Return of overseas contract workers and their rehabilitation and development in Kerala (India) -: A critical account of policies, performance and prospects

Large-scale emigration of temporary contract workers from Kerala to countries in the Middle East began in the early 1970s. Return migration flows into Kerala assumed large proportions only after the mid-1980s. Returned migrants include repatriated illegal immigrants and immigrants evacuated during times of political upheaval and hostalities. Since the end of the 1980s there have been several instances of such repatriation. While reliable information on migration-related matters is not available in Kerala, not even on the magnitudes of onward and return flows, the total number of returned migrants in Kerala must be already around 0.5 million. Returned migrants are, in general, middle-aged persons with low levels of education, skills and experience. After return, about one-half remain unemployed and of the other half, a few retire from active work and the rest enter into self-employment, mostly in the services sector, or get into salaried jobs, or become wage labour in agriculture or fishing. Returned migrants have received little assistance from the state government or any other institution for rehabilitation and development. The sociopolitical and economic climate in the state has remained unfriendly to investment, due to a variety of constraints such as scarcity of land, segmentation of the labour market, wage rates much higher than labour productivity, militant trade unionism, political ideology inimical to the growth of the private capitalist sector and inadequacy of the energy and transport infrastructure. Loss-making public capitalist sector enterprises have discouraged returned migrants from entrusting their savings with government and several fake private sector enterprises which lured them into taking shares have cheated them. The inertia on the part of the state government to attend to the problems of the emigrants began to thaw after 1996, when it introduced an accident-cum-life insurance policy for non-resident Keralites. But no specifed scheme for harnessing the development potential of return migrants has as yet emerged. The novel experiment begun in Kerala for local level development with the active participation of the people, the availability of cooperative credit agencies at all the local levels and the immense possibilities of development of the state, offer a new opportunity for channelling the development potential of the returned migrants into productive investment.