Mainstream WeeklyEvery election season, when trains fill with Bengali workers heading home to vote, the cities like Delhi, Gurgaon, Bengaluru, Kochi, Mumbai and Pune they leave behind briefly halt their fast-paced life-style. All across Kerala, the work in gardens, orchards, orchid farms and cocoanut farms also come to a brief halt. The workers here are from rural Bengal, just like those in the big cities. This happens when elections happen in the north-eastern States, Bihar and Odisha too, and States like Jharkhand and Chaattisgarh. Basically, the cities in India depend heavily on a class of migrant labour, both men and women, to provide creature-comfort. They are the ‘househelps’, gardeners, drivers and watchmen. More than 40% of India’s workforce belong to this ‘informal’ category. The poll-time disruption lasts weeks, at times months. The question it raises has no easy answer. However, it is not just about Urban India. It is about India and the unspelt-out class divide. This year, this regional ‘labour’ force, facing SIR (Special Intensive Revision) in their respective regions, have not promised they will return anytime soon. They are, therefore, headline stories today. This essay is confined to Bengali migrants. However, it is not just a limited story.
THERE IS A MOMENT, recurring with the reliability of the monsoon, that briefly disturbs the comfortable rhythm of urban India. Elections are announced in West Bengal, and within days, something shifts in the apartment blocks of Delhi and Gurgaon, in the tech corridors of Bengaluru, in the high-rises of Mumbai and Pune. The domestic worker does not arrive. The delivery rider is unavailable. The security desk sits unmanned through a morning shift. The city, it turns out, has been running on a labour supply it rarely thinks about – until it is gone.
Recent coverage across The Economic Times, The Times of India, India Today, and The Indian Express documented the pattern with uncommon consistency. A significant share of India’s urban blue-collar workforce – concentrated in domestic work, delivery, construction, security, and daily-wage services – hails from West Bengal. When elections summon them home, the absence is felt not as a political fact but as a domestic inconvenience: a missed maid, a delayed package, a scrambled restaurant shift. The framing, inevitably, focuses on the disruption. It should focus on the displacement.
To understand why this pattern warrants more than a passing headline, one must hold two facts in mind simultaneously. The first: West Bengal is not a peripheral State with a thin history. It is the land of Rabindranath Tagore and the Bengal Renaissance, the birthplace of modern Indian literature, philosophy, and political thought. It produced Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics. It gave independent India one of its most consequential presidents in Pranab Mukherjee. Kolkata was, for generations, the intellectual and commercial capital of the subcontinent.
The second fact: today, a striking proportion of this State’s working population crosses State lines to cook, clean, deliver, and guard in cities that are not their own – for wages that are higher than they would ever earn in West Bengal, far from families they may see only once a year.
Neither of these facts, individually, demands explanation. States rise and decline. Migration is ancient, often aspirational, frequently rational. Blue-collar work is honourable and essential. But held together, these two facts form questions that are difficult to evade: why do India’s historically significant regions become so deeply associated, at scale, with outward migration for informal labour?
The dominant narrative around migration in India tends to be optimistic: the ambitious young man from a village who makes good in the city, sending remittances home, lifting his family out of poverty. That story exists and is real. But it sits alongside a different, harder story – one in which migration is not aspiration but compulsion. In which workers travel thousands of kilometres for jobs they would not have chosen if sufficient work existed closer to home. In which they live on informal contracts, without the safety nets that formal employment provides.
The persistence of this migration, year after year, election after election, despite the hardship it entails is itself a signal. It suggests not a failure of individual ambition but a structural absence: not enough stable, decently paid employment within the States to retain its own workforce.
It is not only the blue-collar worker who leaves
This is where the conversation must be widened. Because the economic pull away from Bengal is not confined to domestic workers or delivery riders. It extends, with equal force, to the professional class – and that fact has received almost no attention. This is the dimension of the crisis that tends to go unexamined.
The conversation about Bengali migration focuses almost exclusively on blue-collar workers – visible, countable, their absence dramatic enough to generate headlines. But the same structural failure that sends the domestic worker to Delhi also sends the lawyer, the accountant, the architect, the consultant out of the State. The fee gap is different in scale. The cause is identical.
