Reintegration and Development: A Comparative Analysis of Kerala and Telangana's Reintegration Schemes for Return Migrants

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Indian government launched a massive repatriation mission to bring back Indian citizens stranded abroad. As of March 2021, over 3.25 million Indian citizens had been brought back under this mission. The South Indian state of Kerala stood out as the only state to provide short-term monetary relief and economic reintegration measures for returned migrants originating from the state. However, the social and economic reintegration of Indian migrants working in the GCC region has greater relevance beyond the COVID-19 pandemic for all major subnational origin states given the circular and temporary nature of migration to the GCC countries. Realizing the importance of reintegration to a holistic approach to migration governance, ILO India has been developing the ‘Regional Model on Reintegration for South Asian Migrant Workers’. The state of Telangana has been functioning as a model, and the partnership to establish a state-level resource center and additional reintegration schemes also includes the IOM and UN Women. These developments are puzzling as they stand in stark contrast to the claims of civil society organizations (CSOs), which state that the state has been disregarding the interests of (returned) migrant workers and their families.

In this article, I compare the reintegration schemes of Kerala and Telangana, two of the major Indian subnational states regarding migration to the GCC region. Drawing on the concept of migration-development regimes (Agarwala 2022), the article addresses the following questions: How do these programs relate to domestic development ideologies? What are the ideological, economic, and political interests at stake informing the two states’ approaches to reintegration? What is the role of IOs, CSOs, and emigrants in shaping reintegration schemes? To this end, I analyze primary data from interviews with representatives of the two states, ILO India and CSOs, and relevant documents.