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Abstract

Keywords

Internal migration migration and development circular migration rural-urban migration migration and urbanisation inclusive development

Introduction

Historically, rural-to-urban migration has been a significant feature of economic development and structural change. India is understood to have among the lowest rates of internal migration in the world. Estimates based on the Census of India show that just 5% of the population changed their place of residence over five years, compared to a global median of 18% (Bell et al., 2015). This is rather curious in the context of a country that has undergone high economic growth and structural change in the last three decades (McMillan et al., 2016; Nayyar, 2019). It is also unusual in the Asian context, where internal migration has played a major role in urban transition (Charles-Edwards et al., 2019; Rajan et al., 2020; UNESCAP, 2017).

The dominant discourse of low internal migration in India finds that sub-caste or jati networks restrict mobility by providing mutual insurance to its members, thus contributing to the low levels of permanent migration from rural areas (Munshi & Rosenzweig, 2016). It is also argued that state-level entitlement schemes, such as access to subsidised goods through the public distribution system and state domicile requirements in public employment and education, constrain interstate mobility (Kone et al., 2018). This dominant discourse of low mobility emerges largely from official statistics, that is, the decadal censuses and surveys of the National Sample Survey Office, the two most important data sources of migration in India. These sources underestimate migration rates within the country as they have an underlying bias towards long-term and permanent migration, and tend to miss out on a significant proportion of short-term and circular migration (Deshingkar & Farrington, 2009; GOI, 2017a; Rajan & Bhagat, 2023; Srivastava, 2020, Srivastava & Sasikumar, 2005).

Micro-studies are better able to capture circular migration—the back and forth of migrant workers from rural to urban India. Circular migration comprises not only seasonal and short-term migration but also longer-term migration of workers who live and work in urban destinations for long durations but eventually return to the rural areas. Circular migrants were the most adversely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought the migration question to the forefront of the public discourse in India. Government lockdowns resulted in large-scale disruption of employment and livelihoods (Breman, 2020; Srivastava, 2020). The sudden loss of employment meant that migrants no longer had the means to stay put in the city, and there was a large-scale reverse migration, predominantly from urban to rural India (Adhikari et al., 2020; Dandekar & Ghai, 2020). While estimates of this return migration may vary, there is no doubt that the scale of this migration was unprecedented in independent India. As the country came to a standstill, migrants—stranded, without work or dwelling in India’s cities—set back to their homes in the village. The images of the mass of migrants travelling by whatever means they could find undertaking long, arduous journeys by bicycle, rickshaw, bus, truck, train or simply on foot led to heightened public awareness and sensitivity about the plight of the invisible migrant workforce. However, this did not translate into measures and policies to ensure their protection and well-being. There was scathing evidence from field studies of the mass abandonment of migrant workers by their employers—job losses, denial of wages, forced evictions from migrant housing, which often doubled up as migrants’ workplace and so on (Khandelwal, 2022; Rajan & Bhagat, 2022). Government advisories and orders to safeguard migrant workers were not binding on employers and landlords; there were no enforcement mechanisms, and these largely went unheeded.¹

As the pandemic eased, and it was business as usual, migrants trickled back to the cities. For, structurally, urban destinations provide employment and livelihoods to rural workers in the context of widespread agrarian distress and lack of local non-farm opportunities in source regions (Datta, 2023; Mishra, 2020; Rao & Mitra, 2013; Sinha et al., 2022). There is now established literature—a steadily growing body of cross-sectional micro-studies that report high levels of mobility and find that migration has increasingly become an important livelihood strategy among rural households² (Choithani et al., 2021; Coffey et al., 2015; Datta, 2016; Deshingkar & Farrington 2009; Dodd et al., 2016; Mosse et al., 2002; Singh, 2019). In addition, evidence from a small body of longitudinal village studies shows that outmigration from rural areas has increased over time (Badiani, 2007; Datta, 2023; Himanshu et al., 2018).

