Migration in India

• Migration in India reflects the interplay of economic development, social structure and regional disparity. It shows where jobs are, how families organise themselves, and how unevenly the country has grown.
• India has two migration geographies:
  • a vast, mostly short-distance internal movement, much of it women moving at marriage;
  • a large international diaspora that makes India the world’s largest source of migrants and largest receiver of remittances.
• Census 2011 counted 45.58 crore migrants by place of last residence, 37.6% of the population. A survey-based estimate for 2020–21 was 28.9% (PLFS).

Concept, Data and Magnitude

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Definition and Data

• The Census treats a person as a migrant if enumerated at a place other than the place of birth (lifetime migrant) or other than the place of last residence.
• Evolution of census data:
  • Place of birth recorded since 1872.
  • Duration of residence and rural or urban status of the birthplace added in 1961.
  • Place of last residence added in 1971, a better measure of current migration.
  • Reasons for migration recorded since 1981.
• Other sources:
  • National Sample Survey rounds (last full round 2007–08) and the PLFS 2020–21, which also counted short-term and seasonal moves the decennial census misses.
• Mobility and migration are different:
  • Mobility covers all movement, including daily commuting and short seasonal trips without a change of usual residence.
  • Migration is a change of usual residence beyond a time threshold (six months in the PLFS).
  • Much of India’s labour movement is circular mobility, not permanent migration.

Magnitude (Census 2011)

• India was long called a low-mobility society:
  • Kingsley Davis found that in 1931 only 3.6% of Indians lived outside their province of birth, against 22.5% of Americans outside their state of birth (1940).
  • At successive censuses about 90% of people were enumerated in their district of birth.
  • Causes: an agrarian economy tying families to land, joint families and caste, early marriage, poverty, low literacy, language barriers and poor transport and information.
• Migration has grown faster than population:
  • 23.1 crore migrants in 1991, 31.4 crore in 2001, 45.6 crore in 2011.
  • Part of the increase in “inter-district” moves comes from the creation of new districts (467 in 1991, 640 in 2011).
• Recent estimates:
  • PLFS 2020–21: migration rate 28.9% (rural 26.5%, urban 34.9%), with women about 48% in both areas.
  • A 2024 study for the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, using railway and mobile-roaming data, put migrants at about 40 crore in 2023 (28.9%). It suggested migration had slowed as conditions improved at origins.
  • The census due with a reference date of 1 March 2027 will give the first full post-2011 count.

Reasons for Migration

• Women: marriage dominates.
  • 66.5% of female migrants (all durations) in Census 2011.
  • 86.8% in the PLFS 2020–21.
  • It follows patrilocal residence: a bride moves to her husband’s home.
• Men:
  • Work and business (about 26% of male migrants in 2011; much higher for recent and long-distance movers).
  • Moving with the household (20%), and “others”.
  • In the PLFS 2020–21, 22.8% of male migrants moved in search of employment and 20.1% to take up work.
• Distance changes the mix:
  • Work was the reason for 14% of male intra-district migrants, 33% of inter-district and 47% of inter-state migrants (2011).
  • Marriage’s share among women falls from 69% within districts to 54% across states.
• Other reasons:
  • Education (higher studies in Delhi, Pune, Bengaluru, Kota).
  • Moved after birth; natural calamities.
  • Conflict and displacement: Kashmiri Pandits (1990), ethnic violence in the North-East and Manipur (2023), and development projects (dams, mines).

Internal Migration

Migration Streams

• Combining origin and destination type gives four streams. Crossed with distance (intra-district, inter-district, inter-state), they give twelve.

• Shares are of migrants whose rural or urban origin is known (about 88%).
• Rural → rural (largest stream):
  • Mostly women moving at marriage, within the district.
  • Agricultural labour moves from crowded, low-productivity areas to areas of labour demand:
    • eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh after the Green Revolution;
    • workers to the tea gardens of Assam and North Bengal.
  • Planned resettlement: Sikh refugees in the Tarai of Uttar Pradesh; the Dandakaranya Project (Koraput, Kalahandi and Bastar) for East Bengal refugees; colonisation schemes in the Indira Gandhi Canal area and the Andaman Islands.
• Rural → urban:
  • The most important economically.
  • Driven by rural push (poverty, small holdings, unemployment) more than urban pull, so much of it is distress migration into the informal sector.
  • It dominates inter-state migration, from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan to the metros.
  • It fits W. Arthur Lewis’s dual-sector model, with the transfer ending mainly in construction and informal services.
• Urban → urban:
  • The fastest-growing stream, more than doubling in 2001–11, partly through the creation of about 2,500 new census towns.
  • Middle-class and skilled people move from small towns to Class I cities and metros: step migration.
  • Small towns lose skills and refill from their rural hinterlands.
• Urban → rural:
  • The smallest stream: returnees, retirees, failed migrants and women marrying into villages.
  • Counter-urbanisation remains weak, though peri-urban growth blurs the line.

