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Employment guarantee and migration

Reetika Khera

Public works offering relatively predictable employment opportunities are likely to be particularly effective in slowing down rural-urban migration.

IN A recent speech, Congress president Sonia Gandhi drew attention to the role of public works programmes in reducing rural-urban migration. "Once we generate employment in the rural areas," she said, "migration from the villages is bound to decrease." This may sound like wishful thinking, but as it happens, she had a point — a point that has received insufficient attention in debates on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA).

In this connection, there is much to learn from the experience of relief work in drought years, notably in Rajasthan. The last major drought in Rajasthan occurred in 2002-03. At that time, I surveyed 400 rural families from eight villages of Barmer, Bikaner, Jaipur, and Udaipur districts. The main purpose of this survey was to assess the effectiveness of relief works initiated by the State Government. In Biramsar village (Bikaner), a group of men said that had it not been for the employment programmes, I would not have been able to conduct fieldwork: entire villages would have been abandoned and homes locked up, as people migrated to cities in search of work.

The survey data confirmed that relief works were having a major impact on rural-urban migration: as the scale of relief works in the sample villages grew, the incidence of migration sharply declined. According to official data, the number of people employed in relief works jumped from 4.08 lakh in 2000-01 to 9.75 lakh in 2002-03. When I conducted a baseline survey in 2002, half of the households reported that some family member had migrated during the summer months in 2001. This proportion fell drastically by the time I revisited them in 2003: just over one-tenth of the sample households reported migration of a family member. This reversal of traditional migration patterns, whereby migration typically increases in a drought year, was primarily due to the relief works.

Even when public works were opened on a large scale, there were many who did not get work at all, or who got less work than they desired. For instance, Kasra Gamar (Badli village, Udaipur), whose family had 11 members, got only 55 days of work in 2002-3. He complained, "Parivar bada hai, phir bhi ek ko hi lagaya gaya aur woh bhi chaar baar hi lagaya (We have a large family, yet only one person was given employment and that too just four times in the year)."

Why, then, was there such a drastic decline in migration? Here the statement of Dakubai (Biroti village, Udaipur) is enlightening. A widow supporting four young children and her mother-in-law, she said: "I go away to Udaipur because I have young children to feed. Employment here is too uncertain." As this statement indicates, it is not just the scarcity but also the unpredictability of employment opportunities at home that induce many people to migrate. Thus, public works that offer relatively predictable employment opportunities are likely to be particularly effective in slowing down rural-urban migration.

By the time of my revisit in 2003, the Rajasthan Government had evolved a "rotation" system for providing employment to those seeking it. The rotation system meant that those who were given work in the first fortnight of any month would be employed again only after everyone else had been given work at least once. Thus, everyone was assured of being employed by turns, in a reasonably predictable manner. The NREGA, too, could become a "predictable" source of local employment (since it guarantees work within a fortnight to anyone demanding it), and therefore reduce distress migration. In this respect, the NREGA contrasts with previous employment programmes such as Jawahar Rozgar Yojana or Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana.

One clear indication of the fact that predictable employment affects migration decisions is that many of the migrants from Udaipur district were synchronising their movements to and from Gujarat with the drought relief programmes. They made sure they were present in the village when muster rolls were filled, and returned to the village (or delayed their departure to Gujarat) when they anticipated being employed in the village relief works.

As this suggests, many migrants would prefer not to migrate. A large proportion of the migrants (70 per cent) said they would not have migrated had work been available in the village at the minimum wage (Rs.60 a day at that time). I also asked them about their "reservation wage" for local employment, that is, the lowest wage they would accept for working in the village instead of migrating. The average reservation wage for local employment was Rs.40, even though the average wage they were earning as migrant labourers was much higher — close to Rs.59. Savita Lahur, an Adivasi of Badli village (Udaipur), asked if she would still migrate to Gujarat if work at Rs.40 a day were available in Badli itself said: "Yahan 40 mile to Gujarat jaane ka kya kaam hai? Bimaar ho jaate hain — phir kya karen? (If I can get Rs.40 here, then why would I go to Gujarat? If one falls ill there, what would one do?)"

Exploitative conditions

The willingness to accept a lower wage in the village reflects the costs of migration as well as the exploitative conditions that labourers face as migrants. The costs of migration include transport costs, uncertain earnings, health hazards, and higher costs of living in urban areas combined with poor living conditions. Migration also results in a breakdown of social life: this is true both in the case of men migrating alone and when entire families migrate. When entire families migrate the situation is even worse: children have to be removed from schools and live in precarious environments. Women and young girls are especially vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Further, urban congestion is a cost of migration that is borne by society at large.

This is not to say that all migrants leave their village for distress reasons. For some households, migration is a positive opportunity to earn higher incomes. Sometimes migration also translates into a better quality of life: the men from Sukaliya (Barmer) who worked as chowkidars in mango orchards in Gujarat were almost dreamy-eyed as they spoke of the mango orchards. A substantial number of respondents said they would have chosen to migrate even if work (at the minimum wage) was available in the village. A majority of these "voluntary migrants" were semi-skilled or skilled workers (e.g. carpenters and jewellers), who had the highest earnings (Rs. 68 a day on an average) among all migrant workers.

To conclude, three crucial insights emerge from the recent experience of relief works in Rajasthan. First, public works programmes in rural areas have a strong impact on rural-urban migration, provided that they are fairly predictable. Secondly, NREGA can be particularly effective in this respect, insofar as it provides work on demand. Thirdly, this aspect of NREGA has been neglected in recent debates. Distress migration has enormous personal and social costs — the NREGA is a unique opportunity to protect people from these hardships.

(The writer is an economist who works on development issues.)

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