Tamil Nadu - Madurai   

On roads most travelled

MADURAI: Migration is considered to be one of the most important methods of diversifying livelihoods. As part of a livelihood strategy, it involves the geographic dispersal of members, with an obvious spatial component.

It can break down, affirm or change social and economic relations, and not always through the conscious agency of migrants. It is, more than ever, an urban affair, both because of its demographic reality and of the increasing awareness of local actors concerning the challenges posed by it.

Migration among the Madurai youth with specific reference to persons involved in two-wheeler repair work has increased. Diploma holders in engineering, ITI trainees and school dropouts are largely part of the two-wheeler mechanic brigade. Most of them are migrating to industrially developed areas such as Tirupur and Coimbatore, looking for more rewarding jobs.

The migration pattern has been influenced by inequality in the form of a neo-liberal economy with socially embedded nature of access to industrial jobs, economic changes and lack of sufficient opportunities for other kinds of employment.

The conspicuous consumption, supported well by a burgeoning middle class population, is seeing an exponential growth in the number of two-wheelers. Newer brands on the road do not necessarily mean better fortune for two-wheeler mechanics.

G. Pandurangan, a two-wheeler mechanic who has been in the profession for more than a decade says that the surge in number of two-wheelers has not increased the means of their livelihood because of the absence of a correlative condition as showrooms are promoting service with various lucrative offers, affecting the private mechanics. Moreover, the situation is not the same as most of the customers go for replacement rather than repair.

T.T.G. Thyaga Saravanan, Executive Director, Sathyaa Jyothi TVS, differs with the opinion that service centres of showrooms affect livelihood of mechanics. He says that there is a phenomenal increase in the number of two-wheelers in recent times and no showroom could provide service to all vehicles on the road. “Good private mechanics are always in demand.”

There are also cases where poor migrants being able to use the money to gain access to economic mobility and secure livelihood and build their political or social capital, which in future also stops a sort of forced migration for economic reasons. There are pockets in Madurai where, migrants who have, in addition to increasing their choices, also enhanced their sense of dignity and self-worth.

There is also a condition where migration has enhanced the status, yet many migrants experience greater powerlessness at the destinations than in their home locality. For example, a migrant who returned after working in a knitting unit in Tirupur says that migration for manual work is itself a source of vulnerability — through ill health, insecurity on the journey, malpractice by employers, abuse, humiliation and the felt indignities.

Most migration is driven by a search for a better or more secure livelihood and can be poverty reducing. The ability to access migration, to choose whether or not to migrate, and the outcomes are not evenly distributed however.

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