Rajan, S Irudaya

Sreekumar, Anand

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1/5An Overview of India’s Migration Governance Over thePast Decadeverfassungsblog.de/selective-reactive-and-liminal/S Irudaya RajanAnand SreekumarThis article belongs to the debate » Indian Constitutionalism in the Last Decade21 April 2024Selective, Reactive and LiminalExemplified by an unprecedented section devoted to internal migration, the EconomicSurvey of 2017-18 brought the issue of migration to the spotlight within government andpolicy circles. However, almost two years later, in March 2020, the government of Indiaimposed a nation-wide lockdown prefaced by a mere four-hour notice period. Astransportation froze and industries shut down abruptly, tens of thousands of migrant workers(and their dependents) were left stranded, forcing them to walk thousands of miles over footback to their home villages, resulting in severe misery, hardship and even casualties. Theseevents brought into stark relief the contours of migration governance in India over the pastdecade.Internal migration: marginal gains and continuing crisesWith a staggering 450 million internal migrants (as of the 2011 census), migration hasbecome integral to the political economy of India. India also has the largest diaspora in theworld, numbering 18 million people. The modes, institutions, and ideological underpinningsof migration governance vis-à-vis both internal and international migration have witnessedsubstantial shifts and continuities ever since the ascendance of the NDA (NationalDemocratic Alliance) led Modi government in 2014. The erstwhile Ministry of OverseasIndian Affairs was dismantled and integrated with the Ministry of External Affairs,Government of India.Consider internal migration in the first instance. The annual inter-state labour mobility hasseen a steady increase from an average of 5-6 million people (from 2001 to 2011) toapproximately 9 million people (from 2011 to 2021). There have indeed been importantmeasures which have improved migrant welfare and streamlined migrant governance. One2/5of the most admirable interventions in this regard was the One Nation One Ration Cardscheme, which has greatly enhanced the portability of social welfare, especially foodsecurity. More than 2 million people have benefitted from this scheme. The government hasalso rationalized a complicated and messy legislative landscape to constitute four codes,including the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Codes passed by theParliament in 2020.Despite these gains, the internal migration governance has been hindered by a culture of ad-hocness, unsatisfactory policies and implementation as well as the invisibilization ofdependents. Consider the legislative landscape in the first instance. The Interstate MigrantWorkmen’s Act of 1979 is the sole legislation which explicitly tackles the question of internalmigration in India. However, this legislation is confined to contractor-driven migration.Informal migrant workers’ rights are subsumed under varying labour laws which suffer fromweak implementation. These weaknesses continue to persist during the NDA regime as well.This was most evident in the Covid migrant crisis, illustrating the highly inconsistent andreactive nature of India’s migration, characterized by knee-jerk reactions and half-measures.For instance, the migrant crisis prompted the government to respond with a slew ofmeasures under the moniker ‘Atma Nirbhar Bharat’, including the Pradhan Mantri GaribKalyan Yojana (PMGKY), One Nation One Ration scheme, The Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana(PMAY) and increased allocations under the existing MGNREGS (Mahatma Gandhi NationalRural Employment Guarantee Scheme) budget. However. such schemes were largelyreactive and failed to alleviate the short term financial distress of migrant workers. Thegovernment response was also oblivious to the plight of international return migrants. In fact,even well-intentioned schemes like the One Nation One Ration scheme have often failed torealise their full potential (especially in terms of interstate PDS portability)  because of poorfinancial literacy and education among migrant workers.Data deficiencies and prioritization of skilled migrationA critical failure of migration governance is the continuing absence of attempts to quantifyand measure migration. The most comprehensive sources of national-level data, like TheCensus of India 2011 and the 64  round National Sample Surveys, are inadequate as theyneither cover real-time movements and seasonal migration nor capture the subjective andemotional concerns of migrants. Reliable estimates of data are thus the need of the hour.The Kerala Migration Survey, which provides such data over 5-year-intervals (covering bothinternal and international migrants), could serve as a model to be emulated across India.There are also increasing calls for the conduct of interpretive-qualitative data collectionmethods to complement existing surveys, enumerations and quantitative studies.Ever since India’s independence, the class character of the Indian state has been historicallycharacterised by the dominance of the state at the expense of labour and capital. In thisregard, the NDA has not fared much better than its predecessors, especially vis-à-visth3/5migrant labour. The process of rationalization of labour codes, for instance, has led to thedilution of several social welfare measures for migrant workers. These have beencompounded by the invisibilisation of dependants in contemporary debates on migration. Theconcerns of dependants like women migrants and children are often ignored, revealing thegendered nature of India’s migratory landscape.Perhaps, the clearest break of the Modi regime vis-à-vis previous regimes has beendemonstrated in the landscape of external migration. The number of migration agreementssigned between India and other countries has surged dramatically, rising from a mere fiveagreements signed between 1985 and 2014 to a staggering 17 during the eight-yeartimeframe of the NDA government from January 2015 to March 2023. These include, forinstance, Labour Manpower Agreements signed between India and Saudi Arabia (2016),Jordan (2018) and UAE (2018). During the NDA years, India also signed MMPAs with France(2018), UK (2021) and Germany (2022). In addition, DOIs (Declaration of Intent), which seekto commence as well as fast track negotiations on migration, have been signed with the likesof countries like “Denmark, Finland, Italy, Portugal, Cyprus, Greece, Germany, Austria, andwith Australia.”A careful