Circulation of Labour

The circulation of labour is one of the most visible changes in rural India, driven directly by the commercialisation of agriculture. As old patron-client ties between landlords and labourers or tenants broke down, and as the Green Revolution created a sharp seasonal demand for farm workers in prosperous regions like Punjab, a new pattern emerged: thousands of workers now move back and forth between their home villages and areas with higher wages and more work. This is not a one-time migration but a seasonal cycle — workers circulate.

Labourers migrate for two main reasons. First, the seasonal demand for agricultural labour in Green Revolution states is intense but short-lived, so workers follow the work. Second, from the mid-1990s onward, rising inequalities in rural areas have forced many households to combine multiple occupations just to survive. For these families, periodic male migration has become a livelihood strategy: men go out in search of work and better wages, while women, children, and elderly grandparents are left behind in the village.

Migrant workers come mainly from drought-prone and less productive regions. They go for part of the year to work on farms in Punjab and Haryana, on brick kilns in Uttar Pradesh, or on construction sites in cities like New Delhi or Bangalore.

Jan Breman has called these workers footloose labour, but the term does not imply freedom. In his 1985 study, Breman showed that landless migrant workers have very few rights. They are usually not paid the minimum wage. Wealthy farmers often prefer to hire migrant workers for harvesting and other intensive operations rather than the local working class — because migrants are more easily exploited and can be paid lower wages. This preference has produced a peculiar pattern in some areas, especially sugarcane-growing regions: local landless labourers move out of their home villages in search of work during the peak agricultural season, while migrant workers are brought in from other areas to work on the same local farms.

Migration and the lack of job security have created very poor working and living conditions for these workers.

The large-scale circulation of labour has had several significant effects on rural society, in both the receiving and the supplying regions. …