Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath has proposed that states looking to hire workers from UP would have to take the state government’s permission. He said he will take this step seeing the treatment meted out to UP migrant workers by other states. According to him this would create a social security net for the migrants. He also reiterated earlier plans to do skill mapping of migrants. Meanwhile, a migrant commission to provide returning migrants jobs is on the anvil.
The plan to secure UP government permission for hiring migrants is likely to make experts scratch their heads. The informal sector in which migrant labourers are needed operates even outside the ambit of governments. A section of labourers get summoned to work by contractors but there is also a large population which moves to big cities and then try to find daily wage jobs. Given this scale of informalisation, Yogi’s plans may be a non-starter.
There is also the desperate migrant who is unlikely to wait for Yogi’s permission to leave UP for work just as he didn’t wait for Centre or the other states to give permission to leave when the lockdown was clamped at four-hour’s notice. Yogi’s plan, meanwhile, will sit well with one group: the bureaucracy. A few hundred government jobs will certainly be created to man the new administrative layers mediating between lakhs of migrants and their jobs elsewhere. The new department’s motto can be: All for a few and a few for all.
![](data:image/svg+xml;charset=utf-8,<svg height="526" width="638" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1"/>)
Meanwhile, CMs in some states had reportedly dialled up Yogi to promise that UP migrants would be looked after and there would be no need for them to leave. Instead of securing UP govt’s permission for employing workers from the state, UP can ask the states where they are headed to ensure better welfare and living conditions for migrant workers. It is a shame that 80 MPs have rarely pulled their weight in the federal system, other than allowing parties to form governments at the Centre, unlike other states whose MPs do considerable advocacy for compatriots.
A better tack may be to explore how the knock taken by big, overcrowded cities like Mumbai and Ahmedabad where UP migrants head to can be turned in the state’s favour. The labour reforms of the Yogi government to do away with most labour laws for a certain period for new companies will be watched keenly for the impact they will make. Take a slum like Dharavi that houses many small scale industries from leather to waste recycling, all of which are manned by labour from UP and Bihar. UP is now asking why the state can’t be a hub of such small scale single room industries so that labour doesn’t have to leave. If the state can find the answers it may also prevent the mythical demographic dividend from manifesting as demographic disaster.
