Circular Migration and Precarity: Perspectives from Rural Bihar
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Circular Migration and Precarity: Perspectives from Rural Bihar Amrita Datta1,2 Accepted: 21 September 2020 © Indian Society of Labour Economics 2020
Abstract Migration and mobilities are vastly underestimated in India. In particular, circular migration remains poorly captured as circular migrants move back and forth between source and destination regions. Based on survey data from rural Bihar, an important source region of migration in India, this paper finds that a vast majority of migrants work and live in precarity in predominantly urban and prosperous destinations across India. However, those at the lowest rungs of the social and economic ladder in source regions—the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, other backward classes I and the labouring class—are the worst off at destination; they are part of the most precarious shorter-term migration streams, earn the lowest incomes, have the poorest conditions of work, and live in the harshest circumstances. The paper shows that social and economic hierarchies, and in turn, precarity in source region is reproduced at destination, and, thus, there is little evidence that spatial mobility is associated with social mobility. Focusing on migrants’ location, work, employment, income, housing, and access to basic services at destination, the paper foregrounds migrant precarity and adds to a small body of empirical literature that is significant in understanding the spatial and structural elements of circular migration in India and in turn, the migration crisis that emerged as a result of the economic shock of the COVID 19 pandemic. Keywords Circular migration · Labour migration · Rural–urban migration · Bihar · India · COVID 19
* Amrita Datta [email protected] 1
Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, Sangareddy, Telengana, India
2
Institute for Human Development, New Delhi, India
13
Vol.:(0123456789) ISLE
The Indian Journal of Labour Economics
1 Introduction The stringent lockdown imposed in India on March 24 2020 resulted in informal migrant workers across the country losing their jobs, incomes, and becoming stranded in distressing conditions, in destinations far away from their homes (SWAN 2020). The subsequent pictures of these migrants—of men, women, and children—determinedly walking hundreds of kilometres were hauntingly reminiscent of images from the Partition of 1947, the largest mass migration in history of the Indian subcontinent. How do we make sense of this crisis of migration—the mass exodus of workers from India’s cities? Why did migrant workers defy the national lockdown to undertake arduous journeys ‘home’? An analysis of the nature and pattern of this migration can shed some light to these questions. This paper, based on a primary study, focuses on migration from rural Bihar, an important source region of longdistance labour migration in the country. The spatial and structural elements of this migration stream, emphasised in the paper, are important in a context where migration from Bihar is known to
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