Many poor migrants in India can't afford to go home to vote

Around I40 million identified as vulnerable to being politically disenfranchised in each election

- Debarshi Dasgupta

Mr Sirajul Miya and his wife Rezina Bibi work hard daily at a construction site near Delhi, helping to build tall apartment complexes with units that are snapped up by India's growing middle class.

The couple migrated about a year ago from their village in eastern state West Bengal - where they had no means to support themselves to Noida, in the north of the country, more than 1,500km away.

Mr Miya, 45, and Ms Bibi, 24, together earn about 24,000 rupees (S$390) a month, much of which they try to put aside for their two children.

Living on the margins of urban India in an unplastered one-room brick tenement with an asbestos roof, the couple have found themselves marginalised politically as well.

They could not afford the 2,000 rupees or so in train fare and other transport costs for each person to return to Cooch Behar district, where they are registered as voters, to cast their ballots on Polling Day, April 19.

Doing so would also have entailed opportunity costs of forgoing their daily wages. Mr Miya asked: "I am poor, and I work hard for a living. If I go home, and I lose out on earnings, what good does it do for me?" He and his wife are among millions of Indian migrant workers who have not voted in the ongoing general election because of the cost of returning home to exercise their democratic right.

In the 2019 General Election, an estimated 300 million eligible voters nearly the population of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore put together did not cast their vote, according to the Election Commission of India (ECI).

It identified poor migrant workers as a prominent chunk of these missing voters.