How the government is failing its migrant workers and their families

Outreach and accessibility of schemes, and estimations of the migrant population remain a significant hurdle for benefits flowing to the migrant population

Last month, the Supreme Court directed all state governments to implement the 'One Nation, One Ration Card' (ONORC) scheme. Even though 32 of the 36 states/UTs had implemented the scheme, the uptake was limited; only 165,000 beneficiaries availed of the service. In its verdict directing all states to implement the scheme by July 31, the SC said that ONORC was an “important citizen-centric reform” and that its implementation will ensure availability of ration to “beneficiaries under National Food Security Act (NFSA) and other welfare schemes, especially to the migrant workers and their families at any Fair Price Shop across the country”.

The apex court also pulled up the Centre for its “lackadaisical” approach towards setting up a national web portal to register migrant and unorganised workers.

Although the Centre and states have launched myriad schemes over the years to support migrants, their approach has been plagued by two significant problems.

First, the implementation of existing schemes has been lacking.

Last year, in March, the central government requested the state governments to disburse funds to building and construction workers (primarily migrants) from the cess collected by state BoCW boards. Until then, data from the labour ministry’s annual report highlights, the government had spent only 40 per cent of the total amount of Rs 49,688 crore collected by welfare boards.

The new annual report by the ministry highlights that while states had added another Rs 1,300 crore in cess from construction activities, they had only disbursed Rs 300 crore from the corpus since the central government’s request last year. Of the Rs 62,400 crore collected over the years, just over a third or Rs 22,400 crore stands utilised.

One has to consider the possibility that the funds may not have been allocated to the migrant population as registration of migrant workers is low and awareness of such schemes is limited. An NHRC-funded study, conducted by the Kerala Development Society, published in October 2020, found that most inter-state migrants lacked access to social security benefits. The awareness about such schemes was also limited. More than half of the migrant population in Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana and Maharashtra had poor access to available schemes due to lack of information and language barriers.

The central government’s record concerning migrant welfare schemes has also been abysmal. The government had launched a pension scheme for unorganised migrant workers called the PM Shram Maandhan Yojana, but only 4.5 million have registered for the scheme.

The NHRC study further highlights that the access to schemes for interstate migrant workers ranged from 0.5 to 27.5 per cent. Ayushman Bharat reached just over 3 per cent in Gujarat, Haryana and Maharashtra and National Social Assistance Programme had 4 per cent accessibility. Although over 20 per cent of migrants availed Jan Dhan Yojana, there were glitches and other issues in cash transfers.

The other significant issue is the computation of who is a migrant and how many migrants are there.

The last record of migration in the country is 2011. There has been no update since on migration numbers. Most of the projections are also based on the Census data.

In 2016-17, a chapter in Economic Survey estimated 9 million inter-state migration each year. For this analysis, the survey computed migration extrapolating travel data from Railways.

The absence of any factual data poses a problem from an estimation standpoint. One estimate suggests that there are 65 million interstate migrants in the country. However, this would put the growth rate of interstate migration at 6.3 per cent per annum--an increase of 40 per cent over the 2011 census growth rate. Interstate migration growth nearly doubled between the 2001 and 2011 census.

“The last available numbers (on migration) are from Census 2011. By the time we get Census 2021 data, it would be another 4-5 years. You can’t wait for so long to have migration data,” says Ali Mehdi, senior fellow, ICRIER.

Mehdi says that administrative data collection or registries may not yield much, and the country needs a survey approach. He calls for restarting of NSS survey on migrants.

The NSS conducted its first migrant survey in 1955, and the last survey was conducted in 2007-08; there has been no new update since.

So, will the ONORC data and new database to register migrants work?

While an estimate of interstate migrant workers is vital for schemes like housing for all and rental housing, migration needs to be looked at from other perspectives. And, even though there is much research on inter-state migrant workers, studies of students migrating for education are limited. Even if the objective is to capture the interstate unorganised migrant worker, ONORC, may not be sufficient, as it remains limited only to workers availing of NFSA benefits.

A survey approach would indeed work better as it would also illustrate the household income of migrant workers and their ability to find accommodation independent of government initiatives.

The government announced two surveys on migrants earlier this year in March. The first survey shall capture data from 300,000 migrants pertaining to their socio-economic conditions, jobs and sectors they work in, whereas the other would capture details of 150,000 firms for job creation.

However, the new exercise only focuses on migrant workers and not students, which also form a significant chunk of the migrant population. Past NSS surveys in this regard have been more extensive.

More important, the migrant survey cannot be a one-time exercise and needs to be carry out at regular intervals to estimate patterns of migration.