PERUMBAVOOR: It’s a hot Sunday afternoon at the Gandhi market in Perumbavoor, a town which is home to a large migrant population, mostly from West Bengal, Assam, Bihar and Odisha. Hundreds of migrant workers, who work in and around this small town near Kochi, have thronged the market to spend their weekly holiday -- purchasing cheap dresses, recharging their mobile phones, shopping groceries for the new week, or just catch up with their friends and relatives. But, perhaps the biggest business in the market is something else -- cash transfers.
Tucked in a corner of the market’s entrance is ‘Mijanur Travels’, an ordinary-looking shop run by Mijanur Rahman, in his 40s. Sunday is the busiest day in the week for Rahman, who hails from Murshidabad, West Bengal. People come here with the cash earned during the week gone by, and send it to their spouses or relatives back home in Guwahati, Nagaon, Bhubaneswar or Murshidabad.
“On a Sunday, I transfer anything between Rs 2-3 lakh for customers. There are some Sundays when Rs 4 lakh or more is transferred,” he says. The remittances range from Rs 1,500 to 5,000, and even Rs 10,000 in some cases, and the small size of transactions means there could be as many as 100-150 such money transfers on a Sunday. Rahman charges Rs 12 per Rs 1,000 remittances -- Rs 8 for the services provider (Pay World, BharatPe, Paytm. etc) and Rs 4 as commission.
Abhijul Islam of Assam Mobile Shop, a native of Nagaon, has been running a similar money transfer outlet inside the market for nearly three years. He says Assamese workers, who mostly work at plywood factories in the region, deposit the cash on a weekly basis while the Bengali workers, who are engaged in daily wage jobs in construction field, farms or other low-skilled works, deposit the money once in two or three days. Explains Lijin J, who runs a train and air-ticket booking shop in Perumbavoor: “For the migrant workers, who stay along with three or four persons in a room, it’s not safe to keep the cash in the room. So, whenever they save Rs 3,000 or more, they immediately transfer the money back home.”
There could be at least 30 shops in Perumbavoor engaged in money transfers. The business is booming, thanks to the high daily wages in Kerala and the shortage of workers in almost every sector that requires unskilled or semi-skilled workers.
A 2021 study on ‘In-migration, Informal Employment and Urbanisation in Kerala’ by Dr Jajati Keshari Parida of Department of Economic Studies, Central University of Punjab, and Dr K Ravi Raman, member, Kerala State Planning Board, found that about Rs 7,500 crore is going out of Kerala annually as remittance to other states.
Binoy Peter, executive director of Perumbavoor-based Centre for Migration and Inclusive Development (CMID), reckons this figure is a gross underestimation. “As per our conservative estimates, the migrant population in Kerala could be remitting at least Rs 17,000 crore per annum to their home states,” he says.
According to CMID’s calculation, there are over 35 lakh migrant workers in Kerala, who are earning a total of Rs 49,000 crore here. “On a conservative basis, we have to assume that a migrant worker is earning Rs 700 per day, 20 days per month, for 10 months,” he explains.
Dr D Narayana, economist and former member of the Kerala Public Expenditure Review Committee, was involved in the first comprehensive study on migrant population in the state, in 2012. His report found that there was a 25-lakh strong migrant population during that time, growing at 8 % per year. “The migrant population in Kerala could be at least 48 lakh now,” he says.
There are no sectors where migrant workers are not present in Kerala, from construction to plantation, hotels to resorts, fisheries to grocery stores, and barber shops to high-end saloons. “Many sectors in Kerala would come to a standstill if migrant workers stop working,” Dr Narayana says.
Adds Planning Board member Raviraman: “While they are in Kerala, they become integral to what I would call ‘right making/state making’ process.”
According to Benoy, the resilience shown by rural India is due to the remittances by the migrant population, not just in Kerala, but also in other states. Significantly, the robustness of the informal Kerala economy is mainly due to the spending power of the migrant population on local goods and services here.
“While most of the Kerala households now depend on shopping malls or use e-commerce websites like Amazon and Flipkart for their purchases, and commute through Uber or their private vehicles, the small grocery shops, hotels, the private buses and autorickshaws largely survive on the spending by the migrant population here,” he says. Going by CMID’s estimates, the migrant population could be spending anything between Rs 30,000 crore to 32,000 crore in Kerala’s informal economy.
Social remittances are as important as financial remittances.
“The migrants see boys and girls, without discrimination, going to schools here. They dream about providing better education and jobs for their kids. There are village heads in north Indian states, who have been migrant workers here. Obviously, they will try to replicate this in their villages,” says Benoy Peter.