kantharao Posted April 5, 2009 Report Posted April 5, 2009 How would you know that a social security scheme is doing its work? Official reports will say what they will say, but proof of the worth of a welfare scheme lies in the answer to one question: Do the children go to school? I am in Dokur, a village about 120 km from the district headquarters of Mahbubnagar. It’s arid country, an expanse of cinder-dry brush on either side of a winding road with a canopy of banyans and peepuls. Drought is likelier than bounty in this rain shadow area, Pepsi easier to get than drinkable water. Mahbubnagar district is migration country. Its migrants are legendary. Old timers here will tell you with some pride that they built the Nagarjunasagar masonry dam, the Hirakud and the Bhakra Nangal. The district was once called Palamur, and therefore its workers Palamur labour. Mahbubnagar is second only to Jaisalmer district in Rajasthan in the number of migrant labourers it supplies to the works of India. Every summer, the buses come to carry away the able-bodied to work sites round the country, sometimes even to the Gulf. With the buses come the contractors to pick up every volunteer in the age group of 12-50 at wage rates of 25 Rs per 12-hour day for children, Rs 35 for women and Rs 40-50 for men. Were it not voluntary, you might be pardoned if you imagined the slave trade of the 18th century. The workers gather in the addas of Mahbubnagar and the contractors pick workers of their choice like vegetables from a basket – ‘you, you and you’. The years leading up to the 2004 election were a cruel sequence for the workers, and by consequence, to the then chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu. Three successive droughts stripped the landscape of any sort of vegetation and the old people left behind flocked to soup kitchens run by charitable organizations. To Chandrababu Naidu, this was not the story to tell the world. That resided in Mahbubnagar, a boom town of pizza parlours and spanking new cinemas. Mahbubnagar was growing on the strength of a different kind of migration: the influx of gentry from the country to invest in internet cafes and bakeries; the flocking of crony capitalists to set up medical and engineering colleges for the middle classes of Hyderabad; and the arrival of carpetbagger realtors dreaming of turning this town into a suburb of Hyderabad. This was the story Chandrababu Naidu was telling the world as he headed into the election of 2004. It was a desperate election for the migrant workers, the geriatric society they left behind and the money order economy of villages such as Dokur. To everyone but Chandrababu Naidu and his fawning press, it was clear that the migrant workers of Dokur and such like villages would vote with their feet. But they weren’t around to vote! The buses had come and gone in early April and half the voting population was absent. Opposition party volunteers went from house to house to seek addresses and whereabouts and sent plaintive appeals to the workers to come back and vote. It was one of those miracles of democracy, and the stunning faith of the poor in its working that most of the workers came back to throw the only stone they had in hand at the regime lolling in the dream clouds of Hyderabad. The vote of 2004 was not just a defeat for Chandrababu Naidu. It was a rout of the McKinseyite doublespeak of ‘reforms’ foisted on the poor by the supplysiders. The significance of the verdict of 2004 continues to be clouded by the friends of reforms in the media, but the essence of it was not lost on clever people like Chandrababu Naidu, the most McKinseyite of McKinseyites, the most eager of those beavers. Today he reappears in the guise of a welfare populist, claiming to have been chastened and, quite ironically, reformed. So I am back in Dokur. It isn’t a tropical paradise yet. There is Pepsi still in the blue refrigerators of wayside tea stalls, and some bottled water. But the important change from 2004 is that there are no gruel centres. That’s no thanks to Rajasekhara Reddy. The rain gods have been kind and the borewells are better. The other important change is that there are workers in the villages. It’s not as if Palamur has ceased to be Palamur but the dynamics of migration have begun to change. The change agents in this process are the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, and the Jalayagnam programme of the state government. The NREGS empowers a landless worker to claim 100 days of work at Rs 80 per day. It’s a wage, paid into the worker’s bank account, that disturbed the dynamics of the indenture trade in India. To make migration feasible for the people of Dokur today, the indenture rates would have to be in the region of Rs 130 per day per worker. Add transportation and accommodation costs and contractor commissions to it and you make Palamur workers completely unaffordable to builders and shippers anywhere in India. The better alternative is to look for Nepalis and Bangladeshi immigrants from north Bengal and tribal Orissa. Thus do you see workers from Jalpaiguri, and Kalimpong, and Balasore in the construction sites in the IT districts of Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad and Noida. The other change agent in Palamur is the Jalayagnam programme under which four major irrigation projects are being built: the Bheema, the Nettempad, the Koilsagar, and the Kalwakurthy. For the first time in history, the people of Palamur are digging and hewing and fetching for themselves. The figures reeled off by the collector of Mahbubnagar are impressive, as government figures will be: 6,67726 workers registered, Rs 318 crore spent, and so on. But do the children go to school? As per the collector’s statistics furnished to me, there used to be 85,313 children not going to school in 2003. The figure has been tumbling down since then: 51,774 in 2004-05, 39401 in 2005-06, 25,036 in 2006-07, 19433 in 2007-08, and 9,781 in 2008-09. The dropout rate, the number of children dropping out of the school system, has been dwindling too from 44,899 in 2003-04 to 5,223 in 2008-09. Compelling facts corroborating the slowdown of migration from Mahbubnagar are available from a variety of sources. For one thing, fewer migrant buses go out of villages like Dokur than before. This year only about 20 or 25 buses came to Dokur to carry people out of Palamur. And there are no crowds at political rallies because the workers are way too expensive to rent for a day. If you paid a worker a premium over what he makes doing honest to goodness work, and add to that the cost of a packet of yellow rice and a sachet of Varuni Vahini, you are talking about Rs 350 per head. Not even politicians can afford that. And the children are in school.
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