The exodus of millions of migrant workers from India’s cities during the Covid-19 lockdown may have shocked the world. But today, it has become apparent that exit is the default strategy for India’s labour migrants to withstand all kinds of shocks — slum evictions, sectarian violence, electoral events, and, most recently, rising fuel prices. While the pandemic exodus indicated that migrants did not trust the govt to sustain them through a livelihood crisis, and preferred to rely on familial and kinship networks in their hometowns and villages, these recurrent exits from India’s cities signal a much deeper concern.

They indicate that the 150 million plus circular migrants who leave the poverty of their rural homes have recognised that the city can only offer them precarious work. They realise that the path to urban citizenship is broken, with not just jobs, but quality education, secure housing, political participation and dignity, all appearing as a pipe dream never to be fulfilled. In the fading years of India’s demographic dividend, when the govt is doubling down on the role of cities as growth hubs, this refusal of the city to integrate the rural migrant must worry us all.

This was not always a lost cause. Between 2016 and 2021, the govt made serious strides towards addressing migrants’ woes, acknowledging the importance of mobility in the 2017 Economic Census and commissioning a Working Group on Migration that recommended a slew of support measures. Since Covid-19, the ability to access rations through PDS in multiple locations and the announcement of a new rental housing scheme indicated the hope of a more dignified urban life for rural migrants. The e-shram portal offered them the hope that they could put down roots in the city, incrementally, through improved documentation.

Today, the economic impulse that undergirded these inclusionary measures for internal migrants seems to have lost steam. It is instead replaced by a political logic that, on the one hand, retains a sedentary mindset handed down from colonial times that seeks to tie migrants to places of origin, and on the other, misapplies the global paranoia about immigrants and outsiders to the entirely legal category of internal migrants.

The Constitution of India’s Article 19 (1)(d) guarantees citizens the freedom to move within national borders. Thus, it supports economic growth by allowing for the spatial redistribution of labour. Simultaneously, though, by concentrating inordinate power in state govts, it encourages citizens to assert place-based belonging, in effect forcing migrants to choose allegiance between the origin and destination. Except that this is not a real choice. For migrant workers experiencing precarity in the city, continuing to vote in their rural places of origin assures their households access to welfare and reinforces family and larger kinship ties. When they face new shocks, retreating to the village assures them economic and social safety nets that the city never bothered to provide.

Without voting rights in the city, migrant workers are unable to make claims for basic rights from urban political representatives. They are forced to rely on informal channels like worker collectives to demand improved wages and working conditions from employers and contractors, and their bargaining power with landlords and service providers remains poor.

Thus weakened, the migrant is prey to the mounting global paranoia of the ‘other’ that has gripped urban India too. At a broader level, in recent years, citizenship exercises like the ongoing Special Intensive Revision have heightened tensions around citizenship disenfranchisement. A few months ago, Bengali-speaking migrants in several Indian cities were detained and asked to prove their citizenship, allegedly as part of a crackdown against illegal Bangladeshis. The recent killing in Dehra Dun of a student from Tripura reminds us of the continued racial profiling of migrants from the North East. Migrants are often targets of suspicion and exclusion despite being integral to a city’s economic and social fabric.

For migrants in Indian cities unable to find stable work, better living conditions and political voice, threats of disenfranchisement are often the last straw, making exit a rational choice. If the Covid-19 exodus was a wake-up call to shake the system, we must worry that today, the system no longer even recognises exit as failure. Instead, it designs for exclusion by refusing to strengthen migrants’ documentary links to the city, or easing their participation in mainstream urban politics.

While in theory, cities — India’s growth engines — must factor rural migrants into their planning and governance, in reality, the absence of citizenship pathways reinforces fluidity and complicates the demographic enumeration and categorisation that are necessary prerequisites for planned urbanisation. The broken pathway for migrants is not just a problem for them; we should consider the possibility that it could potentially curtail India’s urban growth story.

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