Jobs for migrants

The new scheme should help create durable assets in rural India

The government’s newly launched Rs 50,000-crore Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyaan (GKRA) to provide 125 days of employment to the migrant workers who have returned home during the Covid-19 lockdown is essentially a smart repackaging of the existing job-oriented schemes of different ministries. Yet, this initiative merits welcome for several reasons. For one, it lends the much-needed and urgent livelihood support to the returnees who lack earning opportunities at their native places. Besides, it has certain well-judged features, setting the scheme apart from the typical government-run welfare programmes, which focus chiefly on mitigating the immediate hardships of people; any gainful returns from these projects are just incidental. The 25-odd fields for job generation under the GKRA are chosen specifically for creating durable and productive assets that can serve as catalysts for the socio-economic uplift of rural areas. Moreover, for a change, emphasis is being laid on matching the skills and work experience of labourers with the jobs being assigned to them. For this, the skill-mapping of workers has either been completed or is underway in different areas. This apart, instead of conceiving new projects for implementation, this employment campaign proposes to leverage the schemes that have already been approved and budgeted for to avoid any additional burden on the already stressed exchequer.

Going by the official data, the GKRA will cover a massive 6.7 million workers (nearly two-thirds of the returnees) in 116 districts in six states — Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, and Odisha — which have seen the maximum reverse flow of migrants. The list of assets to be created under this programme is also noteworthy. It includes building village roads and national highways, railway works, water conservation projects, panchayat bhawans, anganwadi centres, and other community complexes. More importantly, as announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi while inaugurating the GKRA, this drive would be used to expand the information technology network in rural areas where the use of the internet exceeds that of urban centres. Laying fibre cables and providing the internet have explicitly been made part of this campaign. No doubt, all this sounds too good to believe, but even if part of this agenda is carried out in the right spirit, it will help rural India significantly.

That said, the truth also is that there is a downside to the GKRA that cannot be disregarded. One, excluding a state like West Bengal is worrying and the predominant focus on Bihar gives rise to fears of electoral considerations becoming a factor in decision-making. Two, the idea may suffer from the perils of over-centralisation. It would have been better to allow the local or district authorities, not the central ministries, plan the schemes. Also, the initiative has caused some apprehensions among analysts about its impact on the overall labour dynamics, especially the availability of skilled and semi-skilled workers for the manufacturing sector, and the labour wages in urban as well as rural areas. Care would, therefore, have to be taken to ensure that at least the skilled and semi-skilled human resource that can be of greater value for industry is not held up in villages to cause labour shortage in the manufacturing, construction, services, and other vital economic sectors. At stake is the overall economic recovery, which relies on restoring full capacity utilisation in all sectors.