Migration a Major Issue in Madhya Pradesh's Tribal-Majority Jhabua Assembly District Ahead of Polls

"What else can we do, apart from moving to Gujarat to look for work?" queries 60-year-old Ran Singh, who lives in the tribal-majority Jhabua area of Madhya Pradesh.

One of the main electoral issues in the Congress stronghold of Jhabua assembly district is migration due to a lack of economic prospects.

"What else would we do if we decided not to go to Gujarat? This stony soil of ours produces very little crop. We are able to cultivate only enough food grains for our own requirements," Singh said when questioned about the reason for the district's high population migration to the neighboring state.

These days, Singh, who lives in a 'faliya' (hamlet) around 50 miles from the district capital, is getting ready to seed his little piece of land for Rabi. The principal crops grown by the local farmers are maize, cotton, and millets.

There is no election mood in Jhabua constituency, which is home to 3.13 lakh registered voters and is reserved for Scheduled Tribes (ST), even though the state assembly elections are less than a week away on November 17.

Singh speaks the Hindi dialect known as Bheeli; he is illiterate.

"Many years ago, I traveled to Gujarat to work as a cotton picker. One or two people from every home in our faliya are employed in Gujarat, but I went back to my farm later," he said.

He works as a wage laborer in the neighbourhood, earning around Rs 250 each day. "We get paid more in Gujarat, but it's a 24-hour job," he said.

The son of current MLA Kantilal Bhuria and a skilled physician, Vikrant Bhuria, has been nominated by the Congress. Bhanu Bhuria of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party is his main electoral opponent.

Renowned tribal leader Kantilal Bhuria served as a minister in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) administration at the center, which was headed by the Congress.

Vikrant said that throughout its eighteen years in power in Madhya Pradesh, the BJP administration did little to improve job prospects in the area populated by tribal people.

"The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme started by the UPA government had stopped the large-scale migration from the area, but tribal labourers are finding it difficult to get paid under MGNREGA schemes nowadays and are forced to migrate," he said.

Kantilal Bhuria has been representing the Jhabua region in the assembly or Lok Sabha for the last 45 years, according to BJP candidate Bhanu Bhuria. "But he did not pay any attention to taking measures for stopping migration," he said.

He said, "Tribal farmers would have had access to water for irrigation if Kantilal Bhuria had built dams on the rivers in Jhabua when the Congress was in power, which could have stopped the migration."

Guman Singh Damor of the BJP beat Vikrant Bhuria in the 2018 assembly elections by a margin of 10,437 votes. Retired state government official Damor left the legislature in 2019 after winning the Lok Sabha seat from Jhabua-Ratlam.

In the subsequent by-election, Kantilal Bhuria defeated Bhanu Bhuria by 27,804 votes, regaining the Jhabua assembly seat from the BJP.