This Special Issue (SI) on Internal Migration and Development in India contributes to the growing body of work on the migration question in India. It builds on the papers presented at the international conference, ‘Internal Migrants in the Cities: Entangled Lives’, organised by the International Institute of Migration and Development and the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad on 29–30 December 2022. The conference focused on a wide range of issues related to migrants in the city, including work and employment, the changing forms of labour, migrant vulnerabilities, social and political exclusion and gender in migration. A majority of the papers in this SI, therefore, are empirically located in the urban (see also, Rajan & Datta, 2024). Yet, what emerges strongly is how these disaggregated streams of migrations under study, in diverse contexts, have deep rural–urban connections and are microcosms of the larger processes of growth and development in India. In this introduction to the SI, we deploy the analytical lenses of India’s growth process, the relationship between rural and urban, and the migration and development discourse to study internal migration and development in India. This analytical framing of the SI is elaborated in the next section.

Internal Migration and Development in India: The Analytical Framing of this Special Issue

India’s Growth Process

In the last three decades, India has been among the fastest-growing economies in the world, with a GDP growth rate—in real terms—of nearly 7% per annum. However, high economic growth has not translated into development for most of its population, as the benefits of growth have been very unevenly distributed. India’s neoliberal services-led growth model has been termed as ‘exclusive growth’, where the rich have disproportionately gained from a large and growing share of incremental income generated by growth. At the same time, the poor have largely been excluded from the gains of growth³ (Ghose, 2023). Economic development, thus, has not converged with social justice, or led to an expansion of people’s basic freedoms or human capabilities (Dreze & Sen, 2020).

A key characteristic of the growth process has been its inability to create adequate employment or improve the poor employment conditions of its working population (Ghose 2020; Kannan & Raveendran, 2009). The rate of employment growth was very low at 1.7% per annum between 1993 and 2004, and this decelerated to 1.1% per annum during 2004–2011 (Ghose, 2023). Between 2011 and 2017, employment growth turned negative; absolute employment declined by 6 million, and this loss was disproportionately borne by workers with low levels of education (Kannan & Raveendran, 2019). While employment growth was decelerating, it was also becoming more skill-biased; shifting towards skilled workers, and, particularly during 2011–2017, jobs were available for the best educated (Ghose & Kumar, 2021). Thus, even before COVID-19 struck a devastating impact on labour, India’s employment situation was already in crisis. From 2011 to 2018, as employment growth rates decelerated, there was a stagnation in real wages in both rural and urban areas (Mehrotra & Parida, 2021). From 2017 to 2021, though there has been a turnaround in employment growth, over the long run, employment growth and GDP growth remain uncorrelated in India (Azim Premji University, 2023).

A significant feature of India’s employment story is the unusually high youth unemployment rates for its level of development. Even more peculiar—and concerning—is the high rate of unemployment among the educated youth (India Employment Report, 2024). Though, at the aggregate level, youth unemployment rates tend to be higher than overall unemployment rates,⁴ advanced levels of education are typically associated with lower levels of youth unemployment (Sharma, 2022). In India, however, there is an education–employment paradox; advanced levels of education are associated with higher unemployment rates. This highlights not only the nature of employment creation but also the quality of education, where a large number of educated youth remain unemployable or are employed in low-productivity occupations not commensurate with their education levels (Sharma, 2022). Spatially, rural areas and backward regions have higher educated unemployment rates, and this is attributed to joblessness or the lack of employment opportunities.

The growth process is also marked by certain distinct cleavages. Dalit and Adivasi workers are far more likely to be in casual employment compared to the upper castes, who have the privilege of a higher likelihood of being in regular employment (Datta et al., 2020). Upward—or intergenerational—mobility also remains significantly lower among Dalits and Adivasis, compared to the upper castes (Azim Premji University, 2023), and simultaneously, the prospects for downward mobility are higher between Dalits and Adivasis (Iversen et al., 2017).

