Gopisingh Varsingh Bhilwal of Kambhoi village, Limkheda taluk, owns eight bighas of land, which he shares with his three brothers. Gopisingh’s field is situated on a slope. Not only is it difficult to fetch water from the river Suki, about 500 m away, it is also very expensive. He applied for the construction of a well under the Collective Water Irrigation Scheme. But his application was not sanctioned. The previous year, due to heavy rainfall, his crop was ruined. If not drought or floods, pests ruin the crop. He has never had a harvest that could sustain him through the year.

Since 1988, Gopisingh migrates to the cities for at least 5-6 months a year to work as labour in the construction sector. He has laid telephone cables, dug for underground drainages, and done centering, bar binding, road and R.C.C works. He has also worked as mukkadam (a mukadam is a worker who supervises other workers and reports to the conractor). He undertook the work of laying telephone cables with a group of 100 workers in Dang district. While assigning the responsibility of mukkadam to him, the Contractor of Devgadh Bariya and Santrampur gave him half the original rates agreed upon; the workers also were paid less. Once the workers are taken from the villages to the cities, the entire responsibility is shouldered by the mukkadam. Gopisingh said that he had not been able to go back to his village for two years because he was required to pay wages to the labourers. He borrowed Rs 30,000 at 12 per cent rate of interest. He had to sell his cattle and mortgage three bighas of land in order to re-enter his village.

This is the story of ten lakh tribal labourers, forced to migrate to cities for survival.

In Gujarat, more than 12 lakh workers are engaged in the construction sector, of which 60 per cent are tribal workers. These tribal workers are mostly from Dahod district of Gujarat; Jabhua district of Madhya Pradesh; and Banswada district of Rajasthan. They migrate to Ahmedabad, Surat, Jamnagar and Rajkot to work as labour. An attempt was made to count the exact number of the seasonal migrant tribal workers seeking employment in Ahmedabad city. An estimated 42,000 workers returned by the state road transport to their native village, Dahod, during last Diwali festival. If the migrant tribal workers from Jhabua, Banswada and Dungarpur talukas are included, the estimate would increase by almost 75,000.   

Successful attempts were made by an organisation, Disha, in 1993, to organise unions for the tribal labour migrating to the cities. Bandhkaam Mazdoor Sangathan (Construction Labour Union) is a state-level union, which has branches in Ahmedabad, Vadodara and Surat. Disha conducted a detailed study on ‘Tribal workers migrating to Ahmedabad City’. The conclusions of this study are relevant today. Some of the conclusions are discussed below.

Living Conditions of Migrants in the City

The migrants work as daily wagers, and are employed through the Kadiya Nakas (Labour Market), or mason centres. The most immediate problem they face is the lack of any accommodation. Fifty-seven per cent of the tribal workers spend their night in the open spaces such as footpaths, railway tracks or near ponds, and in most unhygienic conditions. The sky is their roof.

When the workers leave for work, they hang the bag containing their essential household things on a tree. There is no any security or assurance that they will find it on their return. Forty-one per cent of the tribals spend their nights under a thin tarpaulin sheet and only two per cent of the workers stay in small pucca rooms. Only two per cent of the workers get proper wages. The irony is that the workers who construct buildings are themselves roofless, homeless.

Half the tribal workers live in inhuman conditions. These people are often driven away from the places they occupy by unsocial elements, local authorities, police, railway workers, private security and people living in the nearby bungalows. Often, they are compelled to pay ‘hafta’. Ninety-nine per cent of the tribals are forced to relieve themselves in public before dawn or after sunset due to the lack of toilet facilities. The chowkidars at some places take money from the tribals for permission to use vacant, private land for the purpose. The workers get drinking water from nearby societies; sometimes they are made to clean or do some work in return for some water.

Ninety-nine per cent of the tribals buy fuel from the market. The wood is available at the rate of Rs 60 for 20 kg. On an average, Rs 20 is being spent each day on fuel. If the worker does not get employment, the women go to nearby areas to search for fuel, thus saving some money.

Eighty-eight per cent of the tribals take more than one child along with them to the work site. These include mainly the breast-fed children or the children between 5 to 11 years of age, that is, the school-going age. This deprives them of the fundamental right to education.

Working Conditions

The tribals who have migrated to the cities get two types of employment. The first type is in construction projects through a mukkadam. The workers get work for a particular time period and they generally get paid less than minimum wages. The second type is as casual workers through the kadiya naka. The work is only for 15 to 20 days, but workers are paid more than the minimum wages.

Unskilled tribal workers are often seen engaged in the construction of roads, bridges, power plants, drainage lines, water supply, multi-storey buildings and other laborious work. Only 7 per cent are skilled workers such as masons.

Ninety-nine per cent workers do not get any basic facilities such as drinking water, residential facilities, toilet or washing facilities, crèches, eating rooms, first aid, etc., at the working site.

