Invisible people

Some 10 lakh to 30 lakh migrant labourers take up skilled or semi-skilled work in Kerala.

in Thiruvananthapuram

THE State Bank of India has a branch near the Raj Bhavan in Thiruvananthapuram, in a by-lane on the avenue leading to the Kowdiar Palace, the residence of the former maharajas of Travancore. It is a cosy little place on the first floor of a nondescript building, and the clientele includes the rich and the famous of the city who live nearby.

It is for such clients, mainly, that the bank chooses to remain open for three hours from 8-30 a.m. on all Sundays. A friendly neighbourhood branch with pleasant bank officials, an occasional trickle of affluent customers and personalised attention' to all of them that was the idea.

But things have changed dramatically in the past year. Now, half an hour before the bank opens every Sunday, a horde of people speaking strange dialects descends on the bank premises. They include construction workers, casual labourers, road workers, semi-skilled carpenters, masons, plumbers, electricians and, of late, occasionally, agricultural workers. Then they wait, on the steps leading to the bank, at the parking yard and on the road.

Often, though not always, just before the shutters open, the entrance to the bank looks like the ticket counter of a local cinema. They are so impatient to get in and crowd at the counters and the ATM even before we switch on the power. On most days, they fill the hallway and dominate our attention throughout the day, T.P. Dinakaran, a bank employee, said.

On most Sundays, the bank has to open additional cash counters to meet the demand, said Branch Manager Binny P. George. There are usually 300 to 400 such customers on that day, a varying but steady stream. They come from various worksites in the city to send their weekly savings home in West Bengal, Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Assam and other north-eastern parts of India. The money is deposited in a relative's or friend's account so that it can be withdrawn without delay, he said.

According to Antony Kuriakose, who has been working at the branch for several years, such weekly migrant labourer remittances have ranged from Rs.2,000 to Rs.10,000 per head. The manager said the migrant labour remittances through the branch was nearly Rs.15 lakh every Sunday.

Local customers are often taken by surprise. Such a crowd! They were hogging all the counters, said Sreekumar, a retired engineer. But then I reminded myself: you see them everywhere in the city; yet you fail to notice them. Indeed, my house was remodelled recently and the majority of the workers whom the contractor brought were migrants from Bihar or from somewhere there. Unlike their counterparts in Kerala, they are willing to do any work, their labour is relatively cheap, they work long hours and they seem to be a decent lot, he said.

Oriya movies in Perumbavoor

The case of SBI's Jawahar Nagar branch in the State capital is only the tip of the iceberg, as it were. Perumbavoor, 35 km from Kochi in central Kerala, is a town dominated by veneer and plywood units, sawmills, a large number of small industrial units and migrant labourers. There are over 175 plywood factories in and around the town that give direct employment to over 15,000 migrant labourers, traders say. Others claim there are many more.

You will be at a loss at the local market on Sundays if you do not speak Hindi or Bengali. There is a theatre in Perumbavoor that screens only Oriya movies. Even the advertisements are in the Oriya language. For many of the local residents, they are an uncomfortable presence in the town's shopping centres on Saturdays and Sundays. You find them with newly bought household goods and gifts on every train that goes to north-eastern India. There are shops and restaurants catering almost exclusively to the migrants. Many small restaurants display the menu in several languages, Shaju Thomas, a local resident, told Frontline.

The post office in Perumbavoor is well known for being one of the top money order remittance centres in India. The local bank where I work is overwhelmed on Mondays and Tuesdays, with 1,000 to 1,200 migrants waiting in queue to remit their earnings. Many of them deposit between Rs.25,000 and Rs.75,000 every week, which we believe is a sort of pooling system for cash transfer. There are also rumours about a hawala system at work, of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh finding sanctuary among this crowd, said Shaju Thomas.

The industrial belt in Palakkad, and the jewellery sweatshops of Thrissur district, and the agricultural tracts in Wayanad and Idukki have all for long employed non-Kerala labourers on a large scale. There are an estimated 40,000 or so gold jewellery makers in Thrissur, and a major chunk of them are highly skilled workers from northern States.

