The Future of Urbanisation: Migration Policies in the Post-pandemic World

Most of India’s population (69 per cent, as per the 2011 Census, and 64 per cent in 2022 as per projections; United Nations, 2022) lives in rural areas. However, the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns highlighted the urban nature of the country’s COVID-19 crisis. The pandemic brought to the forefront India’s invisible rural–urban migrants—millions of men and women who worked in urban areas but had homes and families in rural areas. As the first national lockdown was announced in March 2020, migrant workers lost their jobs, livelihoods and ability to stay put in the city. This resulted in a mass movement—a reverse migration—of workers from urban to rural India (Dandekar & Ghai, 2020). The absence of an internal migration policy and the lack of efficient governance and institutional frameworks to address the vulnerabilities of informal migrant workers led to a pandemic-induced migration crisis (Rajan et al., 2020).

Prior to migrating, these individuals encounter various obstacles, which serve as impetuses for their relocation. Subsequently, upon reaching their destinations, they confront a fresh set of challenges. For migrants, urbanisation processes have been ‘exclusionary’ due to a lack of essential services, poor and unaffordable housing and regular slum clearances by the state (Kundu & Saraswati, 2012; Naik, 2015). Many of these migrants reside in deteriorating and unsanitary living conditions, often lacking basic amenities. Despite being integral to urban life, migrants are often marginalised, relegated to substandard living conditions, and have limited access to essential social welfare programmes such as ration cards and health insurance (Kusuma & Babu, 2022; Rajan, 2022). This deprivation often stems from issues related to identity documentation and the lack of uniformity in welfare schemes across different states. In addition, their economic, social and political rights are compromised at urban destinations; despite being formal citizens, their substantive citizenship rights remain unfulfilled (Bhagat & Kumar, 2021). The pandemic, in turn, has exacerbated pre-existing inequalities and accentuated poverty, precarity and informality of migrant workers (Levy et al., 2022; Sengupta & Jha, 2020).

Dearth of Data: A Migration Governance Challenge

Comprehensive and up-to-date information regarding labour migrants in India is unavailable. Detailed migrant data within the country offered by the Census of India is outdated. Last conducted in 2011, the census estimates the number of migrants in India at 450 million. Moreover, the census definition of migration focuses on changes in residence over a year, thus overlooking circular and temporary migration patterns (Chandrasekhar & Mitra, 2019).

In addition to the census, the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) conducts various socio-economic surveys, including the National Sample Survey, which is a nationally representative, large-scale and multi-round survey. The NSSO defines migration as a change in the place of employment different from the usual place of residence within the past six months, providing more detailed migration data compared to the census. However, NSSO surveys do not capture data on migration origins and destinations, like the census does, and only cover a few aspects of migration (Bhagat & Keshri, 2020). Despite this limitation, NSSO surveys enable a contemporary analysis of socio-demographic differences between migrant and non-migrant households, as well as the factors influencing migration decisions.

The Economic Survey 2016–2017 estimated the interstate migrant population at 60 million and the inter-district migrant population at 80 million, with an average annual migration flow of 9 million persons between states, using data from the Indian Railways (Government of India [GoI], 2017a). However, these sources have drawbacks, such as accuracy issues or lack of recent data. The COVID-19 pandemic further highlighted the lack of data on unorganised workers in India. The e-Shram portal, launched in 2021 following a Supreme Court directive, allows the self-registration of workers in the unorganised sector and has garnered significant success with 28.64 crore registrations. Nevertheless, it is still evolving, and the voluntary nature of registration, without guaranteed incentives for registering, raises concerns about the portal’s future trajectory (Rajput & Rajan, 2023). In this issue, Aditya Srinivasan argues that while the dearth of quantitative data on migrant labourers limits policymaking, the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting mobility crisis showcased a lack of real understanding of migrants’ woes, self-perception and mindset. However limited, the census and NSSO data would have given policymakers enough information to develop some sort of migrant-centric policy interventions, but instead, they were completely left out of the calculations. He advocates for a qualitative-interpretive method that better integrates the lived experience of migrants, by including interviews, ethnographic observations and fieldwork, along with comprehensive quantitative data, for developing holistic migrant-centric policies.

