Separation and Social Exclusion: A Burden on the Mental Health of India’s Migrant Workers
Sitting under the flickering lightbulb of the Surat Saree Embroidery Factory, Unnati patiently cuts her thirteen hundredth cloth of the day. She often keeps count to distract herself from the memories of her children and her parents back at her village in Lucknow. Having had another child this year, financial burdens have been piling up on her, but the factory owner has refused to increase her wage, even by just a few hundred rupees. It is a hassle for her to send money every month to provide for her mother’s deteriorating health and pay for the education of her two children. She is unable to fulfil her financial responsibilities and also has to put up with a toxic work environment, which provides almost no leaves for her to visit her hometown. All this has taken a serious toll on her mental health even though she refuses to believe it. Millions of individuals like Unnati who move to urban areas in search of better paying work face similar issues of underpayment, ill-treatment at the workplace and discrimination. Separation from families and social exclusion in the cities has had immense psychological impacts on the lower echelons of social and economic orders working in the informal sector. By ignoring and denying mental healthcare to them, labour departments have only added to the miseries of workers like Unnati who toil from day to night in hazardous factories, away from their hometown and communities.
Migrant workers experience an increase in the incidence of serious anxiety and post-traumatic disorders due to a series of socio-environmental variables, such as loss of social status, discrimination, and separation from the family. During a survey conducted by the Labour Exploitation Accountability Hub, 65% of migrant workers said that separation from families has been mentally taxing for them and has greatly impacted their productivity in factories and other jobs in the manufacturing sphere. Loneliness among migrant workers is associated with age, marital status, physical illness, migration pattern, average working hours a day, and perceived social support. Migrant Workers also undergo social exclusion in big cities and towns on the basis of their socio-economic standing. Being considered economically and socially inferior to the city population, migrant workers face institutional discrimination, are stigmatised in various ways and generally excluded from the mainstream of city societies. Suffering from loneliness and exclusion, they often look for methods of temporary relief from their mental worries, falling into addictions and habits of substance abuse. One such case of mental fatigue and boredom from monotonous work leading to addiction was reported by the owner of a Chinese restaurant in Madurai, India. Subhash, who was in his mid 30s, had just moved to Tamil Nadu (state where Madurai is located within India) from Darjeeling and was working as the head chef of the restaurant. Whilst not receiving enough wages and being separated from his wife and children, alcohol became Subhash’s only respite and soon, he was showing up to work drunk which led him to lose his job. Such cases of substance abuse and depression in migrant workers have become increasingly common in urban cities.
Thousands of people migrate to Chennai, Delhi, and Mumbai every year looking for work which often leads to a dearth of employment opportunities in the area. Small-scale businesses lure them through offers of advance money. As soon as they join, they are ill-treated, discriminated against, and denied their due wages in order to prevent them from changing jobs. Owing to this, they always live with fear and do not trust the local people. This unfriendly atmosphere and state of deprivation adds to their loneliness and alienation resulting in many of them suffering from depression and other psychological disorders. In almost all cases, they do not feel welcomed by the city population. Cultural differences of language, traditions, food habits and lifestyle become hindrances in the development of social networks outside their own community. The tremendous urbanisation in developing countries such as India is often fuelled by migration from rural to urban areas and is related to poor social conditions and high levels of stress.
According to the Interstate Migrant Workmen Act of 1979, labour departments are expected to register migrant workers in the source area and their original hometown, which is essential for access to healthcare benefits, but only 12% of them have reported doing so. Although small trade unions have played a major role in liberating the migrant workers from exploitation and providing them with proper facilities for mental healthcare in counselling centres, a huge part of the migrant population is still unable to access them. Mental health services for migrant workers need to include periodic evaluations, a focus on psychological well-being, assessment, and preventive treatment and not just temporary respites. There is an urgent need for a survey analysing the mental health of migrant workers all over the country to identify the best possible locations for an equitable distribution of basic facilities and promote community activities to make migrants feel at home.
This article has been written by Shambhavi Tewari, a senior at Seth M.R. Jaipuria School, Lucknow, India and a member of the Rethinking Economics India Network. She is pursuing the ISC Diploma in Humanistic Studies and is interested in gender violence in conflict regions in India and across the world. Occasionally indulges in literary and cultural comparativism through her heaps of books, while performing postmodernist critiques of public policies in her head.
