As Tamil Development and Information Department is one of his portfolios, Tamil Nadu’s Minister for Industries, Thangam Thennarasu, was recently in Ahmedabad to inaugurate the school buildings for reviving the Tamil medium schools that the Gujarat government had shut down for want of patronage. It is anybody’s guess how Tamil and Tamil development in Ahmedabad city will increase only because of new classrooms when the host government claims that there are fewer takers for Tamil medium schools now.
Tamils, mostly from the erstwhile Madras Presidency’s unified Salem district, had migrated to Ahmedabad, Bombay (now Mumbai), as labourers, in the new textile mills that were coming up. So were their brethren from present-day Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. An earlier generation of Tamils had especially migrated to Sri Lanka, South-East Asia and faraway South Africa, among other destinations, as indentured labour, during the British rule to man the tea or sugarcane plantations or for other jobs.
This time around, the illiterates were moving to factory jobs, especially in Bombay and Ahmedabad, and the literate and semiliterate were eking out a more honourable living in the national capital of New Delhi or Karachi (now in Pakistan), not to leave out Rangoon, the capital of Myanmar and also Kolkata, both in the eastern wing. Madras became a job provider for local migrants, a decade or two later.
Of course, Chennai had its own Buckingham & Carnatic Mills since as far back as 1878, around the time the Indian National Congress (INC) was born. By the time the Mumbai-Ahmedabad mills began pushing handloom textiles to the sidelines – it took years and decades for completion – Madras had its first labour union, and also the first major industrial action, in B & C Mills, owned by Binny & Co. The strike not only hit the city’s economy but also caused a split in the Madras Labour Union, among the first of its kind in the country, founded in 1918, with the Dalit leaders quitting the organisation.
Independent of these developments, the Justice Party was born around this time, and also formed the first elected Presidency Government (1920), the forerunner to what Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin describes as the ‘Dravidian model’ of inclusive development and growth. Elsewhere, Mahatma Gandhi, as he describes in his autobiography, ‘The Story of My Experiments with Truth’, managed to locate a Charka in the attic of an old woman in Surat, and an artisanal tool used in the handloom textile sector, which was already on the wane. He made the Charka, or the spinning wheel, the symbol of the nation’s freedom movement.
Ahmedabad, thus, had municipality-run language medium schools not only in Tamil but also in Telugu, Malayalam etc, all of them catering to the children of the migrant labour. Implied in this construct is the fact that the illiterate migrant labour were keen on educating their children, and Ahmedabad’s social infrastructure provided for it. It is also pertinent to point out that Mani Nagar, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Assembly constituency in Ahmedabad, has a substantial population of Tamils and other South Indian voters.
Many of them may not have even seen their forebear’s native village in Tamil Nadu or elsewhere in South India, and most definitely did not know their mother tongue as well as Gujarati and Hindi languages. Incidentally and independent of all these issues, Ahmedabad is also the only municipality (now a corporation) to run a medical college – something unique by any standards.
Roles reversed
If industrial jobs and those in the British-India government took South and East Indians to Mumbai and Delhi a century ago, today, the roles are reversed. Literate, semi-literate and illiterate job seekers from the North, East and North-East are flocking to the South, for high-end tech and managerial jobs to low-end jobs as dishwashers, cooks, servers and office boys, not only in hotels and corporate offices, but also in factories and private homes.
In Dravidian Tamil Nadu, your family eat out in a respectable street-corner restaurant, or their food door-delivered by one of the many service providers will be more comfortable if you can converse in Hindi. They all come from the Hindi heartland, though they pick up Tamil (or Malayalam, Kannada or Telugu) fast. For them, it is a matter of survival and growth.
There is a difference between the Gandhi-era migration and the present-day. Today, the South requires more hands, especially for those odd jobs for unskilled and semi-skilled labour, in factories, hotels and homes, because blue-collar labour is just not available locally. Critics of the Dravidian model lose no time in asserting that Tamil Nadu wants those ‘Hindi boys’ because the locals are getting drunk on ‘TASMAC’ liquor, where the state government has a monopoly. If that is so, how is there a massive labour shortage in other South Indian states, too?
