The news of the gruesome death of Satnam Singh, who was abandoned with a mutilated arm in Italy where he was working under illegal conditions, also reached his hometown in Punjab, the second state in India in terms of migration flows, only surpassed by Kerala. Until the 1980s, Punjab was considered the breadbasket of India, but now it offers few job opportunities for young people, who leave in two streams: the more educated towards Canada, the unskilled towards the Gulf and Europe.
Chandigarh () – The news of the death of Satnam Singh, the 31-year-old worker left to die by his employer, owner of an agricultural cooperative in the Italian province of Latina, has also reached his hometown in the Indian state of Punjab.
Satnam Singh died in hospital on June 19. Two days earlier he had lost an arm after being trapped in machinery. The employer, instead of calling for medical help, placed the mutilated arm in a fruit crate, loaded Singh and his wife (also illegally employed by the company) into a van and left them outside the door of their house.
Harpreet Singh, the sarpanch (a sort of village chief) from Chand Nawa, where Satnam came from, told the online newspaper The Wire that the news was a hard blow for the entire community: “Many young people from our village are in Italy, that is why they were able to tell the details of the terrible accident and tried to gradually inform Satnam’s parents about his death. It was difficult to tell them the news, they were very distressed, and since then they have been hospitalized. “They couldn’t even talk to anyone,” he stated. He also explained that Satnam came from a Dalit community (without caste, living in conditions of strong economic and social disadvantage in India) and that his family’s economic conditions were not good, which is why he had decided to take that path.
Satnam is not the only one. Punjab, the region from which Sikhism originated, is traditionally a state with a high level of emigration, currently second only to Kerala. In Talhan, Jalandhar district, there is a gurdwara (Sikh temple) dedicated to foreign travel: the faithful bring toy airplanes as gifts in the hope that their wish to leave will come true. The shops at the entrance sell replicas of the planes of the main international airlines which, after being given as an offering, are usually distributed to the children of the neighborhood.
He most recent study on emigration in Punjab was published by Punjab Agricultural University. It focuses on the period 1990-2022 and shows that 74% of emigrants left the State after 2016. More than 13% of families in rural areas reported having at least one relative abroad, but in the districts of Amritsar, Gurdaspur, Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar and Ferozepur the emigration percentage is more than 30%.
There are several reasons, but the main one, reported by three quarters of families, is related to unemployment and insufficient income. The figure had already been recorded in 2021 by other research, according to which young Punjabis declare themselves the most dissatisfied in all of India in terms of job opportunities. Only 2% defined the opportunities offered by the labor market as “good”, compared to 15% of the national average.
Until the 1980s, Punjab was considered the breadbasket of India and the State with the highest per capita income. Only a decade later it became the main “exporter” of migrants through irregular channels. Because? According to various investigations, the transition to neoliberal policies, accompanied by a reduction in public spending on education, has deprived young generations of opportunities for study and personal training, making employment in the public sector or large companies impossible. At the same time, the proportion of workers employed in the agricultural sector rose from 62% in 1971 to 36% in 2011 (there is no more up-to-date data because the 2021 census was not carried out, but it is likely that in recent years the percentage has decreased even further). However, Punjab remains a rural State to this day: 62% of the inhabitants live in the countryside, compared to 37.5% of the urban population.
This distribution also gives rise to a great difference in migratory flows: on the one hand, young people with a higher level of education in the cities choose Canada as their favorite emigration destination, to which many access with a work visa or, much more often, study. According to the latest 2021 census, there are 950,000 Indians from Punjab in Canadian territory, which is equivalent to 2.6% of the entire population. Data from the Indian Ministry of Education, dating from 2021-2022, speaks of a decrease of 100 thousand students Punjabis in five years.
“There is certainly a transition from rural to urban areas, from agricultural to business communities, from those looking for work to those who are already well off or have a career,” explained Kuljeet Singh Hayer, President, Punjab Travel Agents Association. “The trend of remittances from non-resident Indians (NRIs, diaspora Indians) has reversed and turned into massive capital flight to other countries and this will impact Punjab’s economy in the coming years.”
On the other hand, however, those who leave – often “illegally” following traffickers’ routes – are mostly peasants and laborers who belong to the lower castes and in many cases have been left landless. In this case, the destination they choose is the United Arab Emirates, where Indians (almost 4 million, 38% of the local population) work mainly in the construction and transportation sectors.
The migration of Punjabis to Europe, however, is more complex. Until last year, most of those who wanted to reach Europe could pass through Serbia, where Indians were visa-exempt. From there they crossed the borders to any of the countries in the Schengen area. European authorities had registered the presence of 130,000 Indians in the first ten months of 2002, which led Belgrade to suspend the program. In other cases, it was identified to Russia as an entry point Belarus and Kazakhstan as transit countries.
Those who attempt the route to the United States, however, do so through the “donkey routes“, the “donkey routes”, an expression that does not refer to mule trails but rather to going from one country to another, which in the local language is called “dunki” and is reminiscent of the English pronunciation of “donkey”. In this case, those who leave depend on traffickers, who organize flights from one country to another (from Asia to Latin America or Europe) so that the stamps of various visas appear in the passport and the migrants can pass as tourists. veterans. In December, more than 300 indians who had departed from the United Arab Emirates and were heading to Nicaragua (from where they would depart for the United States) were repatriated from France, where the plane had stopped to refuel.
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