Seasonal Migration and Unfree Labour in Globalising India: Insights from Field Surveys in Odisha

With rising inter-regional disparities in post-reform India, circular and seasonal labour migration from the relatively less developed regions to the urban informal sector has come to be part of the livelihoods strategy of a growing section of rural workers in recent decades. Examining the historical processes of marginalisation and dispossession, labour relations and outmigration in one of the most backward regions of India, through a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis, this paper presents the nature of exclusion and adverse incorporation of the working poor in contemporary India. Drawing upon primary research in interior Odisha, this paper examines the conditions under which a section among the marginal cultivators and labourers gets incorporated into circular migration streams through middlemen and labour contractors, while others rely on friends and relatives to find jobs in distant cities. Such migration creates scope for an escape from the abject poverty at the places of origin; however, a large section of these migrants also works under highly exploitative conditions characterised by varying degrees of unfreedom and bondage. The role of social identities, such as those based on gender, location, caste, ethnicity and religion in these migration networks, can hardly be overlooked. The processes through which labour from the study region are getting integrated into a mobile army of cheap labour raise fundamental questions about the role of bondage and extra-economic coercion in contemporary capitalism.