unprotected by labour laws either due to acts of omission or commission by the state machinery, which is, at best, indifferent to their plight and, at worst, corrupt. Every complaint is only an occasion to extort money from the employers rather than to extend justice to the workers. 

The Adivasis migrate to a whole range of employment. Those from Thane district migrate to the salt pans, brick kilns, sand dredgers, stone quarries and earth work for construction on the outskirts of Mumbai and Navi Mumbai. Those going to work on fishing boats are known to move as far south as Goa and up to Kutchch and Saurashtra. A rapid census will show that the Adivasis of Thane, nearby Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Dharampur in Gujarat form the majority of fish workers on this long coastline. Many serve as tandels — captains of the boats. Adivasis from Raighad also migrate for work in the charcoal kilns. Migration is limited intra district to fruit farms, sugar plantations and industrial townships in Nashik and Aurangabad, while the Adivasis of Dhule and Nandurbar cross state borders for employment in paddy fields, for sugarcane harvesting or construction in South Gujarat. The Adivasis of Amravati and Nagpur migrate as farm or construction labour to fruit orchards or nearby towns.

Types of Migration

Three types of migration are clearly noticeable in Adivasi labour migration. The first is qualified by the character of the work unit, the second by the nature of work and third by the period of work.

The first type, namely, the character of the work unit, is brick manufacture and sugarcane harvesting. Whole families migrate as a work unit, reside together at the worksite or close to it, and are away from their villages for periods, stretching as long as eight months for manufacturing bricks and four to five months for harvesting sugarcane. This employment is concentrated in the poorest sections — either the landless or the very marginal land holders. All the members of the family contribute to different aspects of the work. As entire families migrate, they can make little or no investment in the education of the children, improving the productivity of the land or developing other skills. Hence, the cycle of migration continues year after year, generally passing on to the next generation.

The second type is the nature of work, a combination of the period and the specificities of the particular employment. In the seasonal category are work in the saltpans, fishing and charcoal manufacture. All these occupations require individual workers to be available for the season, which stretches for eight to nine months. Workers live at the worksite or close to it. The salt pans are generally at a good distance from villages. Salt manufacture attracts younger Adivasis, who have to raise money to pay for marriage expenses or the debts incurred for the same. But salt manufacture is harsh on the eyes and on the skin. After six to eight years of work in the salt pans, the youth migrate to other employments.

The other seasonal employment, fishing, attracts individual workers in their early twenties, usually friends who are together for long periods in each other’s company. Many workers on the coastline from Goa to Gujarat are Adivasis from Raighad to the north of the Dangs. This employment is harsh on the body; very few continue working beyond a period of six to eight years.

The third type is the sporadic nature of the work, not requiring any particular worker to be at the work site for a definite period of time. In this category are construction, earthwork, road works and other petty manual work. By its very nature, the work is not ‘continuous’ for a worker to learn the necessary skills. The workers work for different employers and generally stand at the nakas (junctions). Employers come and select a few. There is a virtual scramble to be employed, and the strong, able-bodied males get employed first and at a slightly higher wage. The less-abled continue to stand at the naka till they get employed, sometimes for half a day and, often, not at all. While the poorest work as seasonally bonded and, ironically, have guaranteed work for the season, those who do not want to get bonded move in and out of petty jobs, with varying levels of breaks between two employments. Though sporadic employment is ‘free labour’, Adivasi migrants can have a meal only if they are employed for the day; if unemployed, they go hungry. More and more migrants return with little or no savings from their incomes, because they have been forced to spend their money during the days of unemployment, which are on the rise in the past few years.

Migration patterns, however, have changed little in the past three decades. Barring sporadic employment, most Adivasis are employed by agents, who come to the village during the starvation months, immediately after the planting is complete. Starvation, then, and not the willingness to work, is the ground for employment. Starving families take petty food loans and, in turn, become bonded to the employer. Their wages for the season are fixed, depending on the degree of starvation and the desperation to get the consumption loan. An agent takes the worker first and then the families also to the work site.

The system of wage payment ensures that the worker or his family is always available for work. Wages are not paid every day or month. They are given at the end of the season; only kharchi (small expense payments) are made at the end of each week. If a worker is forced to leave mid-season, she/he has to arrange a badli (replacement) to continue wage payment. If no badli is provided, the worker loses the wages that he has earned.

