Migration and Related Stories in India
Data Regarding Internal Migration
- According to World Population report 33% of Indian population lives in urban areas.
- Economic survey 2017 says that interstate migration in India is close to 9 million annually.
- According to 2011 census report total number of internal migrants in the country (accounting for inter- and intra-state movement) at a staggering 139 million.
- Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are the biggest source states, followed closely by Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir and West Bengal;
- Major destination states are Delhi, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala.
Factors of internal migration
- Migration is driven by push-pull factors.
- Distress has been a push factor from rural areas.
- The desire for better employment in urban areas has been a pull factors in internal migration in India.
- Data show that employment-seeking is the principal reason for migration in regions without conflict.
The problems of migration
- At the destination, a migrant’s lack of skills is a major hindrance in entering the labour market.
- The modern formal urban sector has often not been able to absorb the large number of rural workers entering the urban labour market.
- This has led to the growth of the ‘urban informal’ economy, which is marked by high poverty and vulnerabilities.
- The ‘urban informal’ economy is wrongly understood in countries such as India as a transient phenomenon.
- It has, in fact, expanded over the years and accounts for the bulk of urban employment.
- Most jobs in the urban informal sector pay poorly and involve self-employed workers who turn to petty production because of their inability to find wage labour.
- Then there are various forms of discrimination which do not allow migrants to graduate to better-paying jobs.
- Migrant workers earn only two-thirds of what is earned by non-migrant workers, according to 2014 data.
- Further, they have to incur a large cost of migration which includes the ‘search cost’ and the hazard of being cheated.
- Often these costs escalate as they are outside the state-provided health care and education system; this forces them to borrow from employers in order to meet these expenses.
- Frequent borrowing forces them to sell assets towards repayment of their loans.
- Employment opportunities, the levels of income earned, and the working conditions in destination areas are determined by the migrant household’s social location in his or her village.
- The division of the labour market by occupation, geography or industry (labour market segmentation), even within the urban informal labour market, confines migrants to the lower end.
- Often, such segmentation reinforces differences in social identity, and new forms of discrimination emerge in these sites.
The benefits of migration
- Despite these issues, internal migration has resulted in the increased well being of households, especially for people with higher skills, social connections and assets.
- Migrants belonging to lower castes and tribes have also brought in enough income to improve the economic condition of their households in rural areas and lift them out of poverty.
- Data show that a circular migrant’s earnings account for a higher proportion of household income among the lower castes and tribes.
- This has helped to improve the creditworthiness of the family members left behind — they can now obtain loans more easily.
- Thus, there exists a need to scale-up interventions aimed at enhancing these benefits from circular or temporary migration.
- Interventions targeting short-term migrants also need to recognise the fact that short-term migration to urban areas and its role in improving rural livelihoods is an ongoing part of a long-term economic strategy of the households.
- Local interventions by NGOs and private entrepreneurs also need to consider cultural dimensions reinforced by caste hierarchies and social consequences while targeting migrants.
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