Where there are no industries, there are no commercial disputes of scale. Where there are no large enterprises, there is no sophisticated corporate work. Where investment does not flow, the entire ecosystem of professional services that investment generates – legal, financial, advisory – either atrophies or migrates. Bengal has produced, generation after generation, some of India’s sharpest legal and professional minds. Many of them now practise in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru. Not because they prefer to. Because that is where the work is.
A case in point would be Kerala too, where there is no industry. Kerala provides more than three million skilled migrants to the middle eastern countries.
I am a lawyer from Darjeeling, practising in Delhi. I say this not as biographical colour, but because my own professional life illustrates the argument precisely. The fee I can reasonably charge for a single legal matter in Delhi – a commercial dispute, a corporate advisory brief, a High Court appearance – is at minimum three to four times what the same matter would command if it were handled in Bengal. This is not a reflection of my ability, or of the complexity of the work. It is a reflection of the market. Delhi has industry. Delhi has commerce. Delhi generates the density of economic activity that produces high-value legal work. Bengal, increasingly, does not.
Urban India has, in a sense, constructed a remarkably efficient arrangement. It draws on a vast pool of migrant labour – skilled and unskilled alike – to keep costs competitive, sustain middle-class lifestyles, and fill the gaps in professional and public services. The arrangement works well for the cities. It is less clear that it works well for the workers, or for the source regions that lose them. In most cases, it does well for source regions, for example remittances of migrants from Kerala make up about 20% of India’s total overseas remittances.
There is something quietly corrosive in the way this labour tends to be absorbed. Workers are economically essential but socially invisible – they appear in headlines only as shortages, as inconveniences, as logistical problems to be managed during election season. The professional migrant is better compensated and better housed, but she, too, is absorbed into the receiving city’s economy without her departure ever prompting serious scrutiny of the conditions that produced it.
Acknowledging all of this requires a shift in the questions we ask. Not: why are maids unavailable this week? But: why must so many workers leave their home State to find work? Not: how do cities manage during election periods? But: why are source regions failing to generate the commercial activity that would retain their own people? And most specifically, in Bengal’s case: where did the industries go? Why has investment been so muted for so long? What policy environment produced a State in which even its legal profession cannot find adequate work at home?
These are not questions for the workers or the lawyers who have migrated. They have made rational choices under the constraints available to them. These are questions for policymakers, for State governments, and for those who design the industrial and economic architecture of a region.
It has become fashionable, when discussing migrant labour, to invoke the dignity of work – to insist that no job is lesser than another, that blue-collar labour deserves respect. This is true, and it is worth saying. But dignity of labour cannot be the end of the conversation. It must be the beginning of a harder one.
The point is not that domestic work or delivery riding is undignified. The point is that workers – and professionals – should have genuine choices: among industries, among wage levels, and crucially, the option of building a career and a life near the place they call home. A State that once produced ideas that moved the world, and that continues to produce exceptional legal and professional talent, ought to be able to generate the conditions in which its people are not compelled to leave it to prosper.
Every election season, the trains fill and the cities pause, and the cycle reveals itself again. The domestic worker heads home to vote; so, sometimes, does the lawyer – returning briefly to a State that shaped them and could not keep them.
This article was written in the shadow of a cycle that seemed, for a long time, unbreakable. It is only fair, then, to expect that the cycle now turns. For the first time a right-of-centre party has formed the government in Bengal. The BJP campaigned, among other things, on the restoration of Bengali glory: on jobs, on industrial revival, on the promise of a Bengal that can once again hold its own. It is a plank that resonates deeply, because the need it speaks to is real and long overdue. They now have their work cut out. The mandate is large; the expectation, larger still.
The hope – sincerely held, and worth stating plainly – is that this marks a genuine turning point. That the domestic workers will one day find in Bengal the stability and wages that now compel them to Delhi and Mumbai. That the lawyers, the accountants, the architects who left will find in their home State the commercial density that makes a career possible without migration. That the trains, when they fill, will carry people home for good – not merely to vote.
Bengal has done it before. It can do it again. The new government has been handed both the power and the responsibility to begin. Let us hope they deliver. And Hope is a big thing for a migrant worker.
(Author: Krishnan Agarwal, advocate, Supreme Court of India, New Delhi)