GANJAM, Odisha: Kamallochan Sahoo (42) was just 18 when he first boarded a train to Surat along with a few others from his village, Kalamba, in Odisha’s Ganjam district. It was not his last trip to Surat. Nor was he the first–or last–to board a train to the west.
“I don’t know who started the trend of going to Surat. But a lot of people from our caste were migrating there and everyone who did had the best things to say about the city,” said Sahoo, who belongs to Teli, a dominant caste in his village that is categorised under the broader ‘Other Backward Classes’.
“My community was there in Ganjam. They could assure me of good work, decent accommodation and food. So I wasn’t worried and had made up my mind to migrate to Surat,” Sahoo said, who also worked in the textile mills of Surat.
Kalamba’s landscape is characteristic of many villages in Ganjam. A narrow road cuts through the village, flanked by rows of tightly packed pucca houses that share common walls. Locally, they are known as ‘train compartment houses’ for their striking resemblance to railcars–a livelihood symbol in this region. For much of the year, it is just women, the elderly, and children who live in these homes, the men working in Surat.
The weekly train departing from Brahmapur, the nearest railway station to Sahoo’s village in eastern India, takes over 30 hours to reach Surat located in the country’s west, about 1,700 km away. It is always packed with passengers–some leaving home for the first time, while others returning to work they have been doing for decades.
Ganjam is amongst the fourteen migration-prone districts in the state identified by the Labour Directorate, Government of Odisha, based on the magnitude of out-migration from the district.
“General caste and OBC families dominate this migration pattern,” said Liby Johnson, executive director of Odisha-based nonprofit Gram Vikas.
The pano community, for example, are stigmatised as an ‘untouchable’ community in local caste hierarchies across Odisha and do not have a presence in Surat.
THE CLIMATE PUSH
Many years ago, the villagers in Kalamba relied on an unusual ritual to decide their fates: grains of rice, the staple food crop of the state, were assigned to various states, and crows were invited to peck at them. The chosen grain dictated where the men would migrate—Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir or beyond. For years, the village entrusted its future to this peculiar tradition.
The migration corridor’s formation, however, was shaped by industrial shifts, extreme climate events and their impact on people across caste hierarchies in the village.
Several men from Dalit and OBC communities began migrating in the 1960s to the rice mills of Myanmar and the jute mills of West Bengal, said Umi Daniel, director, migration, at nonprofit Aide et Action.
“However, these opportunities eventually dwindled due to various factors, such as the collapse of these mills in Myanmar. Around the same time, power looms began shutting down in Mumbai, with the industry shifting to Surat,” said Daniel.
“As these transformations unfolded both at the source and the destination, the two trends converged, prompting people from Ganjam to start migrating to Surat,” he said.
Majority of all migrants from Odisha are from Ganjam, many of whom toil in the city’s power loom industry. Most migrants are from the OBC community.
In Kalamba, only 20% of the nearly 1,200 households own agricultural land and most families rely on this annual exodus for survival, villagers said.
But it wasn’t rising climate risks alone though that pushed migration numbers. Youth aspiration played a key role.
THE SMELL OF SOAP AND A CASTE NETWORK
When Kamallochan Sahoo left home, all he carried was a pair of rugged pajamas, two vests, faded yellow and green T-shirts, a cotton towel, and Rs 1,000 from his father. He remembers every item vividly, and the hope with which he left his village: that one day, he would return with much more.
Researchers have often described Surat as the El Dorado of the east, with people from impoverished regions imagining it as a city with gilded pavements and ample job opportunities.
Historically, Brahmins, Khandayat, Kurmi and the OBCs in Ganjam were landowners and thus constituted the dominant caste groups. People from the SC and ST communities depended on them for their livelihood, showed a study on Caste Dynamics in Labour Migration by Madhusudan Nag, Benoy Peter and Divya Varma.
The caste of the migrant from Ganjam became a factor in the jobs they picked and the time they spent in Surat, said researcher Nag. While lower caste migrants took up daily wage work and focussed on shorter or cyclical migration routes given the lack of a support system in destination cities, upper caste migrants, with a “stable asset base and sufficient financial security in their native villages”, focused more on jobs that helped them preserve their social stability back home–the textile power looms being a case in point that offered a steady income.
“What started as a necessity soon turned into an aspiration as more and more people, especially young men, started migrating to Surat, in search for not just a better livelihood but also better life,” Gantayat added.
Gantayat, for example, turned from migrant to labour contractor over the years. “I brought my wife and children here and now we are settled here. My village in Aska block of Ganjam has one man from every household in Surat,” Gantayat said.
Besides, those migrating to Surat had community support, as long as they were from the OBC community.
Jagannath Gouda (38), from Sunapalli village of Ganjam, for example, inherited a small piece of land, not enough “even for a kitchen garden”. So migrating to Surat was an organic choice.
“My father, my uncles both maternal and paternal had migrated to Surat for work and so it was easy for me to find work and a place to stay. I keep switching looms,” said Gouda, who has worked in Surat for over 20 years, during which time he helped four of his cousins and friends to find work in the city.
But when Mitika Nayak, 40, a native of Bada Badangi village in Ganjam who belongs to a scheduled caste, reached Surat, he found himself tackling caste hierarchy he thought he had left behind in his village.
Nayak, like several other workers from the SC community in Ganjam, have started migrating to Kerala, which they find more welcoming.
Sishir Sahoo, who is averse to his children migrating to Kerala, said he could build a concrete home over the years with great difficulty. His sons, unable to pursue higher studies due to economic constraints, joined him at the textile unit in Surat, contributing to their earnings to support the household.
They are now looking for alternate opportunities, preferably in the southern states of India since earnings in Surat have stagnated over the years, he said.
“The work has increased, the pay has not,” he said.
“People have started coming to me for guidance,” he said
Aishwarya Mohanty is an independent journalist based in Odisha, and reports on gender, climate change and environment.
