NEPAL: Workers in India Burdened by Alienation, Low Pay, Neglect

By Damakant Jayshi Reprint | | Print |

Damakant Jayshi

MUSSOURIE, India, May 17 2003 (IPS) - Sharpa Raj Karki is not entirely happy to see fellow Nepalis here. Because too many migrant workers like him are coming to Mussourie, in India’s Uttaranchal state, daily wages are going down.

Already, wages have fallen by about 40 rupees (86 U.S. cents). Porters like Karki get about 90 rupees (nearly two dollars) after a hard day’s work now.

Hailing from Kalikot district in mid-western Nepal, one of the Himalayan kingdom’s poorest areas, Karki has been coming to northern India for two years. He has also been going to apple orchards in Shimla, capital of Himachal Pradesh state, during the apple-collecting season

In Mussourie, it is difficult to find anyone who is not from Kalikot district. Along with Karki, there are 15 porters, most of them third-generation migrants. All are from the same village from where Karki hails Daha.

Most Nepalis cross the open border to the northern parts of neighbouring India because of poverty.

Nepali groups say that there 2.5 to 3.5 million Nepalis in India, a country of 1 billion people. Some 100,000 are estimated to be in Himachal Pradesh, many of them daily wagers for the public works department. Most Nepali migrants work as porters, cooks, waiters, dishwashers, guards, drivers, factory workers, farm labourers.

Often, they live with lack of water and toilet facilities, ethnic abuse in the local community and police discrimination. For instance, the porters are called ‘bahadur’ (meaning brave, but now used derogatorily) or ‘kanchha’ (little guy) by both the locals and the authorities.

Krishna Maya Gurung, 30, from Syangja stays with her husband in Y Block in Phase I of the Okhla Industrial Area in New Delhi, where like other migrants they live under fear of eviction from settlements on government land. Because there are no toilets, she says that they go instead to the nearby railway tracks every morning.

These migrants cannot fight or demonstrate for proper toilets, simply because they have been staying illegally. "Initially, it used to be such mental torture, but now we are used to it," says Gurung.

Dil Bahadur Bishwokarma, 42, of west Nepal, has been a daily wage worker in the Vegetable Multiplication Farm in Wairtee in Solan, Himachal Pradesh state since 1991. He makes around 4,000 rupees (87 dollars) a month.

His biggest concern is how to get hold of Indian citizenship certificate that his department bosses have asked him to produce if he wants a permanent posting, which will enable him to have bigger salary and other benefits. But being a Nepali national, he cannot do that.

Pramod Saud, 21 works as a waiter in Vaishali hotel in Lucknow, capital of another Indian northern state, Uttar Pradesh. He is sick of the low pay up to 2,500 rupees (54 dollars) a month with tips – but knows that if he asks for more, he will be fired, and another Nepali hired.

Frustrated with work and by the lack of sexual fulfillment, Saud, like many other migrant workers, visits a red light area in Lucknow. "Every week I go to a commercial sex worker," he confesses. "Sometimes I do use condoms, but not every time."

Many Nepali migrants also feel that neither the governments of India and Nepal nor Indian locals appreciate the work they render.

"Does the government even know that we are also the (Himalayan) kingdom’s citizens and contribute to the economy?" asks Prakash Thapa, New Delhi manager of a Nepali weekly, ‘Vishwa Nepali’ (World Nepali) published from Hissar in the north Indian state of Haryana.

Whether the Nepalese are in Lucknow, New Delhi, Mussourie, Solan and Shimla in Himachal Pradesh, they are bitter about their government’s lack of attention and empathy toward their plight.

There is neither entertainment nor recreational options for these Nepalis, except playing cards and gambling. Those away from their wives share a single room and split the rent as many as eight can stay in a single room. Those with their wives and children also stay in a single room. Privacy is the last thing they even dream about.

Drinking and gambling are common among the migrants and petty fights are almost a daily occurrence, says Jai Lal Sharma, secretary of the All India Nepali Unity Society (Mainstream) in New Delhi, said to be the biggest group of migrants in India. "Wife eloping with another Nepali or sometimes a local is the most common occurrence, and sometimes this leads to serious fights," says Sharma.

Some Nepalis also come with complaints of police highhandedness. "If we lodge a complaint with the police and if the defendant happens to be a native, then the police refuse to entertain our complaints," laments Human Singa, a factory worker in Okhla Industrial Area in New Delhi..

However, Balbir Singh, assistant sub-inspector in charge of Saproon police post that has jurisdiction over Wairtee, says: "It is not true that we don’t register cases if a Nepali comes to do so. The problem is these people do no stay in one place and hardly come for any follow-up testimony."

In truth, many migrant workers are not registered with local officials or do not carry the compulsory identification card. This is because many do not stay in one place, says Singh. This is true of those Nepalis who do not have any fixed, round-the-year job at one place.

The workers have two types of migration patterns – shuttling from home in Nepal to their places of work in India during the monsoon, for those who have some land of their own to work at, and being constantly in the move in India itself, for those with no farm land.

Most migrants are men, because women have to look after not just families but their little farms back in Nepal.

The number of Nepali migrants went up when violence escalated after the truce between the Nepali government and the Maoist rebels broke down in November 2001.

Tikaram Wagle, general secretary of the Nepali Public Contact Committee in New Delhi, estimates that there are around 20,000 "floating Nepalis" in the Indian capital and surrounding areas.

Records from the Jamunaha police post in mid-western Nepal, bordering India’s Banke district in Uttar Pradesh, showed a 20 to 30 percent increase in people coming into India. In November, around 1,000 Nepalis were going to India from this point and 240 returning daily.

Bhekh Bahadur Thapa, Nepal’s ambassador to India, says he is aware of the migrant workers’ problems but lacks resources to deal with them. Another problem, he points out, is that Nepalis in India are mostly in the unorganised sector. "So we have no records of how many of them are working and what is their location," he says.

Thapa warns that if Kathmandu does not pay attention to this migration of Nepalis, "it will lead to an explosive situation in future".