The new migrants: From Jharkhand to Shamli

Bitti takes a while to recollect which state her hometown Sahibganj falls in. Bihar, maybe Jharkhand, and concludes it doesn’t matter anyway. Hardly into her twenties, she has already made Shamli her adopted home. It was village Dungar four months ago, today it is village Bhainswal in the sugarcane heartland of Western UP where she is employed as a domestic help in a Jat household. And by June she will be on the move again.

Her friends from Jharkhand — all employed as domestic helps in Bhainswal — break into a guffaw when Bitti refuses to divulge her age. “How am I supposed to know my age? I am illiterate. My parents died when I was a small child. They died of fever because we could not afford a doctor,” she snaps at Sukhdev Mahato, Basu and Maadra Surja Paharia, all employed in the same household to look after cows and buffaloes.

Bitti and her friends are part of a labour pool herded together by organised contractors from Jharkhand, to whom villages like Bhainswal have turned for help as they see their own vacate the countryside.

Here is how it works: The contractor hands over the labourer to the household in lieu of a one-time payment of Rs 11,000 but without any contract or guarantee.

The labourer gets Rs 4,000 per month — plus food and a small allowance for tobacco, even liquor on festivals — the entire amount is paid in cash when the contract expires.

Villagers complain there were instances when the “labour” ran away the very next day and they lost the money paid to the contractor. Then there are those like Sahado who are seasonal migrants from Darjeeling. He is here to make that extra income until work begins in the tea gardens next April.

Villagers say they are fond of the Jharkhand immigrants but none of them stay at one place for long. As the contract expires, they collect their money and move on to another village, another district, may be even to a Delhi or a Mumbai. “It’s the nomad gene in them,” says a Bhainswal elder. Is it so? Bitti sheepishly smiles, while Mahato and Paharia say they like to alternate works. “Before this, I worked with a road contractor in places like Jammu and Surat. I even worked for him in Bhutan,” he says, refusing to hazard a guess on if he will continue here or not.