In contemporary India rapid urbanization is being largely fueled by the construction sector through the creation of infrastructure, amenities, residential and non-residential complexes. Simultaneously, the construction industry is one of the major employers of the informal, inter-state cyclical migrants in India. The recently conducted Jharkhand Migration Survey reveals that around 40% of Jharkhand’s cyclical-migrants across social categories are engaged in the multi-layered construction sector, which functions through multiple subcontracting relationships. Drawing upon ethnographic observations about cyclical migrant-workers in the construction sector the paper highlights “the right to care” of inter-state migrants in the cityspaces as an integral yet ignored domain of labor rights. The responsibility of care and social reproduction within the sector is borne neither by the employer, the state or the city council. Further, conditions of domicility limit the access of migrants to available social security measures at the destination. Consequently the migrant’s right to care remains unrecognized and the responsibility is delegated to the migrant subject. The degree of care labor delegated is directly dependent on the social location inhabited, the social capital accrued and the contractual arrangements negotiated by the migrant.
Previous scholarships have argued that migration is sustained through the economy of care back at the source. Supplementing this argument the paper argues that economy of care is also re-produced at the destination in the form of non-conventional, contingent commensalities constituted by peer groups of workers. Given the general absence of care rights these non-normative domesticities become crucial for the immediate social-reproduction, resilience and survival of migrant laborers at the destination. In effect, then the absence of a homogenous set of caring rights as an integral part of labor rights entrenches existing social cleavages of class, caste, age, gender, ethnicity and sustains the vulnerabilities embedded within life experiences of migrants belonging to marginalized social stratas.