Migrants, as a rule, work under harsh conditions, often in uninhabitable work sheds, toiling for 12 to 14 hours a day, for wages approximately half the legal minimum wage. They are denied benefits, including paid weekly off, sick leave, and casual leave, and are hired and fired at will by the employer. Many workers are engaged in hazardous occupations without any protective gear or health cover. Others work on obsolete machinery and are regularly prone to industrial accidents.

Workmen’s compensation, in case of accidents, is unheard of; if some money is doled out, it is more a gesture of charity by the employer than a matter of workers’ rights. In many places, unions are run by local political bosses, who are on the pay roll of the employers. They function more as agents of the employers; they control the workers and prevent the formation of any genuine workers’ organisations rather than representing workers’ rights. Women workers are more vulnerable and face greater exploitation and sexual harassment. Many children are employed in small scale industries. This practice thrives with the full knowledge and connivance of the factories’ inspector and labour inspector.

There are only two important exceptions — one positive and one negative — to the pattern of routine seasonal migration. The positive exceptions to migration are the Adivasis from Gadchiroli and Chandrapur districts; the abundant forest produce sustains them during the lean months, providing them food and other marketable produce such as seeds, gums and resins. Hence, the Adivasis of these parts rarely migrate. The forest is their bulwark against migration. In other parts, trees, including the mahua, amla, jamun and aluwa, that gave the Adivasis food, have been felled in the name of scientific forestry — the replacing of virgin forests with plantations of commercial timber varieties. Thus, trees that yielded lac, gum and seeds, which the Adivasis bartered in the market, were cut sold as ‘firewood’. As forest produce yields dropped, many Adivasis took to head loading of firewood from the felled and standing trees. These activities reduced the previously forested hills to barren landscapes. This had deleterious impact on water retention, soil productivity and yields, forcing an increasing number of Adivasi families to shift to the migration route to survive.

The second exception is the perverse kind and refers to the migration pattern of the primitive Adivasi groups such as the katkaris, madias and kolams. These communities, especially the katkaris and the dor kolis, have virtually no homes in their villages. Their houses, often a single room measuring 12 feet by 12, usually have reed walls plastered with mud paste and a roof of straw. When they migrate, the empty house is left to the elements. When these communities return, they try and repair the damaged dwelling, purchase straw for a makeshift roof, partly effective in keeping out the rains, and use the dwelling as their homes for the short period that the family is in the village. They complete their social requirements such as marriage, and live off their earnings for the two months when other labour activity stops and farm work is yet to begin. Then they move on, and the homes are once again left to the elements.

The harsh situation that primitive tribes find themselves in is the cumulative result of a lack of understanding of the peculiarity of their needs and the lack of will in the approach to find appropriate solutions. Primitive Adivasi communities were hunters, food gatherers and shifting cultivators, who moved to the deeper reaches of the forest during the colonial period. They were left alone or were taken from their homelands, south of Mumbai, by the timber contractors as bonded labour to manage the charcoal kilns. They were moved with their employers right up to the Dangs, several hundred kilometres away. They lived in hovels, in the clearings of the forest that were being felled, and they worked exclusively for the contractors. Hence, except for a very small number, most remained landless and were not inclined to cultivation. They were excluded from the benefits of land reforms. For these Adivasi communities, the village is a temporary solace during the heavy rains because they are on the road for nine-tenths of the year. All these communities, by definition, are considered to be below the poverty line.

The Impact

There are complex reasons why the Adivasis consider migration purely as a survival strategy and not a means of advancement. First, migration is not a pleasant choice; it is thrust on them, largely due to exploitation, flawed policies and administrative indifference to sustainable solutions. Migration implies being away from the village and their homes for extended periods of time; days of hunger due to the irregularity of employment; hours spent in scrounging for fuel wood after a hard day’s work, often being forced to burn waste plastic and old rubber tyres to make rotis; consuming water of questionable quality (at times purchased from a public latrine close by); sleeping in the open fields at the height of winter with no protection from the dew; easing oneself in the fields without a shred of privacy; and loss of wages at times as fly-by-night employers abscond. All of these cumulatively lead to loss of dignity.