High growth has also been accompanied by increasing—consumption, income and wealth— inequalities since the 1990s, a period that coincides with the onset of India’s economic reforms in 1991 (Himanshu, 2019). Spatially, there has been a rise in regional and interstate inequalities (Himanshu, 2019). Contrary to development theory and significant empirical evidence across the world that shows that development leads to a convergence of income and consumption across regions, there is striking evidence of divergence across Indian states (Government of India, 2017a). The growing inequalities between regions explain migration patterns—from poor to prosperous regions, from backward to advanced states and from rural to urban areas—in contemporary India.

Relationship Between the Rural and Urban

Historically, economic development has entailed the movement of workers from rural to urban areas—from agriculture to industry, a la Lewis—through the process of structural change. Structural change in India has been slow and lopsided⁵; during the three-decade period, 1991–2022, the employment share of agriculture declined by twenty percentage points, from 63% to 43%, whereas the agriculture sector’s contribution to income (GDP) declined by eleven percentage points, from 28% to 17% Simultaneously, the share of employment in the services sector increased from 22% to 31%, and that of income (GDP) increased from 38% to 48%. In the case of industry (including construction), the employment share increased from 15% in 1991 to 26% in 2022, while its income share stagnated at 26%. (World Bank, 2022).

Across sectors, the skewed distribution of workers has contributed to rising inequality (Himanshu, 2019). In addition, the structural shift in employment to the non-farm sector has been accompanied by rising informality. Between 1983 and 2019, though the share of the non-farm sector in employment increased by 20 percentage points, the share of regular wage work increased by less than three percentage points, and that of the organised sector increased by less than two percentage points (Azim Premji University, 2023). Three-fourths of all workers in the non-farm sector are informal workers (Sharma, 2022). Thus, as workers move from the farm to the non-farm sector, from rural to urban areas, they are mostly absorbed in the urban informal economy characterised by low wages, poor working conditions and absence of social security. In addition, wage denial, salary forfeitures, forced retrenchments and bonded work are deeply normalised (Khandelwal, 2022).

Despite the adverse conditions in the urban labour market, temporary migration is a significant livelihood strategy undertaken by rural households in the context of agrarian distress and the decline of agriculture (Nadkarni, 2018; Reddy & Mishra, 2010). Rural-to-urban migration in India is dominated by temporary migrants⁶ (Rajan et al., 2023). In addition, the stream of temporary and short-term migration is overrepresented by poor, vulnerable and historically disadvantaged Dalit and Adivasi communities (Keshri & Bhagat, 2013). It also disproportionately comprises migrants from underdeveloped states such as Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh (Srivastava, 2019). Thus, the temporary migration stream is characterised by intersecting deprivations and vulnerabilities.

Empirical studies show that those at the lowest rungs of the social and economic ladder in source regions—the Dalits, Adivasis, labouring class—are the worst off at destination; they are part of the most precarious shorter-term migration streams, earn the lowest incomes, have the poorest conditions of work and live in the harshest circumstances. Thus, social and economic hierarchies in the source region are structurally reproduced in migrant destinations (Datta, 2023; Vijay, 2005). Empirical studies also highlight the circularity of migration; rural migrants work in urban destinations for much of their working lives and eventually return to the village (Deshingkar & Farrington, 2009; Mezzadri & Srivastava, 2015; Mishra, 2020; Rajan, 2020b; Rodgers et al., 2013; Sarkar & Mishra, 2021). This suggests that the rural areas bear the cost of production and reproduction of rural workers in the city, and thus subsidise India’s urban development (Datta, 2023). This was brutally evident during the COVID-19 pandemic when urban India came to a standstill, and migrants were forced to return to their villages in several waves of reverse migration (Rajan, 2020a). It is estimated that from 2018–2019 to 2019–2020—in one year—12–13 million workers returned to agriculture, and the total employment in agriculture increased from 42.5% to 45.6% in this period (Mezzadri & Banerjee, 2021). The size of this reverse urban–rural mass migration is unprecedented in independent India. When migrant workers returned home, it was agriculture and the rural that absorbed these workers and provided a cushion, a safety net.

