UP polls 2017: Nearly 18 lakh people migrated to Delhi and its neighbouring areas last year.
As 19 constituencies across seven districts of Bundelkhand prepare to vote in the fourth phase of the assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, NDTV visited a labour chowk in Greater Noida, which has been a hub for migrants from Bundelkhand for the past two decades.
20-year-old Arvind Varma has been frequenting the labour chowk each day for the last 15 years in search of daily jobs that fetch him around Rs 300 a day.
"There are water problems, no roads and no accountability in Bundelkhand. As labour, it would mean literally walking in to the hands of exploitation," says Mr Varma, who now works as a cook at night and a manual labourer by day.
Drought and declining agriculture forced him and his family to migrate from Jhansi to the outskirts of Dadri nearly 20 years ago, a time when Bundelkhand was severely drought-ridden and one of the poorest regions in the country.
For 35-year-old Pappu, a former-farmer from a neighbouring village in Jhansi who has five family-members to feed by himself, even migration seems to have offered little.
"We get Rs 350 here; in Bundelkhand I would make Rs 150. I am a farmer, so manual work is all I can do. I have heard in the elections some party is promising to cancel all farmers’ debts in Bundelkhand, is that true," he asks.
Like Arvind and Pappu, nearly 1,000 Bundelkhandis show up at the Greater Noida labour chowk daily, some travelling for six to seven hours from the heart of UP every day."
If we don’t have anything to eat, what else will we do? I have come today and will go back tomorrow to cast my vote,” says 47-year-old Bhanwri Devi, from Mahoba. “But what is the point? They make us vote and then smother our faces," she adds.
Inder Prakash from Chitrakoot adds, "There is no employment even here. After the note-ban, we can’t even get our wages. So much for political promises."
Last year alone drought conditions in Bundelkhand forced nearly 18 lakh people to migrate to Delhi and its neighbouring areas. According to some estimates, nearly 10 per cent of Bundelkhand’s population migrated at that time.