Due to the absence of up-to-date census data, an approximation of 600 million migrants in 2021 can be derived from the figures obtained in Census 2011 (Rajan, 2020; Rajan & Bhagat, 2021). Following the pattern observed in 2011, it can be inferred that nearly one-third of all internal migrants constitute interstate and inter-district migrants, totalling almost 200 million individuals (Rajan, 2020). A significant portion of these migrants originate from impoverished rural areas of India, seeking better prospects in urban settings (Datta, 2023). Frequently, these economically disadvantaged migrants possess limited education, social connections and financial resources.

The heightened focus on migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic, prompted by the internal migrant crisis during the initial lockdown, spurred significant policy action. For instance, the Affordable Rental Housing Complexes (ARHC) initiative, introduced in July 2020, has been implemented in several states, including Chandigarh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand and Jammu and Kashmir.

Exclusion and Voicelessness of Migrants

The inequitable distribution of social security benefits is evident, as these measures seldom reach migrant populations within the country. This disparity is particularly pronounced in the implementation of education and health policies, which often fail to be inclusive. Research indicates that even migrants residing in urban areas, near healthcare facilities, struggle to access them due to a lack of awareness about procedures and their rights (Kusuma & Babu, 2022). Despite the introduction of schemes like the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana in 2008, aimed at providing health insurance to poor workers in the informal sector, a study by Kusuma and Babu (2019) found that only a small fraction of migrants was covered. Additionally, initiatives like the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT), launched in 2015, and the Smart City Mission, have reportedly failed to include migrants in their benefits (Chandrasekhar & Mitra, 2019).

Women, primarily migrating due to marriage, often join the labour force at their destination location, a phenomenon frequently overlooked due to the male-centric perspective dominating discussions on migration, rendering women migrants invisible (Rajan et al., 2020, 2021). This invisibility of women extends to their exclusion from migration governance. In addition to being under-represented in migration data and social security measures, women encounter further hurdles in the labour market and workplaces, including wage disparities and inadequate sanitary facilities. A recent study of female construction workers highlighted the discrimination they face during recruitment and the ‘gendered burden’ they shoulder, such as household chores and gathering essential resources (Jayaram et al., 2019). The persistence of such exclusionary practices, not addressed partly due to the lack of updated national-level data, underscores the necessity for the central government to invest in a comprehensive pan-India migration survey. Surveys similar to the Kerala Migration Survey conducted by the Government of Kerala would enable a thorough understanding of migration patterns and trends across the country (Rajan & Zachariah, 2019).

The Working Group on Migration, constituted by the Government of India under the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation (MHUPA) in 2015, submitted a report in 2017 (GoI, 2017b). This report proposed various recommendations, including enhancing social protection programmes, enforcing labour laws, registering migrant workers, ensuring portable access to the public distribution system for food security, providing adequate healthcare and education for migrant children, expanding opportunities for skill development, eliminating the necessity for state domicile to obtain government employment and formulating policies to integrate migrants into the formal financial system (Rajan & Bhagat, 2022). Despite the introduction of initiatives like the One Nation One Ration Card (ONORC) scheme to facilitate the portability of social security measures, further action on the report’s recommendations is still pending.

Additionally, the lack of political representation for migrant workers, who are often unable to exercise their voting rights due to economic migration, poses a significant challenge to migration governance in the country, rendering these migrants voiceless. The nature of daily wage-based employment and the logistical challenges involved in returning to their hometowns to vote hinder their participation in the democratic process, a fundamental constitutional right (Rajan et al., 2019).

The Special Issue

It is against this backdrop, four years since the onset of the pandemic, that the policy-oriented articles in this special issue of Urbanisation critically engage with and reflect on the migration–urbanisation nexus and policies that lie at this intersection in a post-pandemic world. With a geographical focus on India, the articles in the special issue critically reflect on the possibilities and limits of new policies and institutional frameworks that have emerged post the pandemic. While there is now a large body of literature that examines the immediate socio-economic impacts and policy responses to the pandemic, a serious engagement with the migration–urbanisation nexus and policies that lie at this intersection is lacking; therefore, this special issue is a critical contributor in this field of knowledge.

The special issue contributes to:

A theoretical and conceptual rethinking of the linear relationship among migration, urbanisation and development.

Emerging academic and policy discussions around the contemporary relationship between the urban and the rural; how we may imagine this to be more equal; and whether and how policies address old and new urban biases (Krishna, 2018; Lipton, 1977) against the backdrop of increasing inequalities between urban and rural areas in the neoliberal context.

Analysing and delineating how migration and urbanisation policies can better complement one another in the Indian context, particularly in governance, federalism, labour, social protection, food security, housing and gender.

