Nepalgunj, Feb. 22:The shutters are down. The Chok Bazar at Tribhuvan Chok, the city centre of Nepalganj, is yet to wake up as the winter chill breaks the day in the western town. The streets are quite. The sun pierces the thick morning fog.

Kallu Dapali leads in a group of 13 men, all from his village in Bihar state of India, where the labourers wait eagerly for offers of manual works at construction sites. If luck favours, all the 13 men will be hired in a single place, which will make their stay in this town easier and cheaper because they can arrange a common kitchen. If not, every individual will have to hunt for works in different places that could pay less for harder toils.

By 6:45 in the morning Chock Bazar is crowded with people eager to sell labour. Men and women, both young and elderly, are pouring in from all corners of the “lebar thiha”, meaning   Place for Labourers. From there the contractors pick up labourers. The crowd of mainly unskilled labourers at lebar thiha depends on masons to find works in construction sites where building contractors subcontract works. “Here, masons are like sweets attracting flies,” says Salim Pathan. “As soon as a mason enters this lebar thiha, labourers gather around him.”

There are far too many workers compared to the area and the number of works one would trip over, says Pathan, also a mason.

According to Nepal Labour Force Survey 1998/99 released last month, 1.7 million people work in informal sector outside agriculture in the country. A report prepared by International Labour Organisation’s South Asia Multidisciplinary Advisory Team (SAAT) in 1997 states that the Terai region accommodates highest percentage of daily wage labourers (35 per cent) among all the three ecological regions in Nepal.

Since mountains and the hilly regions create virtually no job opportunities, workers throng the plain to find wage paying jobs in the southern plains. The National Census 1991, estimates that 0.44 million people migrated to Terai between 1971 and 1981 from mountains and the hills permanently. The region also bears the burden of seasonal and temporary migratory workers. According to Population Monograph of Nepal, Terai’s share of employed labour force increased to 39 per cent in 1991 from 32 per cent in 1971, while the other two regions saw declines in their share of employed population during the same period.

The influx of migratory labourers is pushing the wage rate to minimum, say local labourers. Workers are becoming more vulnerable to exploitation and underpayment. “We are too many labourers here. Sometimes the chief mason who hires us on sub-contract basis pays less than what has been originally agreed upon,” says Laungi Tharu.  “If we do not comply, they have nothing to lose, but we will have to find another mason to hire us,” says Tharu who comes from an adjoining village of Nepalgunj. She claims that she is normally paid Rs. 80 for a day’s work, but sometimes she has to satisfy herself with only Rs. 60 for same work.

The Terai’s job market perhaps has already reached the “point of exhaustion,” as the 1997 report of SAAT cautioned. However, the inter-regional migration of workers alone is not threatening the exhaustion labour absorption capacity of the region. The increasing unemployment rate in Bihar is pushing the Terai’s labour market to exhaustion point even faster.

“The Deshis or labourers should go back home,” says Pathan. “They are stealing away our jobs,” he says of the inflow of across-border-movement of workers to Nepalgunj. “They even agree to work for half of what is customarily paid here.” And, that often comes at the cost of Nepalese labourers.