The travails of migration are not limited to the conditions of work and living conditions at the sites of migration alone; its impact stretches far into the future. The first impact is the disruption of the family, which primarily hurts women and children. For the women, it is the increased burden of single parenthood and being able to keep the home fires burning because wages are rarely paid to the migrant immediately. Even if paid regularly, the money would reach home only when the migrant worker returned home after six to eight weeks of work or during a holiday. For the children, migration results in gravely reduced access to education, foreclosing even the limited opportunities for improvement of economic conditions through employment. Migration also hits hard at the community. For consensus-based societies, the social security of which is based on the webs of internal solidarity, migration seriously impairs the efficacy of the highly complex systems that sustain and reinforce mechanisms of mutual assistance. The presence of members of the community is critical for processes that sustain conviviality, such as consensus seeking, dispute resolution, and collective self-regulation. Migration has contributed to the disruption of these processes, which has snowballed into long-term impacts on the resilience of these communities, on their self governing institutions, their systems of internal solidarity, their cultural life and social interaction. With other forces, migration has led to cleavages that destabilise well-being and leave behind scars which the community has not been able to heal.

The impact of migration on agriculture is reflected in reduced yield as fields are not tended to, bunds remain un-repaired, protective compounds damaged, and the soil suffers from loss of nutrition. Each year of migration takes the family lower in terms of food security. Another pernicious effect is that of stray cattle. When whole families migrate, the cattle are left free to graze; their freedom is the single, most important reason for fields lying fallow after a crop, notwithstanding that the residual moisture could very easily support a lentil crop and well irrigation would allow for a second crop.

The Strategies

The modes of exploiting workers in the unorganised sector are many, including the legal and illegal contract labour system, with multiple sub-contracting, and the sweat shops in state-sponsored and state-subsidised industrial corporations, such as Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (GIDC) and Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation (GIDC). Every labour law is flouted in the name of backward area development, and exemptions are granted to small scale industries to employ labour in slave-like conditions simply because they are small scale units. 

Ironically, exploitation is being carried out in the name of increasing the country’s competitiveness in the global market. Deliberate economic strategies are implemented to ensure this exploitation of labour. These strategies include suppressing local employment in rural areas to encourage the out-migration of labour and supporting the in-migration of outside labour to increase productivity; enhancing the insecurity of the work force to ensure a steady flow of cheap, compliant and vulnerable labourers; sabotaging the Employment Guarantee Scheme and, more recently, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, meant to provide wage works to the rural poor and create productive assets in the villages to stem the tide of out-migration. By not commencing these works when labourers are in dire need of employment, out-migration is facilitated because the staying capacity of the rural poor is greatly limited by hunger. Entire families leave their homes and villages simply to survive; they live on the streets at the mercy of unscrupulous contractors.

Other strategies are reducing the state subsidies meant for the rural poor with the excuse that these are a drain on the economy because they divert resources from productive investment. Consequently, food grains in the ration shops are becoming progressively more expensive and unaffordable. Replacing the universal Public Distribution System (PDS) with targeted PDS, in combination with the manipulation of Below Poverty Line (BPL) family lists and Antodaya lists, ensures that the well-off are in the lists and the poor are not. And those whose lives consist of migrating from one site to the other, of course, do not exist at all. New BPL lists have been drawn up, to identify the truly poor families, thereby eliminating a number of poor families. In the name of creating world-class infrastructure, precious livelihood resources such as agricultural lands, forests and fishing grounds are snatched away from self-sustaining communities to build seven-lane highways, dams, ports, etc.

Alienated from the means of production, entire communities swell the number of the unorganised labour force to toil as casual labour in construction sites, digging trenches and building roads for meagre wages. Multiple sub-contracting in the name of enhancing efficiency and supervision further depresses wages as each contractor deducts his share from the wages. Coupled with this is the phenomenon of contractors bidding lower and lower tenders to grab contracts. The end result is that the subcontractor, who is at the bottom of the ladder and in direct contact with the labour, is so strapped for cash that invariably he is not in a position to pay earned wages even at rates much lower than the declared minimum wage. The gulf between the workers and the principal employer is so vast that the identity of the principle employer is completely obliterated. Local panwallas and feriwallas double as this new breed of fly-by-night contractors, scouting the villages in search of gullible workers, offering them a pie in the sky, only to vanish at the time of payment.

Liberalisation is another buzz word, couching the betrayal of workers by the state. Under the pretext of introducing simpler labour laws, the government is liberated from enforcing the law, employers are freed from complying with the law and the unorganised toiler is freed from the protection of law. The market has become the final arbiter of workers’ rights, with the unorganised labour force always at the losing end. Now every naka has become a market, where the employer (read contractor) is king and half-starving workers undercut each other to grab work for a pittance. The past of the Adivasi has been dismal, the future seems only worse.