Immigration of casual labour had been from the neighbouring States of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka until recently. A recent newspaper report, quoting the Kerala AIDS Control Society's Migrant Suraksha Project', said that there were 35,000 migrant labourers in the northern city of Kozhikode alone, while only 1,246 had registered their names with the State Labour Department.

Migrant stories abound. For example, a Labour Department official said a goat farm owner in rural Thiruvananthapuram had employed 10 workers recently and all of them were from Jharkhand. The farm owner provides accommodation and is relieved he does not have to depend on local labour, which is costly, less productive and often troublesome.

Replacement labour'

In most urban areas of Kerala, sundry jobs that require hard labour are increasingly being taken over by replacement labour. The realisation has been slow but, ironically, while the Kerala economy itself is heavily dependent on remittances made by nearly 22 lakh of its people working abroad, the majority of them skilled, semi-skilled or unskilled labourers employed in the Gulf countries, their place at home is steadily being taken over by labourers from other States.

For many residents in Kerala, where for every 100 households there are 29 emigrants and 15 return emigrants (in 2008, according to the Planning Board), all this brings a strange sense of deja vu only the characters in the story are different and are from other States.

They came with the construction boom, with the big-time builders and mega IT, airport, road, rail and port projects and the plywood factories. They found out that wages were high, working conditions were much better than at home or elsewhere and there was nobody to do those jobs, surprisingly in a State with the largest number of (educated) unemployed. They are not a militant lot but are hard working and are willing to work anywhere, C. Raghu, the State Labour Commissioner, told Frontline.

Once they found the money good, they brought others brothers, friends, cousins and sons; still more began to come on their own. Now they are bringing their families and are finding work all over Kerala. That is a new trend, leading to another danger the re-introduction of child labour in the State. Migrant labourers are now increasingly seeking work in suburban regions and in rural areas where there is an acute shortage of farm labour, he said.

Social hazard'

There are no official estimates of the number of migrant workers entering or living in Kerala. Unofficial estimates vary from 10 lakhs to 30 lakhs. But nobody is sure. The State Planning Board describes the inflow of migrant labour as a social hazard, just like child labour. The Board's 2009 report cautions against inhuman exploitation of these labourers; their low wages at below subsistence levels; shabby, unsanitary conditions of work, including those posing serious health hazards and threat of contagious diseases; and lack of awareness about their rights and privileges, especially in a labour welfare-oriented State like Kerala.

On May 1, 2010, Kerala became the first State in India to institute a welfare scheme for migrant labourers. The Migrant Labourers' Welfare Scheme, 2010 provides every migrant labourer who joins the scheme paying an annual fee of Rs.30, among other things, Rs.25,000 as health-care assistance, Rs.25,000 as terminal benefit if he has worked in Kerala for a minimum period, up to Rs.3,000 every year as education allowance for their children, Rs.50,000 as compensation to the next of kin if the labourer dies in an accident, Rs.10,000 in case of natural death and up to Rs.15,000 for transporting the body to their hometown, in case of death in Kerala.

However, the Labour Department's efforts to enrol members have so far not been very successful. Enrolment is voluntary. But hardly a few come forward to register on their own. Many do not have even a single document to prove their identity. The principal employers (such as big construction companies) are required to register themselves [their employees], and contractors who employ more than 20 labourers are required to get a licence. But each labourer may work under different contractors or the contractors may employ just 19 of them so as to escape the provisions of the law. For the State labour officials, language is the biggest barrier in getting through to these labourers, G. Suresh Kumar, CEO of the welfare scheme told Frontline.

If you want to understand the magnitude and complexity of the situation you need only to wait at the nearest railway station for the next train to or from these States, Labour Commissioner Raghu said. They are a nomadic lot, do not stay in one place, and many go back home during the harvest season every year. They may or may not return to Kerala. Or, when they do, they may bring others with them or decide to seek employment in a different district or location altogether. Earlier, contractors used to bring them to Kerala. Now they are also coming on their own, in large numbers. How will the government agencies, with their meagre resources and manpower, keep track of them?