Intra-regional Migration

• Short-distance, high-volume moves within a state or region. Their macro-economic impact is limited because they are often reversible and do not redistribute labour between regions.
• Main forms:
  • Marriage migration, the largest component.
  • Seasonal migration of landless labourers following the farm calendar.
  • Movement of middle- and upper-income families to district towns for schooling, health care and housing.
  • Distress moves from rural insecurity. In parts of central Bihar in the 1980s and 1990s, caste violence pushed even well-off families to nearby towns.
  • Seasonal service economies at pilgrimage and tourist centres (Kedarnath, Badrinath, hill stations), drawing labour from nearby villages and from eastern Uttar Pradesh.
• Implications for regional development:
  • It feeds the growth of district and small towns: rickshaw pullers, construction workers and squatter settlements in Patna and similar towns.
  • It spreads urban services and ideas into the countryside.
  • It evens out labour shortages within a region.
  • The largest intra-state migrant populations are in the biggest states: Uttar Pradesh (5.2 crore) and Maharashtra (4.8 crore) in 2011, mostly marriage and short-distance moves.
  • It rarely corrects inter-regional inequality.

Migration and Urbanisation

• Migration is one of three sources of urban growth, with natural increase and the reclassification of villages as towns. In 2001–11, natural increase and reclassification together added more to urban population than net rural–urban migration.
• Migration’s weight is greatest in the metros and industrial towns:
  • Delhi, Mumbai, Surat, Bengaluru and Pune grow fastest through in-migration.
  • Small towns in the Ganga plain lose people to them.
• Migrants concentrate in peri-urban fringes and industrial clusters (Gurugram’s Manesar belt, Surat’s textile zones, Tiruppur), where rents are low and jobs informal.
• The result is a dual city: formal neighbourhoods beside slums and labour colonies housing the migrant workforce.

Inter-state Migration and Regional Disparity

• Source states:
  • Uttar Pradesh (1.23 crore) and Bihar (75 lakh) were the largest sources of inter-state migrants by last residence in Census 2011 (all durations). Together they sent about a third of all inter-state migrants.
  • Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Jharkhand and West Bengal follow.
• Destination states:
  • Maharashtra (91 lakh) and Delhi (63 lakh) received the most, followed by Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka and Punjab.
  • Delhi and Mumbai alone held about 99 lakh migrants from other states, a third of their combined population.
• Recent decade (movers of 2001–11):
  • Net gainers: Maharashtra (+24 lakh), Delhi (+15 lakh), Gujarat (+14 lakh), Haryana and Karnataka.
  • Net losers: Uttar Pradesh (−34 lakh), Bihar (−27 lakh), Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha.
• Corridors:
  • Uttar Pradesh and Bihar → Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Punjab, Gujarat.
  • Odisha → Surat (textiles, diamonds), Kerala and Andhra Pradesh.
  • Rajasthan → Ahmedabad, Mumbai.
  • Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh → brick kilns and construction across the Ganga plain and the south.
  • West Bengal → domestic work in the metros.
  • Bihar and Odisha → Kerala, now a major destination for “guest workers”.
  • Most moves are still to adjacent states, in line with distance decay. Long jumps such as Uttar Pradesh to Maharashtra and Odisha to Gujarat follow networks.
• Historical layers:
  • Eastern India once looked to Kolkata and the Damodar valley industrial belt, and to Assam’s tea gardens. The Hooghly belt now draws more from Bihar, Assam and the North-East.
  • Punjab turned from an emigrant to an immigrant state for farm labour.
  • Peninsular states show more balanced, intra-regional flows. Karnataka draws mainly from neighbouring southern states.
  • Kerala is a special case: it sends workers abroad, chiefly to the Gulf, and receives workers from other states, building a remittance (“money order”) economy.
  • The Himalaya, the Thar and the Rann of Kachchh have low in-migration because of harsh conditions and poor access.
• Effect on regional disparity:
  • Narrowing forces:
    • Remittances raise consumption, housing and schooling in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh.
    • Out-migration eases pressure on land.
    • Returnees bring skills.
  • Widening forces:
    • The destination captures the output and the tax base.
    • The origin loses its youngest, most enterprising workers.
    • Capital and skills concentrate further in the core, a form of cumulative causation.
  • The net result has been convergence in consumption but divergence in production. The gap in per capita income between the western and southern states and the Ganga plain has persisted.