Despite the respite provided by agriculture and the rural, migrants and their family members soon felt the economic stresses of the pandemic. As the pandemic eased, migrants returned to the cities to resume work.⁷ Migrants’ return to the cities—in spite of the pandemic-induced hardships suffered in urban destinations—needs to be understood in the context of widespread agrarian distress and lack of local non-farm opportunities; households in rural India are structurally, and precariously, dependent on urban remittances (Datta, 2023). Several studies have shown that migrants prefer to work and live in rural areas if work in the domain of dignity is available in the village (Datta, 2018; Mookerjee et al., 2021; Roy, 2014; Sinha et al., 2022). In destination areas, apart from being separated from their family members, migrants experience isolation and hostility; their social and political exclusion renders them second-class citizens in urban India (Jeyaranjan, 2017; Mander et al., 2019).

It is this exclusionary nature of urban development that explains India’s sluggish rate of urbanisation (Kundu, 2014). Notwithstanding the restrictive definitions of urbanisation in India, only 31% of the population is urban, and the share of migration in urban growth is quite low—estimated at around 18%–20% (Bhagat & Keshri, 2020; NIUA, n.d.). This, in turn, has implications for India’s slow rural–urban transition, urbanisation and economic development.

India’s slow rural–urban transition can also be understood from the analytical lens of urban bias. In the 1970s, the theory of urban bias emerged as a powerful lens to understand the rural–urban divide. In his seminal work, Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias in World Development, Michael Lipton argued that ‘resource allocations within the city and the village as well as between them, reflect urban priorities rather than equity and efficiency’ (Lipton, 1977, p. 13). Urban bias was, thus, embedded in modernisation projects across the developing world that privileged urbanisation and industrialisation, at the cost of agriculture and the rural. Despite disparities in consumption, income and welfare between rural and urban areas, the persistence of anti-rural policies and urban bias was attributed to governments’ appeasement of powerful urban interests in order to protect their own interests and regime stability (Bates, 1981) and, in turn, the countryside remained economically poor, as it was politically weak (Varshney, 1993).

Economic liberalisation since the 1990s and the subsequent high-growth regime has been accompanied by increasing inequalities between rural and urban areas and advanced and backward regions (Ahluwalia, 2011; Deaton & Dreze, 2002). In turn, processes of globalisation and urban agglomeration in largely agrarian contexts have exacerbated the rural–urban divide and led to the emergence of a ‘new urban bias’ where big metropolitan cities have become hubs of global economic and financial activities (Krishna, 2018). These processes have set into motion new migrations and mobilities. Simultaneously, there has been a decline of the rural and a marginalisation of the village economy and society (Jodhka, 2023).

Migration–Development Nexus

The mainstream migration and development literature posits migration as a triple win—for source regions, destination regions and migrants themselves. This dominant discourse views the relationship between migration and development as linear. Migration—mediated by remittances—results in increased consumption and welfare, and in turn, a reduction in poverty in source areas (Adams & Page, 2005). Critical migration and development studies, however, problematise this linear discourse. Drawing on a political economy framework, they shift the gaze to the structures of contemporary capitalism and neoliberal globalisation that have led to the deepening of uneven development. These perspectives focus not on the drivers⁸ or determinants⁹ but on the root causes of migration, that is, ‘the social and political conditions that induce departure—especially poverty, repression, and violent conflict’ (Carling & Talleraas, 2016, p. 6). They address questions such as what the role of migration may be in a system dominated by monopoly capital; how migration may further the process of capital accumulation; and how migration is harnessed so as to stimulate capital accumulation in capitalism in an era of neoliberal globalisation (Delgado Wise & Veltmeyer, 2016).

