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By Chitrangada Choudhury Police ‘rescues’ are stopping thousands of farmers from fleeing western Orissa’s bullock-cart economy to power the construction boom of New India. The alternative -- a grand prime ministerial job scheme to counter the annual march of this ragged army -- isn’t working
hikani Majhi, his wife and teenaged daughter were barely an hour into their midnight journey to Andhra Pradesh in a teeming general-class compartment of the Raipur-Vishakhapatnam link express, when a group of policemen burst in and ordered “all labourers to Andhra” -- entire families of children and adults -- to get off the train. “Over 200 of us were pulled out and ordered back home,” said the gaunt paddy farmer in the clipped Khosli dialect, now back in his village Ghamandanga, in western Orissa’s Bolangir district. The constables conducting the ‘rescue’ also threw in a crude threat to the intimidated group: “If they catch us leaving again, they said, we would be put in jail.” Police ‘rescues’ through November have stopped thousands of subsistence farmers from an annual post-monsoon exodus out of the bullock-cart economy of western Orissa, or the Kalahandi-Bolangir-Koraput (KBK) region, home to some of India’s poorest rural populations. Through a grey network of middlemen, the ragged army of migrants would file into brick kilns and construction sites hundreds of kilometres away, building a New India on poverty-line wages. Bolangir’s Superintendent of Police, Himanshu Lal, spearheading the raids on trains, explained why he was cracking down on what is now an annual journey. “They are being trafficked by politicians and middlemen. We had to step in.” But scores of villagers point out that the action threw them back onto subsistence farms where work had vanished till the next rains. Majhi, with under an acre of unirrigated land, asked: “What work do we do here till then? What will our children eat?” An answer to Majhi’s desperation is meant to lie in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). The United Progressive Alliance launched its showpiece public works programme, the world’s largest, in 331 districts last February. It now wants to extend the Rs 40,000 crore scheme to every district in India as a safety net for the country’s 30-million-and-growing army of distress seasonal migrants. The grand plan is probably needed most here, in this tribal heart of India. Almost eight out of the 10 families in Ghamandanga survive on an annual income of just Rs 11,000, their harsh world far removed from an economy buoyed by 9% growth. Yet, across the region, the programme is failing to provide an alternative, as villagers say they are unable to secure the promised 100 days of work, or battle pervasive corruption. This summer, the Delhi-based Centre for Food and Security, auditing the NREGS in over 100 villages in this belt, failed to find a single work without malpractice. The centre’s Parsuraman Rai said: “We estimate that of the Rs 733 crore spent on the programme in Orissa, officials have siphoned off Rs 500 crore.” In October, a group led by economist Jean Dreze surveyed the programme in 30 villages in Kalahandi and Bolangir and concluded that “corruption threatens to derail the entire programme”. Dreze’s team found “only 60% of the employment was confirmed by the concerned labourers. Corresponding discrepancies in wage payments may be even larger”. Job cards, it said, were designed to enhance corruption: “There is no column for ‘wages paid’. Labourers and worksites are replaced by codes, making it virtually unreadable even for trained investigators, let alone semi-literate labourers.” Kalahandi’s Salegaon typifies the need for the programme, as well as the problems wrecking it. Salegaon and its surrounding villages are across the Udhanti river, which does not have as much as a bridge over it, leaving over 2,000 villagers marooned when it swells in the monsoon. The nearest pucca road is an hour’s walk away. Last November, following a campaign by a non-profit organisation, Salegaon discovered that muster rolls could be checked online. Villagers like 28-year-old Virendra Pradhan logged on and was aghast to find records showing wages of Rs 5 lakh having been paid for a ‘ghost’ scheme -- ‘New Tank at Kulerjore’, a site 5 km away. The muster listed scores of villagers as having received a fortnight of NREGS work. “My name was on the muster rolls,” says 20-year-old school dropout Mohan Bariha; he was 1,300 km away at the time, “working on a high-rise construction site in Navi Mumbai”. When the villagers dashed off a complaint to the chief minister and the collector, local officials who had siphoned funds promptly dropped by. Pradhan said: “The engineer offered the village Rs 1 lakh to withdraw the charge.” But Salegaon persisted, and a police case was finally registered against five officials who were suspended. Fifteen days of work were handed out to create what is now a semi-finished dirt road, but there has been no work since. The villagers added that it was equally hard to monitor the programme -- in violation of the law the muster rolls were not kept in the villages. To check them, the villagers had to troop to the nearest computer, over 50 km away, in the district capital of Bhawanipatna. National Commission on Farmers member Jagdish Pradhan, who heads a farmers collective in the region, calls the unfolding raids “a knee-jerk reaction”. He asks: “When the government does not deliver work, does it have the right to prevent people from migrating to survive?” Almost two years into its launch, Bariha has never been on the NREGS. He points out: “It is not a scheme that can sustain me unless it actually gives me 100 days of work.” Behind the boom, a harsh world of work As a contractor tours his village in Bolangir, listing labour for a brick kiln in Andhra Pradesh, paddy farmer Senapati Bhoi reflected: “Hours at the kiln are endless, and the work is backbreaking. If I could work like that on my farm, I would be prosperous.” 
