Towards policy support to migrants

(Mians GS 2 : Issues Relating to Development and Management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health, Education, Human Resources.)

Context:

• Due to Covid-19, a nationwide lockdown was imposed in India which left people shocked by the plight of migrant workers walking hundreds of kilometers, facing hunger, exhaustion and violence, to get to the safety of their home villages.

Turning point:

• The dire circumstances of the migrants became the focus of large-scale relief efforts by governments and civil society alike during the waves of Covid-19.
• The Government ramped up the One Nation One Ration Card (ONORC) project, announced the Affordable Rental Housing Complexes (ARHC) scheme, set up the e-Shram portal and began to draft a migration policy.
• These initiatives generated hope that the migrant crisis of 2020 would be a turning point, setting India firmly on a policy path by offering adequate citizenship and the accompanying social, economic and political rights to internal migrants.

Migration policy guidance:

• After two years of first lockdown, various surveys have found that the incomes of migrant households continue to be lower than pre-pandemic levels, even after returning to cities.
• The post-1991 poverty alleviation of almost 300 million Indians, driven by migration out of farm work, is being undone resulting in less work for Migrants and nutritional incapability.
• Despite this, a cohesive migration policy guidance remains elusive and the agenda of migrant inclusion has been pushed to the periphery of our collective consciousness.

Take strategic steps:

• Instead of a cohesive migration policy, disconnected policy initiatives and technocratic fixes chase specific agendas while nativism re-asserts itself through domicile quotas and reservations.
• But this is not something India can afford to precipitate as a third of the nation’s workforce is mobile and migrants fuel critical sectors such as manufacturing, construction, hospitality, logistics and commercial agriculture. 
• Despite clear economic and humanitarian reasoning to bring migrants back into the policy discourse, the current policy scenario is at best fragmented and at worst waning.
• To course correct, stakeholders must recognise the entrenched structural constraints slowing the migration policy momentum and take strategic steps to push the policy needle forward.

Widespread ‘sedentary bias’:

• Migration is a highly politicised phenomenon in India as states are highly influenced by the political economy of migration.
• ‘Destination States’ experience a tension between economic needs, which require migrant labour, and political needs, which promote nativist policies that impose domicile restrictions on employment and social security.
• On the flip side, the ‘sending States’ are highly motivated to serve their “own people” because they vote in their source villages.
• This fragmented policy response to internal migration follows from State-specific calculations on what political dividends might be reaped (or lost) by investing fiscal and administrative resources towards migrants.
• This widespread ‘sedentary bias’ continues to influence policy even though migration is an important pathway for impoverished marginalised rural households to find economic security (and social emancipation).

Pushes the timeline:

• Migrants are a perennially fuzzy category in policy discourse, located inside two larger categories that have long troubled policymakers: the unorganised worker and the urban poor.
• Even the e-Shram portal, which has made impressive progress in registering unorganised workers, has been unable to accurately distinguish and target migrants.
• Further, it is assumed that migrants will be automatically catered to with the formalisation of the economy, the labour market, the housing market, finance and so on but this pushes the timeline for addressing the migrant issue far out.

Gaps in the data:

• Migration policy discourse is seemingly paralysed by the now well-acknowledged failure of official datasets to capture the actual scale and the frequency of internal migration in India.
• Data systems designed to periodically record only one spatial location have posed great challenges to welfare delivery for up to 500 million people who are part of multi-locational migrant households.
• The novel coronavirus pandemic has placed a sharp focus on problems such as educating and vaccinating those children who accompany their migrant parents, or ensuring that migrant women avail maternity benefits at multiple locations.

Step forward:

• In the scenario of well-meaning but scattered experimentation, migrants would be well served if the Centre played a proactive role by offering strategic policy guidance and a platform for inter-State coordination. 
• State-level political economy constraints make the Centre’s role particularly crucial in addressing issues of inter-State migrant workers at ‘destination States’.
• The NITI Aayog’s Draft Policy on Migrant Workers is a positive step forward in articulating policy priorities and indicating suitable institutional frameworks, and deserves a speedy release.

Conclusion:

• Strategic initiatives to provide migrants safety nets regardless of location as well as bolster their ability to migrate safely and affordably must keep up the momentum towards a migrant-supportive policy.