Reform for the next generation

One of the striking points about the crowds of migrant labourers making the long trek home, thronging bus terminals and crowding the Bandra suburban station in Mumbai and in Surat, Gujarat, is their relative youth. Forcibly idled, and out of home in contrast to their working-from-home middle class counterparts, they are the biggest non-medical victims of the pandemic even though they fall within the infection's low-risk age cohort. 

Ironically, their future depends heavily on the owners and managers of big capital and the policy-makers who fall squarely within the high-risk age category in this pandemic. To offer an idea, the average age of the CEOs of India’s 10 largest companies by revenue is 57.6 years. Most are in their late fifties and early sixties; the TCS CEO, a mere 49 years, skews the mean.  The prime minister (PM) is now 69 years old, and he is only the third youngest of the last six PMs when they took charge. The Big Three in his cabinet — the trustees of the PMCARES pandemic trust —are, 55 (Amit Shah), 60 (Nirmala Sitharaman) and 68 (Rajnath Singh). State chief ministers are of slightly younger vintage but not by much (the youngest is the party-hopping Arunachal Pradesh CM, Pema Khandu, at 40 years). 

This age differential between the labouring millions and the managing thousands is to be expected since labourers by definition have to do the heavy lifting, so to speak, in the economy. But their sudden ultra-visibility during this lockdown and the discomfiting exposure of their marginalised status raises hard questions about India’s future. 
 

Thanks in no small measure to the much-reviled media, their presence is forcing administrations to confront reality with some ham-fisted attempts at alleviating their immediate predicament. But it is to their longer term future that political leaders need to apply their minds. The dire outlook for an economy that was languishing before the pandemic suggests that India can no longer rely on business-as-normal paradigms. Expecting these millions of migrants to lapse into a hardscrabble rural existence and emerge as and when job opportunities arise is not a tenable option. The 2011 census shows that the number of internal migrants account for about 37 per cent of India’s population, up from 30 per cent in 2001. Assuming the trend has continued for the past nine years, India cannot afford to have such a large percentage of the population wallow in near-destitution and depend on the variability of state handouts. The mobile phone-driven social media mobilisation that brought the crowds to Bandra station on Monday shows that migrants have an idea of their informal unionising power, which can easily explode into widespread social unrest.  

The immediate (and logical) response of activists and economists has been to suggest that the government go beyond the meagre and somewhat unworkable package it has announced. This can be, at best, a temporary solution. My two bits to the conversation is that the bigger opportunity lies in leveraging the relative youth of these migrants — and the 9.7 million that will enter the working age population every year between 2021 and 2031 (according to the Economic Survey).  

The crisis of the pandemic offers the political leadership a chance to create a platform for next-generation reform (literally) beyond the usual entitlement schemes. One key component is to follow the south-east Asian model of not only expanding exponentially public primary and secondary education and industrial training but ensuring that delivery is of a standard that will make the annual Pratham audits less depressing reading than they are now. 

Equally, political leaders need to address seriously and creatively the old problem of easing Doing Business metrics for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Like the labour they hire, SMEs remain the most vulnerable to internal and external shocks. They have been the biggest victims of the triple whammy of demonetisation, an early goods and services tax deadline with its chaotic aftermath and now the Covid-19 pandemic.  

Given the right tools and incentives it is possible for migrant labourers and their families to seek a different future. After all, China’s peasant economy saw the rise of many entrepreneurs after 1977. Startups and SMEs are young people’s business, and this is where “empowerment,” that overused term beloved of CSR specialists, is possible. One index: e-commerce is the most dynamic sector of the Indian economy and the average age of the CEO/founders of the 10 largest companies is 41 years, 16 years below their old economy counterparts.  It is inconceivable that a Sachin or Binny Bansal or a Vijay Shekhar Sharma does not exist among the 450-million-odd migrant population, given the right access to opportunity. Of course, that would create a labour shortage for the kind of work most people don’t want to do, which may entail accepting more immigrants…. But that’s another story.