Of the forty workers trapped in the collapsed Uttarkashi tunnel, just two are from Uttarakhand and one from neighbouring Himachal Pradesh. The rest are from UP, Bengal, Jharkhand, Assam and Odisha. The situation is the same in almost all such construction projects underway in the state. This is a clear indicator of the economic conditions of the states concerned. In fact, many projects’ viability depends on the cheap labour from the ‘supplier’ states. Not only are such daily workers difficult to source from among the native Uttarakhand population, but they would also demand much higher wages. A large slice of the state’s economy is held up by migrant workers, which are increasingly constituting those who work in the retail and technical sectors. This is increasingly visible in the pharmaceutical, hospitality, health, retail and other businesses. These are being sourced primarily from Western UP, whose workers are in the better qualified category.
There are many conclusions that economists would arrive at from such statistics. The obvious one is that states like Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bengal, Odisha still have large sections of population that are barely above the poverty line. From the time when they used to travel by trainloads to agriculturally advanced Punjab for the sowing and harvesting season in the ‘60s to ‘90s of the last decade, such migration has become the primary source of livelihood. Most of them leave their families behind to look after their small landholdings and keep their respective states’ economies afloat with the earnings they send home. This many decades long practice has come to be taken for granted and it has become easy for the governments to ignore the difficult task of development. In fact, the migrants’ remittances have become an incentive to keeping the population poor so that the ‘supply’ can be maintained.
Migration of labour is a worldwide phenomenon but, with the changing nature of the economy, there are greater returns from more qualified workers, even when they emigrate. Uttarakhand, too, has a problem with migration to the point that its hills are being emptied out, but the better educated and technically qualified are finding jobs within the state or closer to home. This is very much due to the investments made in the education sector by, both, government and private entrepreneurs. This is a far better way to go, as it provides workers more lucrative returns for their labour. On the other hand, will the caste quotas being promised by a state like Bihar achieve the ‘noble’ objective of making migration more socially equitable? For, what else does it have to offer?
