FOURTH CRITICAL STUDIES CONFERENCE
“Development, Logistics, and Governance”
(8-10 September 2011)
Name of the Session VII: Migration and Trafficking: The Logistics of Mobility
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Abstract
Bihar and migrant labour are synonymous with each other. It would not be farfetched to argue that the juggernaut of so-called development of Indian economy, especially, infrastructure runs on the back of the Bihari labour. A few years back, as an activist, I was privy to a conversation with a businessman in Delhi who was lamenting that his factory (he owned a factory that manufactured cartons) was running short of workers as the construction of metro railways ‘soaked’ all the Biharis. There is a substantial body of work, both at the academic level as well as activist, dealing with the plight of the migrant labour in the city. The concern of this paper is to analyse the movement of labourers from the village to the city.
The paper will look at the entire circle of the transportation of the labour from the village to the city. It will be a detailed study of the season when the labourers migrate to the city and the people involved in the entire business. It will look into the owner-contractor nexus. The figure of the ‘jobber’ is interesting. On the surface, a ‘jobber’ is like any other worker; however, in terms of interest he sits closer to the owner than his worker brethren. A ‘jobber’ does not, strictly speaking, belong to the aristocracy of working class. He becomes more of an exploiting agent of his own class. The paper will seek to unravel the processes through which a ‘jobber’ (contractor) hires other workers from his own community or village in return for his cut. A ‘jobber’ takes a part of the wage of the workers he has helped in getting employment. At once, he becomes a worker as well as an agent of the bourgeoisie. The paper will look at this entire process. How the recruitment is done? What is the normal rate of commission that the contractor gets form the workers? The site for deciding these rates? This would help us in understanding the political character of these players in the labour market.
The paper will also look at the class and caste character of the migrant labourer. When they make a move, do they move out with their families or do they take their families later when things are more settled in the city? Another crucial area of investigation will be the land holdings of these migrant labourers. Do they own land or are they landless? If they do own land, how do they settle it once they leave their village?
Related to the movement of migrant labour, is the means of transportation. Railways are the most important carrier of the migrant labour. An area of investigation would be how the expanding network of railways has changed the migration pattern of the labourers in terms of the region they migrate to.
The last part of investigation will be the impact of NREGA. The job guarantee scheme is billed as a move that has lessened, if not stopped, the migration of labour. The paper will check the veracity of this statement.
For the purpose of investigation, a village in the district of Buxar will be chosen as a case study. The paper will also look at the migration pattern of various districts of Bihar, if any, and then come up with the specificity of Buxar in the situation of migration of labour in Bihar.
Bionote
Mithilesh Kumar is a Research and Programme Associate at Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group. His research interests lie in the issues of identity, migration, land relations and governance in Bihar. He is currently pursuing Ph.D at Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Kolkata.
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Abstract
Abstract
This paper is based on some studies done during 2009-10 on women’s mobility in the Sundarbans area. It examines several kinds of movements of women in and out of the area. In recent years some remarkably fast changes have taken place for both men and women, in the region’s occupational structures in response to the nature of economic development taking place there. One outcome of these changes has been the increase in people’s movements in and out of the region. However, in face of the difficult nature of the terrain of the region, state actions so far to improve the logistical support system for facilitating these population movements have proved less than adequate
Traditional livelihoods in case of a large section of local households have become precarious because of stagnancy in agriculture and decline in village based traditional household industries. In the new, altered livelihood strategies of households women are often being compelled to find paid work; but because it is not available in the immediate neighborhood, they are forced to undertake painful short and long-distance migration or daily commuting journeys to join in the few overcrowded occupation available to them. For this they have to operate mostly along well established, known corridors between their villages and selected labor markets outside.
Remarkably, while these poor communications within the region and between the region and outside world have confined women workers to unprofitable and overcrowded opportunities of work, they have not deterred the growth within the region of an elaborate network of local and outside agents and subagents. This network operates efficiently and ubiquitously everywhere including in the remotest parts of the Sundarbans at its tasks of abducting women or seducing them and their guardians for flesh trade, illicit marriages and child labor. This implies failure of governance in two senses; one in failing to provide people with the much-needed communications network and another to take effective policing action against the operators engaged in illicit trade in women and children.
Bionote
Nirmala Banerjee is an economist trained at Bombay University and the London School of Economics and Political Science. She worked as an urban planner before she joined the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences from where she retired as professor of Economics in 2001.
Her areas of interest are wide ranging starting from Public Finance, industrial structures in the unorganized sector and Gender studies, especially the economics of women’s work and its relation with women’s overall social position. She specializes in applied economic research with field studies that focus on understanding the complexity of the Indian situation with its regional variety.
She has been very active in the women’s movement and is a founder-member of SACHETANA, a Kolkata-based women’s organization. She was a founder-member of the DAWN Group and past president of the Indian Association of Women’s Studies. More recently she has been working on the analysis of public policies and their interaction with lives of women at the grassroots.