Rest of their agreed daily wages went into the hands of multiple middlemen.
Hyderabad: A majority of the migrant labourers who built roads, flyovers, dams and buildings in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh have, all these years, actually received only half of their agreed daily wages, the rest going into the hands of multiple middlemen. If a semi-skilled labourer was paid around Rs 600 per day by a contractor, only 50% of it—around Rs 300—went to him and the remaining had been shared by others.
This is the outcome of an internal survey by a special task force set up by the Telangana government to find out the reasons for migrant labourers’ reluctance to return to work, even after free transport and other facilities are offered to them. “Much has been wrong in the management of migrant labourers who came all the way from Northern and Central India,” an official of this task force told this newspaper.
Right from L&T, which is building the last stages of the Hyderabad Metro Rail, dozens of various firms that construct highways, irrigation projects and housing ventures are totally dependent on migrant labourers from North and Central India.
The number of migrant labourers who went back to their homes through railways and buses is around 8 lakh, while another three lakh are believed to have left by other means.
Telangana Chief Secretary Somesh Kuamr personally called up his counterparts in Bihar and Chhattisgarh to call back the migrant labourers; his efforts haven’t yielded results except for the return of 250 workers for rice mills at Miryalaguda in Nalgonda district. Labourers from other states are not willing to return to work anytime soon, thanks to a variety of reasons.
The task force members had tried to find out the reasons for their reluctance to return to work. One of the major reasons was the exploitation by the middlemen between the labourers and the management. It is these middlemen who take out at least half of the wages agreed by the contractors. The governments which take up these big works have almost no say to stop this exploitation.
“An irrigation contractor in Telangana engages a labour supplier in Hyderabad who gets in touch with another supplier in Bihar and then comes into the picture a ‘mestri’ (chief mason) in a particular village who, in turn, mobilises actual workers for the work. While the ‘mestri’ takes half of the agreed wage, the remaining two suppliers share the rest equally,” an official explained.
The average wage for a semi-skilled male worker in Hyderabad is around Rs 700 per day and that of an unskilled woman is Rs 500. So, a couple, on an average, earns around Rs 1,200 per day, but half of it goes to the suppliers and the “mestri”. Shelter (nominal) may be provided by the contractor, but the food bill would be borne by the workers. They bring their own cooks from their home states.
One good thing about migrant workers is that most of them have bank accounts but their wages are deposited by the suppliers, after deducting their share, as far as small ventures are concerned. In big ones, the suppliers collect their share from the workers and the contractors deposit the wages in full into the accounts.
“We are looking to suggestions that the middlemen can be avoided and the entire wages are deposited into the workers’ accounts. We are also collecting database of all migrant labourers and their skill details. Once we do this, we can think of upgrading their skills into semi-skilled or skilled,” said an official of the task force.
Even in Andhra Pradesh, the situation is the same. Some of the workers are shuffled between projects owned by a single company with similar nature. If a builder has some projects in Vijayawada, he will shift workers from Visakhapatnam where there was no work. In such cases, workers are not willing to travel to farther places from their home towns.
The task force is listing out measures for the welfare of migrant labourers so that their condition can be improved. Officials are now cataloguing the facilities offered by private builders or contractors to the workers. Only a few private firms offer medical facilities to migrant labourers, while some contractors offer money to the needy.
There are instances where some contractors had paid for the travel expenditure of the labourers to their home states so that they can return at a later date. There is a big infrastructure firm from Hyderabad which collected mobile numbers of around 2,000 workers from UP so that they can be contacted directly without the help of middlemen. That firm paid Rs 2,000 to each of them before leaving for their homes.