Migration and its Impact on the Tribal Communities

Migration is a complex phenomenon that is not amenable to any simplistic understanding. A number of socio-economic models purport to explain this phenomenon. The dual economy model understands migration to be a result of ‘urban pull’. Proponents of the theory claim that labour migration takes place when there is likelihood of getting higher-paid employment in urban rather than rural areas. The modified version of this model proposed by Todaro (1987) explains migration in terms of expectations regarding higher wages in urban than in rural areas, though these may not be realistic and may result in migration of a larger number of workers than urban areas can hold. This model thus states that migrants are free agents and make their own choices in favour of migration.

As opposed to this, the Marxist model stresses structural factors and the dominant classes’ extraction of surplus through exploitation. According to this model, labour is pushed out of peripheral areas and contributes to underpaid surplus labour in urban centres. A variant of this model attributes the push-out to ecological/ environmental factors.

Migration can be understood as a coping mechanism against unfavourable conditions in rural areas, as well as a means of bettering economic conditions. Less than 12% of tribals in India are able to meet their daily needs through agriculture alone; they are dependent on forest work, but the ban on logging has reduced this source of employment. It is here that migration to urban areas for work acts as a means of survival.

There is a definite linkage between migration and food security. While migration is a way of life in most tribal families, the extent of migration (number of people in the family migrating, distance and duration of migration) depends on how the family perceives its foodgrains security. For families with a slightly better food security situation, migration is mainly by young male workers, it is short-term, short-distance and combined flexibly with agricultural work. In the second case of households facing severe food insecurity, the entire household undertakes long-term, long-distance migration. These poorer households migrate immediately after the harvest, and the reason for this is that they have to repay the high-interest loans that they have taken under distress circumstances during the monsoon. In this sense, migration only serves to perpetuate dependence. Since one of the most important factors for migration and perpetual dependence is food insecurity, a system of subsidised food distribution is essential.

Migrants face harsh and almost inhuman working conditions. Long hours and unpaid overtime are expected conditions that have to be fulfilled if good relations are to be maintained with employers, an essential prerequisite to ensuring availability of work in later years. Employers do not provide protection either against risk of injury, health hazards or sexual exploitation at worksites: in fact in most cases employers and their agents are primarily responsible for sexual harassment of women migrants. Unsanitary conditions, poor diet and contaminated drinking water result in breakdown of health, strength and productive potential, and entail high medical costs which have to be borne by the migrants themselves. The very conditions which migrants seek to escape in the villages are prevalent, perhaps multiplied, in urban work centres.

Gender roles become more mainstreamed as there grows a sharpening of existing gender-linked division between paid and unpaid work. The task of women in the village, while men migrate for work, is perceived as less dignified and less important, while on the other hand women grow increasingly dependent on men for cash, and their bargaining power declines. Those women who migrate with their men are excluded from the public spaces where labour negotiations take place. They face greater strain as along with productive work they have to fulfil domestic duties in an unfamiliar environment, face health and childcare problems and many times sexual abuse as well.

Apart from the economically harsh conditions, migrants also face social indignity and isolation. They travel from a world where relations are well defined and they are respected members of a community, to one where they are ostracised as outsiders, uncivilised and dirty people. The world of caste discrimination is thrust upon them. While they were looked down upon by moneylenders and labour agents even in the village, there these moneylenders were in a minority among a large tribal community; here in the city the tribal migrants are not only poor, ‘uncivilised’, ‘low-caste’ but they also lose their strength of numbers. And when they return to their villages, their links with their roots are already loosened; long absence entails loss of reputation and social status, especially if they have not been in a condition to return to their villages for social occasions and festivals. Since tribal society is inseparably rooted in land and agriculture, to lose touch with the life of the land is to alienate oneself from one’s own; and this results in a definite loss of social position.

The world of the migrant tribal worker is not a pleasant one. Deeply attached to the culture, community and land, tribals are driven to unknown environments by circumstances not completely in their control. For some, of course, migration is a choice – but one that is exercised in absence of lucrative employment options in the village. For others, of course, it is an act of desperation forced by the simple inability to repay distress loans. The fact that generations of tribals have experienced the harsh conditions of migrant life and still continue to take that option shows that there is no other option locally available.