Agriculture Labour Migrants (Denied) Access to Health Care in Andhra Pradesh

Abstract

In most countries international migration has received more attention than internal agriculture labour migration. Even though internal agriculture labour migration has become an important livelihood strategy for many poor groups across the world, these migrants are often neglected or excluded from the various welfare programmes of their respective countries, such as mainstream programmes in education, health, adequate living conditions, minimum wages and freedom from exploitation and harassment. This increases the vulnerabilities of the agriculture labour migrants and leads to their poor health status, which has significant public health implications. This paper concludes that a multitude of factors affect the health of agriculture labour migrants, including inadequate nutrition, poor housing conditions, hazardous occupational conditions, lack of access to health care services and a low level of awareness. Hence a population health approach is necessary that will align strategies, policy options and interventions for improving health outcomes among agriculture labour migrants. Possible strategies to improve the health of agriculture labour migrants can be: promoting migrant-sensitive health policies, assessment of the health of migrants and identifying and filling the gaps in service delivery to meet their health needs, sensitizing and training relevant policymakers and health stakeholders and initiating migrant friendly public health services for those with special needs. There is also a need for convergence of the existing programmes at source and destination levels, so that the needs of marginalized agriculture labour migrants are accommodated in the programmes such as food security, education for migrant children, and Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS).