India's migrant workers flee poverty but face violence threat

from AFP

NEW DELHI (AFP) — Each summer, tens of thousands of men leave India's dirt-poor Bihar in a mighty exodus for work that development workers expect to be spurred this year by the worst flooding in decades.

They face back-breaking labour or even violence where they arrive -- but even so, at least 200,000 people leave Bihar each year looking for employment.

"It's obviously one of the highest (number) without any question in terms of migrants. There are both push and pull factors," said Shankar Venkateswaran, India head of development group the American India Foundation (AIF).

This year monsoon floods that affected 20 million people in the eastern state and drowned 1.6 million hectares (3.9 million acres) of crops will push more men out, leaving villages of mainly women and children.

With the harvest lost and relief patchy, families will need to borrow money just to eat.

"If the moneylenders see the family has a man away working they'll be more likely to give money," said Vijay Kumar, who works with non-profit group Kanchan Seva Ashram to help the women left behind.

By going to areas that have benefited from India's nine percent-plus growth, landless migrants can make more in a few months than they would the entire year in Bihar, which has been left out of the boom.

Aided by middlemen, they will head to construction sites in capital Delhi and farms in breadbasket Punjab state.

Workers even head as far afield as insurgency-hit Kashmir, some 1,800 kilometres (1,116 miles) away, with parts of the state dubbed "Little Dubai" by migrants for the high wages.

"It is getting more and more organised," said Venkateswaran of AIF, which runs education and livelihood programmes in migration-prone areas.

"People are going further and further to get work. It's all contracted out, very middleman-driven."

According to India's latest census in 2001, 2.2 million people left the state of 83 million over the previous decade -- and the numbers are believed to be increasing.

"Every year a new long-distance train route is added from Muzaffarapur and Darbhanga to other states," noted development worker Kumar, who works in the two Bihari districts.

But how the migrants are received is far from certain, competing for work with existing residents in the billion-plus country where despite fast-paced economic growth 20 percent live on 10 rupees (25 cents) a day or less.

In some cases, local insurgencies based on cultural identities exacerbate tensions.

In northeastern Assam, militants have killed nearly 90 Hindi-speaking migrants this year, many Biharis, some of whom migrated decades earlier.

"My grandparents left Bihar back in 1910 and made Assam their home," said Anil Paswan, 37, a bespectacled schoolteacher whose grandfather parlayed his coalworker earnings into his own business.

Rebels say families such as the Paswans have taken away similar opportunities from local Assamese.

In Muslim-majority Kashmir, locals say migration has steadily increased in the past five years, with some viewing it as a threat to law and order in a state where an Islamic separatist insurgency has raged for almost two decades.

In July and August, after two migrants were arrested for the rape and murder of a local girl, militants ordered such labourers to leave the state. An estimated 20,000 people fled.

The order was later rescinded to the relief of Latief-ur-Rehman, 24, a house painter from Bihar, who heard about it as he boarded a bus leaving the state.

"I unpacked immediately and returned to work," said Rehman as he painted a gate at the entrance of a new house in the restive state's main city, Srinagar.

Rehman, who has been coming to Kashmir for five years, sends home 5,000 rupees (125 dollars) a month to support an ailing mother, two brothers and their families.

Labourers are less likely to meet anger in prosperous Punjab, where farmers grew rich during the "green revolution" in productivity in the 1970s and 1980s, or in far northern Ladakh, where tourism has fuelled a building boom.

This summer, migrants from Bihar's Darbhanga district are working on a road from Ladakh to a neighbouring state.

For 3,300 rupees a month they are building a rock wall to prevent the road from crumbling, hauling uneven stones with bare hands.

Many of the workers are young, unmarried Muslim men in their early twenties, who joke they come for the mountain views.

Birko Yadav, an older man who has left behind a wife and children to work here as a cook, was not quite so light-hearted.

"Necessity is what drives us here," he said as he made strong, sweet tea in the tin shack the workers call home.