A fairer assessment would be that along the coastal states, as elsewhere in the world, development came first, and the hinterland suffered. In India, that is Bharat now, the geographical marker became a unified political entity only in 1950. For centuries, earlier coastal kingdoms in present-day Gujarat in the West to Odisha/Kalinga in the East, had flourished. So had the Chera, Chola, Pandya and Pallava kingdoms in present-day Tamil Nadu. The European colonial rulers took off from what they inherited. Their bias in the choice of locations – for historic and not socio-political reasons – meant that states like Tamil Nadu flourished while Odisha, for instance, suffered.
Relative evenness
Today, owing to socio-economic growth and the consequent governmental attention to women and child welfare and education, and subsequent adherence to the Centre’s small family norm over the past decades, has meant that the population growth rate has come down drastically in South India whereas it is slower, especially in the Hindi heartland. Even among the South Indian states, there was relative evenness in growth within Kerala and Tamil Nadu whereas it took its time in the other three, namely, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka.
Given the relatively higher level of education in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, for instance, there are not many to take up jobs that require little skill or education. This does not mean that the local boys and girls are jobless and/or wastrels. By self-estimation, many of them are under-employed, as a permanent job, particularly in the government, has been their dream and goal, and a definite marker for the socio-political harmony over the past few decades since the emergence of that generation. Either they are doing other jobs, big or small, or are gainfully self-employed.
It is thus that Tamil Nadu and other South Indian states are becoming increasingly dependent on internal migration from the North and North-East, for filling up those vacancies for jobs, especially in the unorganised sector. In the IT corridor, around the state capital of Chennai, and the traditional hosiery town Tiruppur in the West, employers have dormitories built exclusively for their migrant labour – lest the latter would go to whoever is offering them lodging, otherwise.
Of course, enlightened trade union leaders say this was an elitist way of institutionalising ‘bonded labour’, but they, too, do not have any alternative solution to offer. If Tiruppur is now becoming a ghost city, it owes not to the lack of migrant labour but because of the Centre’s tax policies.
Rewarding failures?
What does it all mean? Politicians in these states, especially those not belonging to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the Centre, complain the current demographic distortion was already affecting the better-performing states. The Modi government, having shifted the benchmark Census figures for Central aid to 2011 from the earlier 1971, South Indian states with lower fertility rates are getting less Central aid, under Finance Commission recommendations. Against this, states with higher population and fertility rates are rewarded for their failure to adhere to the small family norms. Or, that is the complaint.
This, they say, has already increased the pressure on the budgets of better-performing state governments, as their inherent capacity and also the willingness to tax their people more and more is limited. (Hence, also the devious ways like the nationalisation of liquor trade and sand-mining and sales for construction, both milch cows). Critics often sidestep such arguments, though their intention of a liquor-free state should be welcome, all the same.
Politicians from the non-BJP-ruled Southern states also complain about how the demographic distortion of the past decades may have compromised the nation’s democratic scheme. Already, twice in the past 50 years, the Parliament voted to freeze the total number of seats at 542 lest the South Indian state should lose out on the number of Lok Sabha MPs, and the ‘Hindi belt’ (‘cow belt’ in context) would gain enormously.
The freeze comes up for review in 2026, and the Opposition, especially, is convinced that if the BJP came to power, they would definitely go in for increasing the number of Lok Sabha MPs, based on the 2021 Census, which will now take place only in late 2024, owing to the Covid pandemic first and 2024 summer’s general elections, since. They point to the Centre readying a larger Parliament building with more seats for MPs, as an indicator of the ruling BJP’s intention in the matter. Translated, to them, it means that by choosing an election agenda that would impact the central Indian states, political parties and leaders could have their personal/ideological ways to the near-exclusion of the rest of India. The post-Emergency elections of 1977 showed the way, when the ruling Congress at the Centre, including Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, was swept out of power, by the illiterate and semi-literate voters of the ‘Hindi belt’ even though they did not have the ‘intellectual equipment’ to understand the nuances of democracy, free speech, judicial independence, etc, as their relatively elitist South Indian brethren could boast of.
