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Distress seasonal
migration impacts many lives caught in the battle for survival,
Being away from home and village, migrants lead an uprooted life. They do not belong to the places where they go, and increasingly lose acceptance in their own villages. Cut off from their community, culture and traditions, unable to take part in festivals, fairs and religious and social functions, which are an important part of their lives, migrants lose their sense of identity. The vulnerability of people who cross state boundaries is even greater as they are unfamiliar with the language and culture of the areas they go to and they find themselves increasingly at the mercy of their contractors. While migrating families face hardships, the elderly, ailing family members or children left behind in villages have difficulty fending for themselves, and are often reduced to destitution. They frequently do not know where the family has gone, or how to contact them. Dealing with emergencies, particularly back home is difficult, especially for those who go long distance. They have to spend money on travel, and forego earnings for the days they are away. News of injury or death takes a considerable amount of time to reach. For instance, recently in the Setu field area 12 saltpan migrants died in a bus accident, and their co-workers had no way of contacting their families. There are reports of people going missing, or women being carried off, and people at home are helpless to do anything. Further, poor and unhealthy working conditions ensure that most migrants rapidly decline into ill health. It is said of Orissa brick migrants that after four or five years in the brick kilns a young man starts to look old and haggard. ***
No assets Distress migrants find themselves on a relentless
falling curve as far as assets go. They start by being landless or
land poor, with hardly any skills, assets or education. Earnings from
migration are survival level and allow them no opportunity to build
assets. On the contrary, medical or other personal emergencies as well
as the unstable nature of work often push them further into debt.
Their meagre possessions are also at perpetual risk. Families who lock
their homes and leave find their dwellings and other possessions in a
state of disrepair of disuse when they return. Those who own a few
animals have to arrange that they are cared for in the village and
they have to pay for this. Many just end up selling them off at low
prices. The work at the sites allows for no advancement or upward
mobility. The few who have the advantage of some education experience
frustration at being unable to get out of the trap. Clearly education
is a necessary but not sufficient condition to enable assetless
migrants to get out of the traps within which they are caught.
Eventually, the last asset of the migrant is the body, which is used
as collateral to get an advance from the contactor. But years of
migration and extreme physical abuse wear out their bodies way ahead
of their years — contractors find diminishing use for labourers who
are beyond 40 years of age. *** Although work sites vary from sector to sector, there are certain elements that are common to most of them; they are usually far from habitation, in the wilderness with perhaps not even a road nearby. Consequently there are no basic facilities like water, a marketplace, a school or a health centre. Migrants depend on employers for their needs, which are not met to any degree of satisfaction. If there is habitation nearby, migrant labourers are usually shunned by local people, and regarded as bad elements or thieves. Locals erect extra fences around their homes to keep migrants out. They are subject to prejudice, and are stigmatised and criminalised. (Mosse 2005) There are no labour laws at the site. Work hours are long and odd, up to 16 hours daily and some sections of labourers have to be on call round the clock. Work norms are set keeping in mind healthy and strong young men, but everyone, including weaker, older men and women and children, has to struggle to meet them. A shortfall in performance means being weeded out of the labour force. Contractors retain control of labourers not only financially but also physically, forcing them to work even when they are sick or injured. Yet if employers stop or slow down the work for their own reasons, for example a technical snag in the production process, the payment also stops. If working conditions are wretched living space is worse — tiny, unhygienic and inhuman. Most members of the family sleep under the open sky in all weather conditions. The nutrition available is sub-minimal. Health hazards are too numerous to list, and range from infections and fevers, contamination and toxicity related diseases, respiratory and gynaecological problems, injuries and accidents, malnourishment of children and so on. There are no facilities for medical treatment, and no compensations or insurance; on the contrary, if a worker falls ill and cannot work he gets no pay. For women life on the site is worse than if they were living with the same marginalisation in their homes in the village. Their work hours are longer as they have domestic and child rearing responsibilities in addition to working on the site. In the bargain, their nutrition, health, illnesses and need for rest take second place compared to the men. This gets carried down to the girls. Sugarcane
sites The settled sugarcane
cutters (at the tyre and gadi centres) camp for the season in
clearings earmarked by factories for them in the vicinity of the
fields. Each family is provided with a bamboo mat and poles, which are
converted into a small conical hut or kopi (8 feet in diameter). Tyre
centre settlements or addas have 200-500 kopis and gadi
centres have 50-100 kopis. The kopis are cramped together, and
bullocks are parked in front of each. Animals and humans live together
in congested conditions. The work units or koyatas move in the dark
hours of the morning to fields where they cut cane
throughout the day at the rate of 1.5 tonne per person. The payment
rate per tonne varies between Rs 80 and 100. The field is divided into
strips, and each strip is assigned to one koyata for cutting — the
man and woman cut the cane, remove the leaves, and throw it on the
ground, the child takes the cane and puts it on a pile. The piles thus
made are then tied into bundles, carried on the head by men and women
and put on to carts. The men drive the carts to the factory where
they might have to wait in queue for several hours before they get to
off load the cane. The women, meanwhile, walk several kilometres back
to the settlement. In field interactions, many of them described how
they fight exhaustion all the time. The mobile sugarcane cutters (the
doki centre koyatas) work in areas with less intensive cultivation and
are, therefore, moved to new locations every 15-20 days by their
agents. They do not have their own carts but are dependent on factory
trucks. They also have no shelter and live in open, unprotected spaces
and work in much smaller groups of 15-20, as compared with their tyre
and gadi centre counterparts. Their output is tied to the
factory schedule, which works round the clock. The koyatas are thus
subjected to round the clock loading of trucks that ply up and down
all day and night. Often they get to sleep only once in two or three
days. Women and girls in doki centres are more exposed to
exploitation. At one field where cane cutting was going on, we
observed seven koyatas working simultaneously. Those who were faster
had moved further into their ‘strip’ compared to others. As
workers cut cane ceaselessly, the work site gave the uncanny
appearance of being mechanised! There were about 15 adults at the site
and about 13 children of all ages, the youngest being an infant tied
in cloth hammock. The 4-6 year olds were around their parents, trying
to work, constantly in danger of being hit by the sickle. The older
children were fully part of the assembly line. When we tried to talk
to some adults, after a few moments they moved back to work saying
they had no time. When we tried to lift one of the bundles of cane we
could not even budge it!
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