India's Informal Jobs Control Rooms Offer Hope But The Problem Is Way Too Big

Satyendra Singh, 43, lost his job at a construction site in Delhi during the third wave of Covid-19 last month. He planned to take a train back to his home in Darbhanga, Bihar but changed his mind.

"Another worker, who stays with me, told me that I could reach out to the government for help," he told BloombergQuint over the phone. "I called up the control room and they helped me find work at a separate construction site."

Singh's experience offers hope after what happened during India's first lockdown, among the strictest in the world, announced in March 2020. Out of job, millions of informal workers headed back to the hinterland in the nation's biggest migration since partition. Thousands chose to just walk hundreds of kilometres as buses and trains were halted.

During the third wave, the central government set up 20 monitoring centres across states to help migrant workers find employment and prevent a mass exodus, according to a Ministry of Labour and Employment official, who isn't allowed to speak to the media and so preferred to stay anonymous.

From Jan. 5, the centres have been set up through coordination with various states, the official said. The control rooms are located in Ahmedabad, Ajmer, Asansol, Bengaluru, Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh, Chennai, Cochin, Dehradun, Delhi, Dhanbad, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Jabalpur, Kanpur, Kolkata, Mumbai, Patna and Nagpur.

The cities were selected on the basis of estimates on the number of migrant workers who either live or travel to these areas to seek work, the official said.

Officers stationed at control rooms in Bihar, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand explained to BloombergQuint that they stay in touch with local employers and migrant workers. Those unable to find employment can reach out to the control rooms through publicly available phone numbers, they said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

The number of calls spiked once restrictions were imposed to contain the spread of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus. The control rooms help by either retaining employment at an existing site or finding work at a new site, said an official from Kolkata.

For Kamal Sahu, 33, in Raipur, the control room helped get his pending wages. He had stopped working at a construction site after his employer refused to pay citing "financial constraints caused by Covid-19".

"I called the control room and explained everything," he told BloombergQuint. "In about 10 days, I received my dues."

Still, there is no public data available on the success rate of the monitoring centres. The Ministry of Labour and Employment didn't respond to emailed queries.

Where Are The Jobs?

According to labour experts, the scale of informal unemployment is so huge that the centres are unlikely to help in any meaningful way.

"People who require such employment on a daily basis are sitting on those nakas and are waiting for work. The government on telephone cannot deliver any kind of help to these people without going to ground zero," said Vinod Shetty, a Mumbai-based advocate.

Shetty helps informal labour through the Working People's Charter. "We get a lot of distress calls from people who've tried everything but are unable to find work or payment of due wages."

After agriculture, the largest unorganised sector employer in India are the micro, small and medium enterprises or the MSME sector. And these businesses have been worst hit by the pandemic.

"Employment opportunities are just so limited and so random that even if the migrants get work, it is for two or three days," said Ritu Dewan, vice-president at the Indian Society of Labour Economics. "It does not solve the problem. Only corporates are hiring and they do not cater to this section. MSMEs are out, shops are out, tourism is out, so where do you get employed?"

BloombergQuint's multiple visits to some of the informal labour hubs during the pandemic revealed distress. There aren't enough jobs and wages have fallen. Demand for work under the rural jobs guarantee scheme remains high. Even that is not enough, prompting them to consider returning to cities amid rising indebtedness with no savings or social security to fall back on.

The government has set up e-Shram portal to help informal workforce to register and avail social security benefits. It caters to those who are not members of the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation or Employees' State Insurance Corp.

"They have made the registration itself so difficult. One constantly needs to be online and there is an OTP that comes. People who actually need this, the informal workers and daily-wagers, have no access to this registration," Shetty said. "In Maharashtra, despite our many attempts to involve the government and tell them that we are willing to go to the places where informal workers gather and do the publicity for this project, they have not come forth to allow us to do it."

Still for Singh, the government's control room helped. He had to leave Delhi even during the second wave because there were no jobs. This time, he was lucky. It's been a fight for life and livelihood, he said. "We've been fighting this dual battle for the last two-and-a-half years."