Mumbai lockdown: Why migrants will come back, eventually

A migrant labourer going back to his hometown passes Sion Highway in Mumbai. File pic/Ashish Raje

In an answer to a question raised in the Lok Sabha earlier in March this year, the government had said that "the size of the migrant workforce can be estimated to be over 100 million 10 crore in 2016 in absolute terms." The number would have only grown since.

Many of these migrant workers came looking for work in some of India-s biggest cities, including Mumbai. In the last few months, lakhs of migrant workers have left the cities to go back to their villages due to the Covid-19 lockdown.

A May-end news report said close to 6.5 lakh migrant workers left Mumbai on special trains. Of course, there is no reliable estimate of workers who went back in taxis, autos, trucks, two-wheelers, bicycles or walked back hundreds of kilometres, for that matter.

These workers form a very important part of the system that keeps Mumbai-s economy functioning - from driving autorickshaws, taxis and app cabs to working at construction sites and at small and medium enterprises to helping shopkeepers carry out their normal everyday business.

Without the migrant workers it will be very difficult to fix the broken economic system of Mumbai, and get it up and running again. The question is: will they come back after having gone through what they did, before they were able to go back to their homes?

Many people believe that they won-t. But the chances are they will have to come back to Mumbai and other cities simply because there isn-t just enough work in the villages and the states they came from - Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Odisha and so on. The original reason these workers came to work in India-s biggest cities and more developed states will bring them back. The data bears that out.

As the Economic Survey of 2019-20 points out: "As high as 70 per cent of [India-s] rural households still depend primarily on agriculture for their livelihood, with 82 per cent of farmers being small and marginal."

Nearly 42 per cent of India-s overall workforce depends on agriculture for a living. The problem is that agriculture in 2019-20 was around 13.4 per cent of the overall economy.

In other words, agriculture employs 42 per cent of the workforce but forms only around 13.4 per cent of the overall economy. Hence, there is huge disguised unemployment in agriculture, with the sector employing many more people than is economically justified.

On the face of it, many people working in agriculture seem employed. But their employment is not wholly productive, given that agricultural production would not suffer even if some of these employed people stopped working.

Now, migrant workers who have gone back home will look for work in agriculture and only add to the disguised unemployment. Over and above this, they will look for work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme MGNREGS.

When the budget of the central government was presented in February, the government had budgeted R61,500 crore towards the scheme. This has subsequently been increased by R40,000 crore to R1,01,500 crore. The increase essentially tells us that the government expects the demand for work under MGNREGS to go up in the days to come. The scheme is self-selecting, i.e., only those who want to do manual unskilled work can volunteer for it.

t seems that there is great demand for work under the scheme. In May 2020, 3.62 crore households demanded work under the scheme, against 2.51 crore households in May 2019. It is important to understand that everyone who demands work under the scheme isn-t necessarily provided with it. Of the 3.62 crore households demanding work, around 2.99 crore households were provided with work. The average pay under MGNREGS is R202 per day.

During the first nine days of June 2020, 2.34 crore households had demanded work. During the whole of June 2019, 2.57 crore households had demanded work. This tells us how much the demand for work has gone up. Also, only 7.36 lakh households have gotten work in June so far.

What this means is that state governments, which implement MGNREGS, are going slow on the scheme because of lack of money. Hence, there isn-t enough work going around in the villages, as has been the case for the past decades. This had led to individuals moving to cities to look for work. And this is precisely the reason that will push the migrant workers to come back to Mumbai and other big cities they had left in the aftermath of COVID-19.

Of course, we can only hope they get treated better this time around, by governments and those who they used to work for.

Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy

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