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THE poor in India suffer from a variety of tribulations and afflictions. They are all quite dreadful, but some of them are at least well understood and well analysed, so that remedies can be sought if we manage to get our act together. The fact that we do not seem often enough to be able to get our act together is, of course, true, but in dealing with such well-understood problems as widespread and chronic undernutrition, or lack of school facilities and basic health care, the task of the concerned citizen is well defined and suggests the need for more insistent political demand, public pressure and social agitation for economic and social expansion of the kind that would make a difference to these well-characterised deprivations. The practice of democracy demands that we get up and do something, rather than sit and hope that things will sort themselves out automatically. One such problem is the huge phenomenon of what is called "distress seasonal migration". By making an important — and to some extent pioneering — contribution in analysing this miserable social phenomenon, the author of this study has taken a significant step in drawing attention to the nature, magnitude and the far-reaching consequences of this terrible state of affairs, which afflicts so many human lives in India, including a gigantic number of luckless children whose parents are forced to undertake distress seasonal migration. This prevents normal schooling, regular health care and basic social and civic attention coming to the children. There is, first and foremost, the issue of its magnitude and its causation. The phenomenon of migration is not in itself one of distress, but the result of terrible things that happen to people’s lives, sometimes with great regularity. The migration itself is really an attempt to cope with those terrible things, through the only way available to the poor and the underprivileged to deal with local deprivation, to wit, going elsewhere in search of a less grim set of possibilities. There will be no way of eradicating "distress seasonal migration" unless the causes of such distress, which apparently have a pattern of seasonality, are themselves addressed and overcome. The second aspect of the phenomenon includes the consequences of such migration and the adversities that the migration itself generates. Since the foundational task will not be completed overnight, we have to see how the adverse consequences of distress seasonal migration can be reduced, and where possible eliminated. We can think of this as "the immediate task." These features of distress seasonal migration have also been much more neglected and often have received next to no attention
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