Bandhkam Mazdoor Sangathan has observed that 90 per cent of the tribal workers do not know their main contractor. They are not given any employment documents such as attendance cards, wage slips, registration in the muster rolls, etc. Workers are exploited due to a lack of alternative, sustainable employment and the ignorance of employment-related rights.

Illiteracy, ignorance of legal entitlements, lack of collective bargaining and a dire need for employment contribute to extreme exploitation. The contractor pays a small part of the wages as advance so that the worker can buy food and holds back the major portion of the wages till the assignment is completed. Often, even after the completion of work, the contractor does not make full payment. This modus operandi is adopted by many contractors to exploit migrant tribals, who are thus converted to forced labour.

In the year 2006, Bandhkam Mazdoor Sangathan at its Ahmedabad and Vadodara offices received 97 group complaints involving 1,818 workers, amounting to Rs 28,11,274  in unpaid wages. In Gujarat, the minimum wages for an unskilled worker is Rs 95.40 per day for building and other construction works.

The construction sector is an accident-prone industry. Of the accidental deaths, more than 60 per cent of the victims are found to be tribals. This indicates that the tribal workers are compelled to work in the absence of safety measures while doing very risky work. Moreover, workers are not in a position to refuse such high-risk work; they do not get any insurance benefits.

Migrant tribal women workers very often face sexual abuse and harassment. There is no crèche facility at the work site. Nor do they get any privacy to feed their children. Sometimes workers have to work late nights and are compelled to do overtime work. BMS has tackled such cases and also filed petitions in the court.

Unions for Migrant Tribal Workers

BMS has focused on and enrolled those migrant tribals that represent the most vulnerable labour class in the construction industry. BMS has not only tried to draw the attention of the state government and society to the working and living conditions and the problems of the migrant tribal workers but has also ensured advocacy and lobbying in some crucial issues. BMS has also been successful in getting The Building and Other Construction Workers (Regulation of Employment and Condition of Service) Act 1996 in Gujarat implemented in order to protect the fundamental rights and to provide the benefits of social security and other welfare schemes.

BMS joined the campaign of National Campaign Committee—Construction Labour as its Gujarat chapter. Due to BMS’s continuous efforts through rallies, dharnas, demonstrations, etc., the Gujarat government was forced to implement the central law. It framed rules in 2003, and eventually the ‘Gujarat Building and other Construction Workers Welfare Board’ (at present, a one-man board) was formed. A representative of the BMS has been included as an Invitee Member. The representative will be present in every process and in the framing of welfare schemes and rules of the Welfare Board. Schemes such as Renbasera for improving housing facilities, drinking water, mobile toilets, childcare services, etc., for migrant tribal construction workers in the cities are under consideration by the Board. 

For the last five years, the Tribal Development Department of the state government has been allocating Rs 10 lakhs for establishing Renbaseras in the cities to solve the shelter problems of migrant tribals. At present a Renbasera has been constructed under the Nathalal Jaghada overbridge in Mani Nagar, Ahmedabad. Each person using it, however, has to pay Rs 5 per day and it can be used only for a maximum period of 7 days at a time! Moreover, the places are not yet habitable.  Due to all the above reasons, they are unutilised till today.

BMS demanded that essential commodities such as wheat, maize, rice, etc., be provided at subsidised rates to migrant tribals in the cities under the Antyoday Yojana or any other scheme. Consequent to the campaign for the Right to Food, the state government declared the ‘Roaming Ration Card’ scheme. With the roaming ration cards, the tribal workers can avail food grains at subsidised rates in the cities; their family members in the villages too can get the food grains. This scheme has not been implemented completely. This scheme will help tribal workers to limit their expenses during migration and possibly start saving some of the money they earn.

The Gujarat government is also trying to help in the education of the children of migrant tribals. In this scheme, wherever the parents migrate for employment, their children can get admission in a nearby school through a bridge card.

Suggestions

There should be coordination between the departments of Labour, Tribal Welfare, Health, Civil Supplies, Education and Social Welfare in order to protect the human rights and to provide the basic amenities to the migrant tribals in the cities.

At the village level, there should be compulsory registration in the panchayat of the families who intend to migrate, and there should be an arrangement for providing identity cards to them. The government should motivate trade unions to establish Workers’ Facilitation Centres at the village level and help organise them.

The migration rate is very high in Dahod-Panchmahal district. The central government has implemented the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGA) in this area. Several efforts have been made by the government and non-government organisations to increase the income of tribals through the local resources of the area such as forest, land, water, animal husbandry, etc. Crores of rupees have been invested in this; yet the fact is that the tribals earn 80 per cent of the income for their annual requirements through migration. The government should protect the rights of the migrant tribals and provide safe working environments so that they can live and work with dignity and self-respect.