Connecting the dots between development and migration, Raul Delgado Wise (2023) explains:

The global and national dynamics of capitalist development, the international division of labour, the imperialist system of international power relations, and the conflicts that surround the capital-labour relation and the dynamics of extractive capital, have made economic, social, political, and cultural polarisation more extreme between geographical spaces and social classes than ever before in human history. A conspicuous outcome of this scenario is the disproportionate concentration of capital, power, and wealth in the hands of a small elite within the capitalist class… Social inequalities are one of the most distressing aspects of this process, given the unprecedented concentration of capital, power, and wealth in a few hands while a growing segment of the population suffers poverty, exploitation and exclusion. Increasing disparities are also expressed, ever more strongly, in terms of racial, ethnic, and gender relations; reduced access to production and employment; a sharp decline in living and working conditions; and the progressive dismantling of social safety nets. (Delgado Wise, 2023, p. 316)

In India, as noted earlier, similar processes of ‘exclusive growth’ have been at play (Ghose, 2023). The celebration of remittances by the migration and development discourse evades structural aspects of this migration, rooted in rural–urban inequalities, that continue to rise in India. Amidst rising incomes and growing prosperity, several disaggregated, context-specific migration streams point towards the adverse incorporation of migrants in development (Breman, 1996; Deshingkar, 2010; Mishra, 2020; Phillips et al., 2011; Shah and Lerche, 2020). The migration and development literature needs to capture better, engage and unpack these aspects of the migration–development nexus.

In addition, the migration–development nexus needs to move beyond remittances and incorporate employment in its framing. As education levels rise, the employment question, both in terms of the availability of jobs and the quality of employment, becomes critical. Be it in source or destination regions, the creation of good jobs is necessary for economic development and to meet the aspirations of India’s workers. Conversely, the inability of the economy to create good jobs is inextricably linked with the politics of social discontent (Mody, 2023). Herein, the migration and development discourse must not only include but foreground the fundamental question of employment in both source and destination areas.

In This Special Issue

The papers in the SI are largely empirical, based on both destination and source area studies on migration (see also Rajan & Datta, 2024). They converge in their understanding of internal migration as an outcome of structural and spatial inequalities in contemporary India. At the same time, migration outcomes and experiences are found to be shaped by the intersecting identities of caste, class, gender and social group. Circular migration from the rural areas to cities and urban agglomerations—such as Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Kolkata and Thiruvananthapuram—emerges as the predominant migration stream in the SI papers, connecting economic production and social reproduction, gender and generation, the rural and the urban and the village and the city.

Soundarya Iyer and Nitya Rao’s paper (2024) finds that the duration of migration at destination matters; housing, property rights and access to amenities such as electricity, water and cooking gas are a function of how long a migrant has been in the city.¹⁰ Duration intersects with social group, and newer migrants, Dalits and Muslims emerge as the most disadvantaged. Iyer and Rao (2024) also show that while autonomous migration is important, contractors remain significant not only in migration but also in accessing information about work in destination regions. While migrant housing emerges as a serious concern (Cherian & Rajan, 2024; Iyer & Rao, 2024), Shubham Kaushal and Tara Nair’s paper (2024) shows that in-factory living arrangements add to migrant workers’ exploitation and social isolation in the city. Kaushal and Nair (2024) argue that this kind of informal industrial employment ‘allows firms to have greater control over workers’ lives to extract surplus value and dictate their relations with the city’ (Kaushal & Nair, 2024).

In highlighting the complex relationship between the city and the village, Andaleeb Rahman et al. (2024) argue that while remittances from rural–urban migration are beneficial for rural households, the ‘lack of access to amenities and poor quality of life in urban areas do not necessarily improve their well-being’. This analysis resonates with critiques of the mainstream migration and development discourse discussed in the previous section, as well as the call for a more contextualised and disaggregated understanding of migration (Deshingkar, 2017). At the same time, Rahman et al.’s paper (2024) shows that migration from the deprived districts of Kolar and Kalaburgi to the urban agglomeration of Bengaluru is in a context of climate change characterised by periodic droughts and deepening water scarcity, environmental degradation, and in turn, transitions away from agrarian livelihoods in the source regions. Thus, the rural–urban migration patterns under study are an outcome of historical and structural inequalities.

