Many unhappy returns

Scores of migrant labourers and their families are now back in their home states. Having suffered the extreme trauma of eviction and joblessness, many are unlikely to leave even the uncertain safety of their villages in a hurry. For the foreseeable future, then, India will see a unique and artificially created imbalance in its labour force. States with relatively low private manufacturing and construction activity will have large cohorts of unemployed and underemployed people. Those where private activity is limping back to normal will suffer a shortage of skilled and semi-skilled workers.

For states that account for the bulk of the migrants, this unprecedented reverse migration imposes extraordinary challenges of absorbing them without causing social disruptions. Seen differently, this could offer these states an opportunity to become India’s new manufacturing hubs. Politically savvy leaderships have indicated an early understanding of this. But the response has been variable and the focus appears to be on controlling rather than enabling. 

The first move of many states — including those that employ the bulk of the migrant labourers in normal times — has been to curtail labour rights through ordinances legalising expanded working hours and reduced bargaining rights. The idea, they say, is to provide proprietors of small and medium enterprises, the ones most at the receiving end of the lockdown, to get up to speed quickly. This small (and hopefully temporary) measure has been taken with some big ambitions: To attract foreign direct investment diverting from China. 

There is reams of analysis to explain why weaker labour rights alone is unlikely to prompt foreigners to disgorge their dollars in green- or brownfield projects just yet. Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Modi has offered a more realistic solution and a grasp that migrants can be assets: He is reaching out to investors in Maharashtra and Gujarat to relocate to Bihar to access the vast returnee labour force in situ as it were.

But between “mapping skills” of their migrant forces, as UP, Bihar and West Bengal have resolved to do, and transforming these states into new catchment areas for investment, lies a vast gulf. Mamata Banerjee helped West Bengal miss that bus in 2011 when she ejected the Left Front on the entirely perverse ticket of repelling investment, including one of the largest single investments in over 30 years. The scar of Singur, and the steady descent of the state into violence not seen since the sixties, has done much to deter even the most intrepid investor. Much is made of the IT complexes on the edge of the city’s suburbs. Those are impressive but they have not turned the state’s capital in tomorrow’s Bengaluru, not even day after tomorrow’s. This means Ms Banerjee urgently needs to divert her attention from battling the governor and Amit Shah to focusing on vesting more workers with training and education and offering the business community a viable investment climate. 

The pity is that, unlike her neighbouring states, West Bengal is the most suited to becoming a renewed investment hub.  Unlike the bucolic character of Patna or, say, Lucknow, resplendent in parts with its historic charms, Bengal is highly urbanised. Its capital retains an urban life of vibrancy and culture, quality educational institutions and access to multiple global and local markets. Yet the city is decaying for want of the sort of dynamic economic activity that makes cities relevant. 

Limited urbanisation, in fact, has been Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s enduring dilemma. Through his stint in power, he undoubtedly transformed his state, bringing bijli, pani, sadaak  to his state’s more remote regions and also, for a while, improving the state’s law and order. Now, it’s a chicken-and-egg situation: To take his state to the next level, he needs game-changing, value-added activity from big-ticket large corporations, whether Indian or foreign. But until he is able to optimise social and physical infrastructure and security, few corporations will venture into Bihar’s hinterlands. 

UP has a similar problem, which Yogi Adityanath is trying to solve in various quirky ways. Mayawati once sought to solve by focusing investments in the sprawling Noida urban agglomeration on the edge of the National Capital Region (including a massive, kitschy park and Formula 1 track). Investors certainly appreciated these efforts — as with Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu, Mayawati tried not to let endemic corruption come in the way of her investment policies. 

The lack of dynamic investment has left UP and Bihar mired in the same antediluvian issues of caste and class that make politics that create a perpetual climate of uncertainty. That is why the states top the charts in terms of outbound migration — and may also explain why many returnee migrants are trying to make it back to those inhospitable states that are in a position to offer jobs.  

Leaders of states sustaining large reverse migration labour flows — and that includes Jharkhand — cannot be unaware of the failings of their states to make the great leap forward to the next-level urban-industrial complex. Those investor jamborees they hold routinely yield more MoUs than shovels in the ground. These states have been mired in the entirely artificially created vicious cycle of lawlessness and low investment. Unemployed migrants, forced to rely on the subsistence of the rural jobs guarantee programmes, will multiply their predicament many times over.