This special issue of Urbanisation is the outcome of the online international conference, ‘Internal Migrants in the Cities: Entangled Lives’, organised by the International Institute of Migration and Development, Kerala, and the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, which took place on 29 and 30 December 2022. The motivation for the special issue is to respond to the critical need to integrate migration with development and urbanisation policies in a post-pandemic world (Rajan & Bhagat, 2021; Rajan & Cherian, 2021). The issue includes policy-oriented articles on urbanisation from this conference (see also Datta & Rajan, 2024).

Harshita Sinha, Priyansha Singh, Varun Aggarwal and Mukta Naik, in their article titled ‘The Governance of Internal Migration: Learning from the Pre- and Post-COVID-19 Policy Responses of Indian States’, attempt to initiate an empirically grounded discussion on the governance of internal migration. The article draws from the two consecutive rounds of the Interstate Migrant Policy Index (IMPEX)—an ex ante policy indexing tool—conducted in 2019 and 2021 and an extensive literature review. It discusses policies formulated by state governments in India’s pre- and post-pandemic period. Using IMPEX as a tool is critical here as it ranks and compares the states based on their migrant integration policies from a destination perspective. The authors argue that ‘the complexity of migration policymaking in the context of federal democracies like India, as seen by the tension in destination states between economic imperatives to attract migrants and nativist politics that fragment migration policy’. Further, it provides cues for economic development and social justice architecture in developing countries through the improvement of labour mobility patterns.

Mukta Naik, in her article titled ‘Tracing Internal Migration Governance in India Through a “Mainstreaming” Lens’, analyses the internal migration policy in India over time, particularly how the pandemic reshaped responses. By using ‘mainstreaming’ as a potential analytical framework, she has rightly discussed how mainstreaming can help streamline research and policy design into policies, institutions and structures for enhanced migrant inclusion through effective migration governance.

Aditya Srinivasan’s article titled ‘Interpretive Methods as Policy Tools: The COVID-19 Migration Crisis in India and the Case for Policy Innovation’ argues that a paradigm shift towards a more wide-ranging use of qualitative-interpretive methods is necessary to obtain a fuller picture of migrant needs and actions. The government failed to understand the ‘contextual reality’, more profound reflections, and subjective and emotional concerns that migrants had about their well-being. By integrating the lived realities of migrants into policymaking, interpretive methods offer a more holistic perspective on migrants and migration. Even in limited circumstances, they can provide critical insights into discourses on the ground, informing specific policy response measures and differentiated planning. Therefore, it benefits policymakers to rely on local context, invest in understanding subjective concerns and frame policy narratives specifically intended to alleviate those concerns.

The article ‘Epistemic Violence Embedded in the Urban Policy: Locating Internal Migrants in Pune’s Smart City Mission’ by Kuldeepsingh Rajput argues that the fundamental cause for migrants’ exclusion, precarity and othering process in the ‘smart city’ lies in the epistemic violence against them, embedded in the Smart City Mission itself, which develops the knowledge framework of ‘inclusion and exclusion’. The epistemology constructs and shapes the knowledge and ideas of smart cities and the power structures that consequently influence the urban government functionaries, urban planners and officials of the Smart City Mission Project Corporation. It normalises the miseries of migrants and validates the salience of urban policy in protecting migrants’ rights.

The article ‘Urban-ward Migration and Policy Narratives: A Time to Retrospect’ by Amita Bhide reveals, through its review of post-pandemic policies, that migration policies remain unaware of the ground realities of circular migrants. ‘Policies for migrants demand a new imagination of entitlements, of how to do welfare as against a firmly embedded sedentary and territorial bias’, argues Bhide. There is, thus, an urgent need to formulate migrant-aware policies that draw from their ground realities.

Chinmay Tumbe and Rahul Kumar Jha, in their article titled ‘One Nation, One Ration, Limited Interstate Traction: Migration and PDS Portability in India’, compare the interstate PDS portability with intrastate PDS portability and find that the former has limited traction. Interstate PDS transactions account for less than half a million monthly transactions, in stark contrast to more than 20 million monthly intrastate transactions. According to them, ‘both demand- and supply-side factors appear to be at work in constraining the ONORC interstate PDS portability at present, and easing these constraints could substantially increase the adoption of the benefits’. Measures to ease such constraints would include considering the seasonality of migration for improving stock management at fair price shops and focusing on specific migration corridors through publicity campaigns targeted towards migrant workers.