Later, when the Vajpayee-Advani duo headed the first BJP-led government at the Centre, they talked about a presidential form, as the hope at the moment was that they had an electoral advantage (only) in the Hindi belt and also the Western states. The idea was given up, it was reported, after the BJP lost heavily in Assembly elections in some of these states, upsetting their unfounded belief. Even today, there are expectations in some Opposition circles, if and if only the BJP and ‘Modi magic’ were expected to lose the Lok Sabha polls in 2024, the party would have long ago started floating the idea of the ‘presidential form’, as no other leader matching Modi even half as much in charisma and popularity, is anywhere in sight.
Reverse distortion
Academics and political scientists, studying internal migration and its impact on the host state’s politics and economy, who have more work to do in terms of these ‘guest workers’ (the typical NGO terminology), end up becoming hosts and welcome more ‘guests’ from their home states, villages, clans and families. In many ‘host states’, these ‘guests’ of the past are a part of the social environment. Many of them also have Aadhaar cards, Voter ID cards and even ration cards, in their host states (all of them, including the last one, now have a national reach – and you know why).
The truth is that all this has happened to the Tamils, Telugus, Malayalis and Kannadigas who had moved out of their home states/regions to other parts of the country, be it Delhi, Bombay or Calcutta, the latter two now being known as Mumbai and Kolkata. Barring the older generation, Shiv Sena, when founded, in Mumbai, no one else protested against those ‘guest workers’ of yesteryear, integrating in the local communities.
At one level, the Sena was being criticised as being ‘parochial’ and even ‘anti-national’ at times, but they had made a point, without either understanding it or explaining it for others to understand. Today, the protest in Dravidian Tamil Nadu against NEP and NEET, among other issues, also owes to such a construct: How the children of guest workers in their midst have an inherent advantage in the imposition of Hindi through NEP and earlier the Jawahar Vidyalayas (of them there are only a few in the state), and how NEET compromises the inherent and institutionalised advantage that Tamil Nadu has in matters of health-care.
The state has the highest number of government medical colleges (one in each revenue district, whose numbers are also increasing), each attached to the mandatory multi-disciplinary government hospital. Pre-NEET, the highest ratio of doctors in the country, four per 1000 population, (equivalent to Scandinavian countries), with incentives for rural postings available as add-on marks for PG medical admissions.
It is this that the state is concerned about, when it comes to losing out to NEET, though even earlier, those government hospitals and colleges were addressing the needs of those migrant labour and their families. But when they become ‘ordinary residents’ of the state, even if their families and other interests reside elsewhere, it creates economic, social and political problems that could have consequences for the nation as a whole, over the coming years and generations.
Impact on State GDP
Number one, there is a section that bemoans the way a substantial portion of the earnings of these ‘guest workers’, who number now in hundreds of thousands in each of the southern states, repatriate to their parent states. They would amount to upwards of tens and at times hundreds of thousands of rupees per year. It will impact the state’s GDP at both ends. However, there is no institutionalised mechanism to calculate the contributions of these ‘guest workers’ to the SGDP of the host states, either.
Two, the Southern states have been boasting of small families and lower fertility rates over the past decades. More and more guest workers joining the ranks (many of them with their wives and children) distort the population figures, both in the donor and donee states, over time.
Three, in the absence of the institutionalised societal culture as in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, governments in developed/progressive states cannot expect a pattern in birth control and new births for them, to be able to plan future development projects and programmes including education and healthcare.
As Hindutva ideologues have been talking about an explosion of the Muslim population, overwhelming the Hindu numbers across the country, over the coming decades, there are those in Kerala and Tamil Nadu in particular, who say that at this rate, ‘internal migrants’ and their families could outnumber locals, again decades from now. They also point to the assimilation of South Indian families in new environments, where barring their names, nothing much gives them away as ‘outsiders’.
This, they argue, cannot be said of internal migrants from outside the region – even when they have been residing in the respective states for centuries together. They may have a point, contestable at times but uncontestable at the same time!
The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst & political commentator. Views expressed are personal.
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