Furthering the aforementioned argument, Diksha Shriyan and Arun Kumar’s paper (2024) deploys the lens of political economy to understand migration patterns from Bihar, a source region, historically mired in poverty and conflict. Migration from Bihar is seen in response to crises—of zamindari repressions, rack-renting, floods and famines, low wages and loss of livelihood opportunities—embedded in the structures of capitalism and caste. Shriyan and Kumar (2024) argue that ‘capitalism seems to have developed a caste-based working class in India, where the skilled–unskilled division between workers is reinforced by caste hierarchies’. In turn, informality is institutionalised, and informalisation of work and precarity in internal migration is structured along caste lines (Shriyan & Kumar, 2024). Kaushal and Nair (2024) find similar processes at play in their study of migrant workers in the garment value chain in an urban destination of Ahmedabad, where, located at the bottom of the value chain, migrant workers from particularly marginalised communities are embedded in ‘hyper-precarious occupational niches’ characterised by informality.

Despite overarching structures of capitalism and rural–urban inequality, migration mediates in ‘minor but significant ways in which members of subordinate groups are able to displace dominant social reproductive scripts of gender, patriarchy and caste’ (Gidwani & Ramamurthy, 2018). It is within this framing that Urbee Bhowmik’s paper (2024) foregrounds migrant subjectivities, experiences and agency to show how rural Bengali migrant women domestic workers in Kolkata develop their sense of self and ‘deploy identities from other sources like shared histories located within the local context to negotiate their alienated position with their employers in paid domestic work in the city and to stake claims over the city’ (Bhowmik, 2024). In a similar vein, Cherian and Rajan’s paper (2024)—based on a source and destination study in West Bengal and Kerala, respectively—problematises the concept of the migrant as a ‘guest worker’. By prioritising migrant perspectives, they emphasise the push factors of migration in the source regions, social isolation and marginalisation faced by migrants at destination, as well as migrants’ awareness of the deep inequalities between source and destination regions. Cherian and Rajan (2024) argue that though migrants benefit from higher wages and social security schemes at destination, ‘most migrants experience a sense of temporariness as a result of their precarious situation as legal residents of India but not appropriately regarded as citizens of Kerala’ (Cherian & Rajan, 2024).

Two papers—by Pranita Kulkarni and Amrita Datta (2024) and Nandini Ramamurthy (2024)—discuss the marginalisation of migrant workers in the context of the decline of the trade union movement in India. In response, civil society organisations are seen bridging the gap to address workplace issues of wage theft and harassment (Ramamurthy, 2024), while politically active organisations such as Dalit Sangharsha Samiti focus on issues beyond the labour market to fight for the rights and political inclusion of marginalised Dalit communities (Iyer & Rao, 2024).¹¹ Kulkarni and Datta’s paper (2024)—based on interviews with major trade union leaders—presents a disaggregation of trade union perspectives at the subnational level. It finds that ‘individual union strategies vary on account of their historical origins, ideological underpinnings and relationship with state and the market, in both national and local contexts’ (Kulkarni & Datta, 2024). The authors argue that the exclusion of migrants has played a significant role in the decline of trade unions and advocate for a combination of universalistic and particularistic approaches for course correction to bridge this disconnect between trade unions and migrant workers (Kulkarni & Datta, 2024).

We trust that this SI would contribute not only to a deeper understanding of the multitudes of migration streams—old and new—in India but also to a paradigm where migration is studied not in isolation, but as a fundamental part of India’s growth and development process. Foregrounding migration in development would give greater visibility to migrant workers, value their contributions to the economy and society, protect them from abuse and exploitation and promote migrant welfare and well-being in destination regions. It would also shift the gaze to the root causes of migration—the structural inequalities discussed in the papers in the SI, that need to be urgently addressed for a more equitable and just development.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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