Migration

 Today a huge number of Indians are on the move as they are mostly migrating for labour. A conservative estimate based on various government data is that every year 100 million people or about 25% of the workforce are migrating seasonally for labour. In Alirajpur district the proportion is as high as 85% of the workforce. Migration has become a permanent phenomenon of the present form of economic development where agriculture has been severely under funded and industrial development has been predicated on cheap casual labour. To avoid the problems arising from unionisation of local labour employers prefer to employ casual labour brought from other areas by labour contractors. A vast majority of these migrants are poor labourers. Only a miniscule proportion of travellers are high flying executives who are frequent travellers on aeroplanes. Most people travel by train and the Indian Railways issues some 8 billion passenger tickets every year for short to long distance journeys including repeat ones for daily commuters and also less frequent ones for long distance travellers. Understandably, given this huge rush of people travelling all the time the Indian Railways cannot meet the demand. Things have been compounded by the fact that for long distance trains there are many AC and Sleeper Class Compartments which allow travel in relative comfort but on which seats have to be booked well in advance. There are only one or two general compartments in which people can travel without reservation at short notice. Therefore, these compartments are jam packed with some people having to stand and cover long distances of over hundreds of kilometres.

So due to the rush in trains now people have to rely on buses and various other kinds of road transport also which are not only much more expensive but also more accident prone. These modes of road transport too are over crowded as the picture below of a jeep over laden with passengers in Alirajpur shows.
Not surprisingly India has a high road accident fatality rate of 19.9 per 100,000 inhabitants per year which is more than the global average of 18 per 100,000 inhabitants. In terms of accidents per motor vehicles, it is 211.8 per 100,000 motor vehicles per year in India which is significantly more than the global average of 93.3 per 100,000 motor vehicles.

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