Ever expected this! Bihari labour most skilled for work on Sardar Sarovar, say Gujarat officials!
Eager to leave: eagerly awaited elsewhere!
Gandhinagar: what is keeping the Bihar labour away? This is a question now being asked commonly in different parts of the country, right from Punjab to Gujarat. One would imagine that the simplest way to answer the question would be to ask the Bihari labour. Instead a number of hypotheses are floating around among the arm chair thinkers and officials.
In recent weeks, Bihar and Gujarat have been coupled on the national stage for a strictly political reason – due to Nitish Kumar’s sure-headed and single-minded antipathy towards Narendra Modi and its wider ramifications for Bihar as well as national politics.
But according to a report from Gujarat, but this time around it’s about the economy and development strictly – it is the Sardar Sarovar Nigam Limited (SSNL) which is faced with a dearth of labour and is making noises. With the labour force from Bihar preferring to keep itself confined to the native state, work on the construction of the canal network of the SSNL in Gujarat is suffering. “The shortage is pretty serious this time. We are mulling how to get the labour force from Bihar to do the required task,” said an official. He explained that it is the Bihari labour which has the skill to carry out the concretizing work of the canals. “This work cannot be done through automation as 70 per cent of it requires manual concretizing,” he added.
This on its own reveals something about our migrant labour that even we don’t seem to appreciate in Bihar. The implications of the outcry in Gujarat may be that the ‘typical’ Bihari migrant, if one takes the license of using the vague expression, is not as unskilled as we take him to be. Things seem to have changed over the years even as we bemoaned the problem of our labour force being ‘unskilled’ and lying right at the bottom of the labour market. All these are hypotheses that need to be tested through conversations with none else but the Bihari migrant rather than the labour contractors alone who may who have very good reasons to tell lies!
The officials in Gujarat in the meantime are trying to analyze what is keeping Bihari labour away. One of the explanations being given is that proper implementation of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) has prevented the emigration of labour not only to Gujarat but to the other states as well – in which case will the centre stop complaining about the poor implementation of MNREGA in Bihar? A hundred day employment offered under MNREGA coupled with subsistence farming is learnt to be a major factor.
Other sundry reasons debated these days are small jobs during the other months further add to their income. Even if a labourer is getting a little less than what he gets while working away from home, he is comparatively better placed. This is good in a way but it has led to problems elsewhere,” said the official. He disclosed that Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and Panchmahal in south Gujarat are the key labour supplying areas to the state. ‘But it is the Bihari labour which is the most skilled to do the job required to be done by the SSNL’.
“Orders have been given to get in touch with contractors supplying labour force. One of the solutions for addressing this issue is that we give more wages which we are willing to do. The solution has to be found soon,” said the official.