The second half of the last decade has seen exponential and unprecedented growth in adivasi participation in the migrant labour market. While there is evidence of adivasi participation in migrant labour markets over the last four decades, from the nineties onwards the phenomena has risen to levels that can only be termed as a crisis of enormous proportions. With no means of survival other than marginal land holdings, which provide food for four to six months in a year, more than 80% of the tribal people are forced to migrate in search of work.
Surrounded on all sides by rapidly industrializing and urbanizing areas, the migrant tribal labourers are absorbed in employment involving hard physical labour under harsh conditions in stone quarries, brick kilns, sand excavation sites, salt pans, fishing boats, construction sites, as hamals on trucks, and as casual labour in industries performing the most arduous tasks often involving health hazards for extremely low wages.
It is this cheap labour that has been subsidizing India's march to modernization, whose availability is continued through an annual cycle of starvation and bondage. Estimates made by organizations working with adivasi populations range from 55% to 70% as the number of adivasis migrating out of their villages looking for employment.
Many of these adivasis are paid less than 50% of the prescribed minimum wage. It is also seen that the working conditions of the tribal migrant salt workers are excessive. It is difficult to ascertain the working hours of the day and the owners, conductors and lease holders never provide safety equipments. The employers do not maintain any records and workers are often denied payment of earned wages; under conditions of migrant labour it is difficult to prosecute and recover any wages.
The practice of migrating out for work among adivasis has various inflections to how it is constituted, in large part depending on the initial conditions that create the necessity to migrate out for work. For instance, among those adivasi communities where lack of local employment creates conditions where there is a cash shortage but where the families have not entirely run out of food stocks etc, the tendency is for individual members to migrate out for short periods so as to generate cash supplements to support their family. In sharp contrast, when adivasi families are reduced to abject poverty with no food stocks or other resources to even tide over the short term, the whole family tends to migrate looking for survival.
Often the levels of exploitation, non payment of wages, harassment and sexual violence forces them to migrate further to a new place, often abandoning the claims over earnings they may have had. Each such new place puts them in a more vulnerable situation producing a cycle of newer and sharper crises.
Any understanding of the causes for the continuation of such unyielding and hyper exploitative practices is impossible without an examination of the infrastructure that is in place to regulate and monitor employment and remunerative practices of employers. The said infrastructure is both by way of State institutions and laws that are meant to together constitute an apparatus of regulation.
Almost all labour in the brick kilns, salt pans, sand excavation and fishing boats is 'forced labour'. The law is clear on this point. The payment of wages is an absolute condition of employment. In the Peoples Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) v. Union Of India, the Supreme Court has held that requiring workers to work for less than Minimum Wages is 'forced labour' as contemplated in Article 23 of the Constitution. 'Forced Labour' is a criminal offence and an atrocity under 3(1)(vi) of the Prevention of Atrocities on Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe Act 1989 and the Sub Divisional Magistrate has been specifically empowered to prevent atrocities under the rules framed under the Act. However, the critical aspect of the criminal justice system's relation to adivasi migrant labour lies in the fact that criminal matters such as non payment of wages and sexual harassment are never treated as criminal offenses by the law enforcement mechanism.
In every tribal area the Integrated Tribal Development Project has been set up for the welfare needs and development of the tribal people. There is a need to empower the ITDP Department to protect the rights of migrant tribal workers. As the Revenue department is the license issuing authority for many rural industries, if suitably empowered, it can be effective in the recovery of the wages of unpaid workers. Non Payment of Minimum Wages should be made a cognizable offence and be brought under the purview of Section 374 of the Indian Penal Code as Unlawful Compulsory Labour. The redressal of complaints like non payment of wages and sexual exploitation should be done at a government office nearest to the place of residence of the worker and not necessarily the site of employment. There ought to be regulation of the unfair labour practices through the presence of a labour inspector at all 'nakas' from where casual labour is recruited with a display board of Minimum Wages for different employments and provision should be made for registration of migrant labour with the Gram Panchayats. There is also a need for Mobile Labour Courts or additional powers to be given to the Court of the Judicial Magistrate First Class to try labour matters.
The phenomena of adivasi migrant labour is positioned to grow rapidly over the next decade unless a series of corrective/preventive measures are taken. Such measures can be conceptualized at either end of the phenomena of migrant labour and the very creation of such a 'disaggregated' labour force that is fragmented, disempowered and highly marginalized is minimised. However, simultaneously efforts to create a new and aggressive regulation mechanism that seeks to discipline the ownership of said industries is needed.
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