Why lakhs leave Odisha for unsafe brick-kilns?

Failing agriculture and shrinking forests have destroyed traditional livelihoods, forcing people from the eastern state of Odisha to take up hazardous jobs in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh

Agriculture loses lure

The sorry state of affairs in the agriculture sector is forcing farmers to either quit farming or commit suicide due to an unbearable loan burden. The contribution of agriculture to the Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP) is falling gradually over the years while the number of small, medium and large scale farmers has dropped by 460,000, the report says.

"Around 722,000 hectare of land has remained uncultivated in the state in 2014-15 while it was 756,000 hectare in 2013-14. 849,000 hectare agricultural lands had remained uncultivated in the year 2012-13," an agriculture department report says.

Climatic conditions, inadequate formal sector credit, lack of marketing for agricultural produce, high costs of labour, cheap rice scheme of Centre and State governments are cited as the main reasons for not youth showing interest in farming.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 3,602 people employed in the farming and agriculture sectors committed suicide between 1999 and 2013. Ironically, the state government has been presenting a separate agriculture budget since 2013-14. This has been pegged at Rs.10,903.62 crore for 2015-16.

Come November and it whirrs to life as people arrive from the nearby countryside after harvesting the year's sole rain-fed crop. With no work in the villages for the next few months, they come to the town with their meager belongings to catch trains to Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, where they would spend the next five or six months working in brick-kilns.

During those weeks in November, the town becomes the largest migrant labour market in western Odisha. Its guest houses and hotels fill up as brick kiln owners called ‘seths’ come to recruit workers, with the help of local labour contractors called ‘sardars’.

Two trains heading to Visakhapatnam – the Korba-VSKP Link Express and the Durg-VSKP Passenger – extend their halts to make sure all the workers enter (or are loaded into) the unreserved compartments. In November, the tiny Kantabanji station would be packed with thousands of workers.

It's not clear how many people flow through Kantabanji towards the kilns every year. M Muthukumar, the collector of Bolangir district, pegs their numbers at anywhere between 1,00,000 and 1,25,000. Others like Pramodini Pradhan, a human rights activist, say the number is far higher at around 2,00,000.

Migration is one of the leitmotifs in modern Odisha. Young men leave the State's coastal districts like Ganjam to work in textile mills, shipyards and the diamond-polishing shops of Gujarat and Mumbai. Young girls from Sundargarh work as domestic labour in Delhi and elsewhere.

People in western Odisha, especially the districts of Kalahandi, Koraput and Bolangir, travel to neighbouring Chhattisgarh to work in its farms, or migrate to the brick kilns in the South (sometimes to the ones in the North as well). Workers from Odisha go to Goa’s fishing villages as much as Kerala’s construction sites, said Pradhan.

Until half a century ago, Bolangir's fields, forests and rivers could take care of most people through the year. Not anymore. Things began to change in 1965, said Rajib Sagaria, a journalist in the town of Bongomunda. That year, a severe drought gripped this area. In response, then prime minister Indira Gandhi directed that Bolangir's forests be used to provide relief.

Food-for-timber programme was started. As hundreds of timber depots came up, forests shrank, and the traditional livelihood calendar, built around farming during the rains and forest produce the rest of the year, came unstuck. Earlier, only Dalits used to migrate seasonally, said a report prepared by human rights activists last year.

But after 1965, it said, “people from other castes and people having land, mainly small and marginal farmers, also began migrating”. What has added to the uncertainty is the increasingly erratic pattern of rainfall. Until 15-20 years ago, the monsoon would come to Odisha by June 10, said environmentalist Biswajit Mohanty.

“It would rain heavily almost every day till the end of September, and then gradually taper off by November.” But now, the state sees very little rain in June. By the time it rains heavily in September, the crops have often wilted. The State is also seeing unnatural spells of dry weather.

“As many as 10-15 days can go by without any rain as opposed to two-three days earlier,” he said. Between these trends – the withering of forest-based livelihoods, increasingly unpredictable rains, swelling families – the people of Bolangir have entered a phase where their traditional livelihoods cannot support them through the year.

As several researchers, writers and lawyers have documented, workers have suffered abuse, long working hours, severe beatings and rape at India's brick kilns. The most recent reminder of the casual brutality hardwired into this trade came last January when labour contractors chopped off the hands of two workers.

Even without the brutality, kilnwork is loaded against the workers. The high advances, while serving to reduce the risk of payment default by the kiln-owners, also lock in the workers. They cannot leave till they make their quota of bricks. This is where the industry gets its reputation for bonded labour.

But the bad reputation does not matter as long as the business is profitable. In his book on bonded labour, Harvard academic Siddharth Kara estimates that the margins for kiln-owners from debt bondage are as high as 50 per cent.

Despite the known risks, every year after the harvest, workers in western Odisha fill up trains and head to the kilns. The reasons why people keep migrating to the kilns go beyond the marginalisation of traditional livelihoods. A second fait accompli – where people are left with no alternative – is also at work here.

Take access to credit: Umi Daniel, one of the leading activists working on migration in Odisha, pointed out that contrary to the claims of the kiln-owners, most workers came back with hardly any savings. “When they come back, they need money almost immediately to repair their houses and to take care of those unwell,” he said.

But around June and July, there isn't enough farm work and so they end up borrowing. Formal finance is hard to come by. Another factor is the poor performance of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Guarantee Act. An ineffectual state is another structural reason for the persistence of migration.

Given Odisha's inability to improve financial access for farmers, respond to shifting rainfall patterns and better implement MGNREGA, rescue efforts like the one which plucked Rana from the kilns are little more than band-aids. With none of the root causes addressed, it might not be long before he and his family are compelled to migrate again.

By M Rajshekhar