THE 23rd Congress of Communist Party of India (Marxist) condemns the gross apathy of the Modi government towards the plight of the crores of migrant workers in the country.

While accurate data on the number of migrant workers is not available, data from the Census of India 2011 indicate that there were 5.6 crore inter-state migrant workers in India. In 2020 their number was estimated at 10 crores.  Their labour is vital to all sectors of the economy. They work in the formal and informal sectors, in urban and rural areas, and in agriculture, industry, and services. In the unorganised sector, migrant workers work in construction, brick kilns, small hotels and restaurants, and shops, and they work as rickshaw pullers and autorickshaw drivers. Millions of women migrants work as domestic workers.

Despite their huge contribution to our country’s economy, the conditions of life of interstate migrant workers are miserable. These conditions were exposed when the prime minister announced the countrywide lockdown of March 2020. Millions of migrant workers suddenly became jobless, income-less, homeless, and hungry. Lakhs of them had to walk hundreds of kilometres back to their villages as the government neither took measures to protect their jobs and incomes nor provided them transport to their native places.

During the pandemic, when workers in general and migrant workers in particular were in severe distress, the Modi government mounted a new attack on migrant workers. The code on Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions (OSHWC), which subsumes the provisions of the Inter-State Migrant Workmen’s (ISMW) Act, 1979, is part of this attack.

The ISMW Act had some provisions that protected the interests of migrant workers. It provided for registration of migrant workers, and of establishments employing them. Migrant workers were required to be issued passbooks recording their identity. Contractors had to be licensed, and had to fulfill a list of mandatory obligations. It had guidelines related to workers’ wages, their accommodation, access to free medical facilities, all to be provided by the contractor.

However, it is also a fact that governments did not implement the ISMW Act effectively. A report by the Standing Committee on Labour (in 2011) stated that the Government of India had not made any concrete efforts to ensure the implementation of these provisions.

The OSHWC Code does not have the protective provisions of ISMW Act and treats migrant workers merely as “contract workers.” At the same time, the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, which had provisions to protect contract workers, has also been subsumed under the OSHWC Code, with most of the protective provisions removed from the Code.

The 23rd Congress notes that the Left Democratic Front government in Kerala has paid special attention to the rights of inter-state migrants in Kerala. We salute the Government of Kerala for taking special care of migrant workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. The way the state looked after large numbers of highly vulnerable migrant workers was a model for other states and the central government. There were approximately five lakh migrant workers at the time of lockdown in Kerala. They were sheltered in 21,556 camps all over the state. Food, water, and recreational facilities were provided to them in the camps. The Government of Kerala is also perhaps the first state government to include schemes for the welfare of migrant workers in its plan budget.

The 23rd Congress of the CPI(M) demands that the OSHWC Code be immediately scrapped. It also demands that the Inter-State Migrant Workmen’s Act be restored immediately and its jurisdiction be extended to cover all migrant workers including domestic/home based workers, and that it be implemented effectively.