The flames rose into a darkening Jharkhand sky as 14-year-old Sonia Sabar lit her father’s funeral pyre. In Ramchandrapur, a remote Sabar Adivasi village in East Singhbhum, she stood alone among the mourning—because there were no men left in the village.
Her father, Jua Sabar, died in late January. He was the last man remaining in the settlement. His son, Shyamal, like thousands of others, had migrated to Tamil Nadu for work and couldn’t return in time. With no one else to perform the last rites, Sonia stepped forward—defying custom and carrying the weight of a disappearing generation.
A State That Bleeds People
Jharkhand’s most consistent export isn’t coal or iron—it’s people.
From tunneling through Himalayan mountains to laying the foundations of India’s metros, Jharkhandi migrant workersform the invisible spine of national infrastructure. The 2011 Census recorded over 4.14 crore inter-state migrant workers across India, a significant portion from Jharkhand alone.
The 2020 COVID lockdown brought nearly 10 lakh migrants back home to Jharkhand, but they soon left again—pushed by poverty, pulled by survival.
In February 2025, a tunnel collapse in Nagarkurnool, Telangana trapped eight workers—four from Jharkhand’s Gumla. In November 2023, another 41 workers, several from Jharkhand, were trapped for days in a collapsed tunnel in Uttarakhand. And in the Cameroon labor scam of 2024, more than 40 Jharkhandi youth were stranded overseas—lured by fake promises, rescued only after international outrage.
For many, the journey ends in silence: nameless deaths in road accidents, illnesses in labor camps, or entrapment in faraway lands.
The Women Who Remain
Behind every migrant is a family left in waiting.
Women like Gulapi Sabar, Sonia’s mother, raise children, manage households, and weather uncertainty—often with no remittances for months. Ghost villages are no longer a metaphor in Jharkhand. In districts like Simdega, West Singhbhum, and Latehar, entire communities comprise only women, children, and the elderly.
This loss of working-age men triggers a chain of vulnerability:
- Increased school dropouts
- Heightened risk of trafficking and exploitation
- Collapse of traditional tribal livelihoods
Migration isn’t just an economic story—it’s a gendered crisis, a social rupture, and a cultural erosion.
A Crisis That Needs More Than Sympathy
To address the exodus, the Jharkhand government launched the Safe and Responsible Migration Initiative (SRMI) in 2021. It tracks migrant workers, offers legal assistance, and extends some social security to affected families.
But state efforts are like patching a dam with duct tape.
What’s needed is a robust national migrant policy that:
- Enforces employer accountability
- Provides portable social protections
- Targets fraudulent recruitment networks
- Establishes a real-time national database of migrant labor
A Nation Built on Unseen Shoulders
India’s growth rides on the shoulders of workers like Shyamal Sabar—unseen, underpaid, and unprotected. Their labor builds roads, bridges, malls, and tunnels, yet they remain undocumented in the narrative of development.
As Sonia Sabar watched her father’s pyre burn out, her silhouette etched against the dusk, she wasn’t just performing a last rite—she was bearing the burden of systemic neglect.
How many more villages must go silent before the country listens?