analysis of these interventions highlights the high degree of priority accorded to themobility and opportunities for skilled migrants. One of the milestones in this regard has beenthe increasing cooperation between India and Australia, exemplified most recently in theMATES (Mobility Arrangement for Talented Early-professionals Scheme) agreement in 2023which seeks to enhance the mobility of skilled professionals in seven sectors, includingAgricultural technology, Artificial intelligence (AI), Engineering, Financial technology(FinTech), Information and communication technology (ICT), mining as well as renewableenergy. In fact, the restrictions on post-study graduate visas of students in Australia imposedby the new migration strategy of Australia exempted Indian students, owing to the terms ofthe India- Australia Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement negotiated in April 2022.The patronizing state: Classist, gendered and religious assumptionsHowever, the unskilled emigration regime leaves a lot to be desired. Several works havehighlighted the colonial, classist and gendered assumptions and biases inherent in India’semigration regime. The Gulf migration from states, especially Kerala in the 1970s followingthe oil boom, led to the Emigration Act, 1983, which forms the legal cornerstone ofemigration regulation in India. An ECR (Emigration Clearance Required)/ ECNR (EmigrationClearance Not Required) dichotomy constitutes the fundamental framework underlying thisAct; certain classes of lower-class, unskilled and under-educated citizens were granted ECRpassports, which required an Emigration Clearance vis-à-vis 18 countries with low levels oflabour protection. However, this paradigm of protection, control and regulation violated theprinciple of equal opportunity resulting in discrimination among citizens. The Modi regime4/5has continued to uphold these classist assumptions of its predecessor governments. Themost notable instance in this regard was a proposal to colour code passports mandatingorange passports for ECR holders in 2018; this was scrapped after widespread opposition.Besides this classist character of the migration regime, the regulatory framework has alsoconsistently betrayed the gendered anxieties of the state. For instance, the widespreadexploitation of female emigrant domestic workers post the Gulf War resulted in a slew oflegislations which progressively curtailed the mobility of unskilled ECR women workers. Thepatronizing character of the migration regime has been no different under NDA rule,exemplified by the intervention of mandatory emigration clearance for nurses from May 2015in response to recruitment frauds, resulting in drastic reductions in ECR clearances grantedto women nurses.There have also been highly spectacular shifts most prominently visible within the externalmigration governance framework on an ideological level. This corresponds to the increasingsecuritization of migration; in other words, migration is often framed as a threat to security interms of “citizens’ livelihood, safety, and cultural identity.” This was most visible in the CAA(Citizen Amendment Act) 2019, which sought to offer Indian citizenship to Hindus, Jains,Buddhists, Christians, Sikhs and Parsis who fled persecution from Afghanistan, Pakistan andBangladesh (and arrived by December 2014). This was a momentous intervention whichenshrined a religious criterion for Indian citizenship for the very first time, which called intoquestion the secular foundations of India’s constitution. In addition, institutional interventionslike the NRC (National Register of Citizens), with a staggering exclusion of 4,070,707applicants (in the final draft list of 2018), have sparked widespread concerns regarding thechallenges to the regularization of citizenship of millions of marginalized people especiallyMuslim migrants from Bangladesh. In fact, as Samir Kumar Das argues, NRC represents thelatest elusive attempt of the anxious Indian nation-state to make the citizen-foreigner binaryprogressively legible.These interventions necessitate a word on the shifting contours of India’s refugeegovernance regime. As of January 2020, India had a refugee population as high as 240,000originating, inter alia, from Tibet, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Mostlyleading precarious lives, they have always faced severe challenges on the grounds ofarbitrariness and indeterminacies inherent in the ambiguous legal contours of refugeegovernance. For one, India has neither signed the 1951 Convention nor the 1967 Protocol,which constitute the two fundamental instruments of international law. In this hazy and liminallandscape where the Indian state “arrogates to itself the ‘sovereign right” to decide whoconstitutes a refugee (and, by addition, a repatriate), some scholars have noted a distinctshift within the refugee governance during the NDA regime. The government hasprogressively made amendments to incorporate refugees within the fold of Indian citizenship(e.g. amendments to the Passport Rules, 1950 and the Foreigners Act, 1946 and the CAA).However, as hinted earlier, these inclusions are motivated by the religious identities of the5/5refugees. Reflecting a ‘Hindu nationalist frame’, the refugee governance under the NDAregime has been selective along religious (and parochial) axes rather than singularlyexclusionary.ConclusionThus, a broad overview of the migration governance during the Modi era reveals quitedistinct shifts and continuities from the previous era. While there have been certain policysuccesses in the internal migration front, it continues to suffer from weaknesses of itspredecessors regarding frameworks, implementation, ignorance of gendered concerns andthe limited availability of data. While the external migration landscape has beencharacterised by vigorous and astute negotiations facilitating external skilled migration, manyhave expressed increasing concerns over the perpetuation of classist and gendered biases,the distinct shift towards the securitization framework of migration and an increasing religiousselectivity of refugee governance.LICENSED UNDER CC BY SAEXPORT METADATASUGGESTED CITATION  Irudaya Rajan, S; Sreekumar, Anand: Selective, Reactive andLiminal: An Overview of India’s Migration Governance Over the Past Decade, VerfBlog,2024/4/21, https://verfassungsblog.de/selective-reactive-and-liminal/, DOI:10.59704/4ed01b1221d15842.Explore posts related to this: BJP, Migration, Migration GovernanceOther posts about this region: IndienLICENSED UNDER CC BY SA

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