Divya Varma: Strategizing Solutions for India’s Migrant and Informal Workers

Since the early 1990s, millions of people in India have migrated from rural areas to cities in search of work in industries including manufacturing, construction, and domestic services. For many years, this massive shift in the Indian economy left these informal workers-many of them from communities on the margins-without access to basic services, skill training, and information about their rights as informal workers. This highlighted the need for systemic support for them and their families.

Divya Varma, a Ford Global Fellow and cofounder and director of policy and practice for Work Fair and Free, has been supporting domestic migrant workers in India since 2009. That year, she and colleagues at the nonprofit Aajeevika Bureau established worker resource centers in cities with some of the largest migrant populations. As they worked at the grassroots level, "we were trying to bring out reports that would highlight their conditions," said Varma. "Nobody knew who these people were or what their stories were."

After earning graduate degrees at Harvard University and the Institute of Rural Management, Anand in Gujarat, Varma returned to Aajeevika Bureau and helped build a research and policy advocacy unit, which evolved into Work Fair and Free after the COVID-19 pandemic uncovered the lived realities of migrant and informal workers.

"Work sites shut down with just a few hours' notice, and these workers did not have savings. Some were living in the open or at their work sites," she said. "We collaborated with many stakeholders, including the government, to give them a vocabulary to describe the unprecedented phenomenon they were witnessing. We helped explain who this vast community of workers were, characterized their vulnerabilities and the reasons why they were moving back to their villages in such large numbers as work and incomes dried up in the cities."

By producing research and reports with data grounded in the lived experiences of informal workers, and sharing these with local and national employers and government agencies, Work Fair and Free helps strategize concrete solutions to problems that would otherwise remain invisible. Some are questions of labor rights and safety protections: measuring the incidence of workplace accidents in steel utensil factories, providing audits that offer low-cost solutions to injury risks such as installing safety sensors on powerlooms. Others involve creating infrastructure, such as working with local authorities to install mobile toilets and drinking water tanks in low-income areas previously lacking them.

The successes of Work Fair and Free are targeted and hyperlocal, but in a globalized economy, the organization offers a model that could be adopted by worker advocates in other countries, as well as provides crucial information to international labor rights groups. For Varma, the organization's achievements, especially as part of the Ford Global Fellows program, are an essential element of building solutions across the world, industries, and contexts.

"There is power in dialogue, both between workers and employers and between advocates in different spheres," Varma said. "I have a lot of faith in the inherent voice and agency of workers. Every small act of courage is important, and that gives me a lot of hope and solidarity."