Context: Spurred by the exodus of 10 million migrants from big cities during the Covid-19 lockdown, NITI Aayog, along with a working subgroup of officials and members of civil society, has prepared a draft national migrant labor policy.

A rights-based approach:

• The draft describes two approaches to policy design: one focused on cash transfers, special quotas, and reservations; the other which enhances the agency and capability of the community and thereby removes aspects that come in the way of an individual’s own natural ability to thrive.
• The policy rejects a handout approach, opting instead for a rights-based framework.
• It seeks to remove restrictions on true agency and potential of the migrant workers.
• Migration should be acknowledged as an integral part of development, and government policies should not hinder but seek to facilitate internal migration.
• This compares with the approach taken in the Report of the Working Group on Migration, released in January 2017 by the then Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation.
• The report argued that the movement from agriculture to manufacturing and services was inherently linked to the success of migration in the country.

Issues with existing law:

• The 2017 report argued that specific protection legislation for migrant workers was unnecessary.
• Migrant workers should be integrated with all workers as part of an overarching framework that covers regular and contractual work.
• The report discussed the limitations of The Inter State Migrant Workers Act, 1979, which was designed to protect laborers from exploitation by contractors by safeguarding their right to non-discriminatory wages, travel and displacement allowances, and suitable working conditions.
• The 2017 report questioned this approach, given the size of the country’s unorganized sector.
• It called for a comprehensive law for these workers, which would form the legal basis for an architecture of social protection.

Governance nuts and bolts:

• The NITI draft lays down institutional mechanisms to coordinate between Ministries, states, and local departments to implement programmes for migrants.
• It identifies the Ministry of Labor and Employment as the nodal Ministry for implementation of policies, and asks it to create a special unit to help converge the activities of other Ministries.
• This unit would manage migration resource centers in high migration zones, a national labor Helpline, links of worker households to government schemes, and inter-state migration management bodies.
• Migration focal points should be created in various Ministries, the draft suggests.
• On the inter-state migration management bodies, it says that labor departments of source and destination states along major migration corridors, should work together through the migrant worker cells.

Ways to stem migration:

• Even as it underlines the key role of migration in development, the draft recommends steps to stem migration; this is an important difference with the 2017 report.
• The draft asks source states to raise minimum wages to bring major shifts in local livelihood of tribal (that) may result in stemming migration to some extent.
• The absence of community building organizations (CBO) and administrative staff in the source states has hindered access to development programmes, pushing tribal towards migration, the draft says.
• The “long term plan” for CBOs and panchayats should be to alleviate distress migration policy initiatives by aiming for a more pro-poor development strategy in the sending areas…that can strengthen the livelihood base in these areas.

The importance of data:

• The draft calls for a central database to help employers fill the gap between demand and supply and ensure maximum benefit of social welfare schemes.
• It asks the Ministries and the Census office to be consistent with the definitions of migrants and subpopulations, capture seasonal and circular migrants, and incorporate migrant-specific variables in existing surveys.
• Both documents see limited merit in Census data that comes only once a decade.
• The 2017 report called on the Registrar General of India to release migration data no more than a year after the initial tabulation, and to include sub-district level, village level, and caste data. It also asked the National Sample Survey Office to include questions related to migration in the periodic labor force survey, and to carry out a separate survey on migration.

https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/niti-aayog-migrant-workers-policy-covid-lockdown-7201753/

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