Growing rice on his unirrigated farm employs Bhoi for a mere third of the year. He then moves with his family -- like lakhs of farmers and farmhands in western Orissa’s tribal belt -- to live and work hundreds of kilometres away in unfamiliar kilns in Andhra Pradesh. In Bolangir district alone, the epicentre of the great rush, police officials say between 1-1.5 lakh adults and children make the annual journey. They are part of a great exodus unfolding across India’s villages. Economist Tushar Poddar of Goldman Sachs estimates that by 2020, 140 million rural Indians will be moving to towns and cities in search of work. The National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector -- a body set up by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to draft social legislation for India’s sprawling and neglected unorganised sector -- estimates that 30 million rural Indians (half the size of France) turn distress seasonal migrants every year, caught in a circular journey between town and countryside. Their lives reflect the two extremes of India’s disparate economy -- a primitive agrarian sector that now only delivers the people caught in it between 120-150 days of work in a year, down from 282 days, as revealed by a central survey in the mid-1950s. And a real estate industry that is growing at an annual rate of over 30% and needs a vast pool of cheap and pliant labour to manufacture bricks in over 60,000 kilns in the country, or work on construction sites in India’s booming cities and towns. Families like Bhoi’s spent eight months each year in open-air brick kilns, making 12,000-15,000 bricks every week. They rarely returned home with any meaningful earnings. But the contractors who mediated the desperate movement took a cut on every brick made. Bolangir’s Superintendent of Police Himanshu Lal sums up their role in one word: “Trafficking.” The IPS officer who has been spearheading the raids on trains leaving from the district’s rail town of Kantabhanji explains why he is cracking down on the annual journey. “In my district of Bolangir alone, we estimate it to be a Rs 50-crore-and-growing business for politicians, middlemen, railway officials and labour contractors who milk the distress and exploit the labourers. Villagers are free to migrate for work, but here it has taken on the form of trafficking of bonded labour.” Lal reels off the figures. “My team has rescued more than 3,000 villagers in the past fortnight. Forty criminal cases have been lodged, and 66 middlemen are now in jail.” He says the nexus runs deep: “I am under pressure from all political parties to stop the raids.” Lucrative movement “I am only helping the poor,” argues Haroon Khan, Bolangir’s leading contractor, a burly man with an imperious manner. Speaking in the office of Kantabanji’s MLA, and his brother, Ayub Khan, part of the ruling combine, Khan has three cases lodged against him of abduction of labour in the past years. The distress Khan refers to is real. It also helps explain why the annual movement of a pliant labour force has fructified over the years into a shady and lucrative business, offering a vast opportunity for mediators like him who have linked up with brick kiln owners at one end, and an emerging network of village-level contractors. Last September, a survey by a local non-profit organisation revealed that total advances from kiln owners across a cluster of 120 villages stood at Rs 2.4 crore. Mediators like Khan oversee the late-September distribution of this advance, which ranges between Rs 10,000-Rs 15,000 to each family. This is when the year’s only crop is being harvested, and work on the farms is about to dry up. The need for cash is desperate -- to buy clothes and sweets to celebrate the year’s all-important harvest festival, to conduct marriages, or to pay off debts to local moneylenders. The advance effectively ties villagers to work in the kilns until the next monsoon, even as contractors insist that children join in. “I flip semi-dry bricks and cook for the family,” says Bhoi’s 12-year-old daughter Indamati. She dropped out after just two years in a village school, and is unlikely to ever get a decent job. Since the weekly allowances handed out by the kiln owners are so paltry, and state schemes like the Public Distribution System (PDS) do not journey with migrants, Bhoi says they can only afford to eat kanki, or broken rice used as chickenfeed. Vasmati Majhi, a Gond grandmother in her 60s, who has been migrating for the past decade between her village and a brick kiln each year, paid by such advances, says: “I have been beaten up by kiln owners and forced to work even when I fell ill.” Local advocate Bishnu Sharma, who tirelessly tours the villages explaining to farmers their legal rights while working in the kilns, says abuse is rife. For seven years now he has been moving the local courts, filing rescue petitions for villagers who are forcibly held back in the kilns, compensation suits for workers who die in the course of their work or during the hazardous return in a packed train in the sweltering summer heat, cases of sexual abuse, and wage non-payment. Success is rare, with the kilns located hundreds of kilometres away, escaping the local courts. Middlemen are rarely registered, and there are no formal work contracts despite a few lakh employees. Sharma says: “Migrants enter the market as unequals, with little say in work conditions or compensation.” 
The Inter-State Migrant Worker’s Act, ironically legislated by Parliament in the 1970s in a bid to end the “various abuses” of migrants from western Orissa, could provide a modicum of social security. But Sharma says: “The law is roundly flouted because few workers can read or write and are too vulnerable economically to demand for its provisions, while officials entrusted with monitoring the Act are hand-in-glove with the contractors.” Back in her village, Majhi explains why she will continue to make the harsh journey: “Making bricks, I could pay for the marriage of my two daughters. Otherwise I would have had to mortgage my land to a landowner, and would probably never have got it back.” Khan is more frank: “If villagers stay back, they will starve to death.” (Chitrangada Choudhury reports for the Hindustan Times and reported this story under a NFI-AIF Media Fellowship) InfoChange News & Features, December 2007 “Migration boosts the economy… I’m trying to make the process more humane” Kalikesh Singh Deo, the 32-year-old MLA from Bolangir, is from the local royal family and the third generation of elected representatives. The Doon’s School, St Stephen’s alumnus believes migration helps the economy, but it should follow the law. Thousands of villagers migrate to brick kilns each year from the area you represent. Have you looked into the issue?
I have taken up the problem with the highest authorities, after getting several complaints from villagers of mistreatment and non-payment of wages. I have given them a proposal for monitoring cells, to ensure that labourers and contractors get registered. I want to make their employment follow the law, and be humane. Can you share a copy with us?
I have only communicated the idea informally. The district administration believes local politicians also function as middlemen.
Nobody from my party is involved in this. I cannot say about the others. The NREGA was meant to address all this.
The scheme is unwieldy, and like all other programmes has several leakages. Wages do not get paid on time, while contractors give the villagers advances to go work in the kilns. The small projects taken up by the scheme cannot alter the rural economy in any major way. |
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