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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Gujarat's Adivasi Migrants: Unseen and Unheard by Party Manifestos -Divya Varma and Sangeeth Sugathan

Gujarat's Adivasi Migrants: Unseen and Unheard by Party Manifestos -Divya Varma and Sangeeth Sugathan

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published Published on Dec 14, 2017   modified Modified on Dec 14, 2017
-TheWire.in

An estimated 35 lakh Adivasis in Gujarat seasonally migrate to cities for work but the grand electoral promises of BJP and Congress fail to acknowledge their issues.

Sharma Bhuriya seems disillusioned with the recently released party manifestos ahead of the Gujarat elections. “There is nothing in it for people like me. I have been living on pavements in Ahmedabad for more than 20 years now and have been thrown around like garbage from one pavement to another in constant evictions by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation,” said the 33-year-old Adivasi migrant who hails from Dahod district of the state.

She lives on the over-crowded pavement outside Asarva railway station, where around 40 adivasi migrant families, employed as construction workers in the city, live. “It is extremely difficult as I have to wake up as early as 4 am in the morning, so that I can safely bathe out in the open,” said Bhuriya. The Adivasi women migrants lack access to basic sanitation facilities in their settlements. “I walk more than a kilometre to access the pay and use Sulabh toilet and spend Rs 20 just to use toilets on a daily basis.”

This is not the case of Bhuriya and her family alone. Thousands of Adivasi families seasonally migrate from their villages to seek employment in agricultural farms, factories and construction sites across Gujarat. According to the informal estimates of Sthalantarit Adivasi Shramik Manch (SASM) – a state-wide coalition of trade unions of Adivasi migrant workers – there are around 35 lakh Adivasis in Gujarat who seasonally migrate for work.

Despite this, both the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress have displayed complete ignorance in appreciating and addressing the issues of Adivasi migrants in their recently released manifestos in the run up to the Gujarat elections.

“Even after significantly contributing to urban growth by providing cheap labour at factories and construction sites, Adivasi migrants are absent in the urban development imaginations of both the BJP and Congress,” said Mahesh Gajera, a convenor of SASM. The much-hyped housing schemes in the BJP and Congress manifestos, called Mukhya Mantri GRUH Yojana and Rajiv Gandhi Awas Yojana respectively, are about in-situ rehabilitation of slums in urban areas.

This is appalling beccause Adivasi migrants as a population don’t even have access to notified slums and they remain in the fringes of the city occupying open spaces under flyovers, beside railway tracks, on pavements and empty private/public plots.

Bhuriya says, “The political parties don’t understand the fact that we spend six to eight months in a year in cities working hard to make ends meet. All their promises are village-centred, as if we don’t exist in cities. We also miss out on the government’s welfare schemes in the villages, as we are constantly on the move.”

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TheWire.in, 13 December, 2017, https://thewire.in/204528/gujarats-adivasi-migrants-unseen-unheard-party-manifestos/


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