Rural–Urban Migration: Causes and Problems

• Causes:
  • Economic: rural unemployment and disguised unemployment; urban jobs in construction, manufacturing and services.
  • Social: education, health care and lifestyle; escape from caste, ethnic and communal tension.
  • Demographic: rapid rural growth and fragmenting holdings.
  • In India the push of rural distress is usually stronger than the pull of the city.
• Examples:
  • Bokaro Steel City grew from a cluster of villages to a large township on in-migration after the steel plant was built.
  • Conflict-driven moves include Kashmiri Pandits to Jammu and Delhi and tribal–non-tribal clashes in the North-East.
• Problems in cities:
  • Slums and informal settlements: housing shortages force migrants into slums, squatter colonies and pavement dwellings with poor sanitation and services.
  • Pressure on infrastructure: overcrowded buses and trains, water shortage, flooding, sewerage failure, power cuts, encroachment.
  • Social tension: migrants seen as competitors; regionalism and “sons of the soil” agitations, as in Mumbai and Assam.
  • Environmental stress: urban heat islands, air pollution, polluted lakes and rivers, solid-waste crises.
• Problems in villages: loss of young men, the feminisation of agriculture, ageing, and dependence on remittances.

Women’s Migration

• Women are about two-thirds of all internal migrants, overwhelmingly through marriage, mostly within the district.
• Female labour migration is rising:
  • garment workers in Tiruppur and Bengaluru;
  • domestic workers from West Bengal, Jharkhand and the North-East in the metros;
  • nurses from Kerala to other states and abroad;
  • women in brick kilns and construction, usually moving with their families.
• Recorded “reasons” understate women’s economic migration, because the census records only one reason, usually marriage or “moved with household”.

Environmental and Disaster-induced Migration

• Slow-onset stress: drought in Bundelkhand, Marathwada and western Odisha pushes seasonal and long-term out-migration; salinity and erosion in the Sundarbans drive men to Kolkata, Kerala and Chennai.
• Sudden disasters: floods in Assam and Bihar and cyclones on the Odisha and Andhra coasts cause repeated, mostly temporary displacement.
• River erosion on the Brahmaputra (Majuli) and the Ganga (Malda, Murshidabad) has made thousands permanently landless.

Seasonal and Circular Migration

• Seasonal migration is the cyclical, temporary movement of workers between home and destination, following the farm calendar and labour demand. It is a form of circular migration.
  • The Economic Survey 2016–17, using railway data, estimated work-related inter-state movement at close to 9 million people a year in 2011–16.
• Major patterns:
  • Farm labour: Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh → Punjab and Haryana for sowing and harvest.
  • Sugarcane cutters from Marathwada → western Maharashtra and Karnataka.
  • Brick kilns: Odisha and Chhattisgarh → Telangana and Andhra Pradesh; Bihar and Uttar Pradesh → the kilns of the Ganga plain.
  • Construction and footloose industry in the metros, Surat, Tiruppur and Ludhiana.
  • Tourism and pilgrimage work in the Himalaya and the south.
  • Workers also go to Jammu and Kashmir and the North-East for construction and seasonal trades.
• Problems:
  • No contracts: job insecurity and arbitrary dismissal; wages below the minimum; debt bondage through advances (dadan) in brick kilns.
  • No portable entitlements: exclusion from the public distribution system, health care and welfare because of missing documents.
  • Hazards: pesticides, machinery and heat in the Punjab–Haryana farm belt; poor shelter and sanitation at work sites.
  • Social vulnerability: most are SC, ST, landless or poor; children’s schooling is broken.
• Consequences of circular migration:
  • For rural development:
    • Remittances finance food, debt repayment, housing, schooling and farm inputs.
    • Returnees bring skills and new norms.
    • Seasonal absence keeps land in the family while diversifying income.
    • The costs are the feminisation and ageing of farm work and disrupted education.
  • For the urban economy:
    • A cheap, flexible labour force for construction, manufacturing, logistics and services.
    • But low productivity, no investment in workers’ skills, chronic housing deficits, and fragility exposed by shocks.
• COVID-19 reverse migration (2020):
  • The lockdown sent over one crore migrant workers back to their home states. Shramik Special trains alone carried about 63 lakh.
  • Many returned to cities within months, showing how circular, not permanent, much migration is.
• Measures:
  • One Nation One Ration Card (in all States and UTs since 2022), for portable food rations.
  • The e-Shram portal (2021), a database of unorganised workers with over 30 crore registrations.
  • Affordable Rental Housing Complexes (2020) under PMAY-Urban.
  • The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020, which absorbed the Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act, 1979.
  • Building and Other Construction Workers welfare cess funds.
  • MGNREGA, to cut distress migration.
  • State schemes, such as Kerala’s health insurance for guest workers.
  • A draft national migrant labour policy (NITI Aayog, 2021).

Consequences of Migration

• Demographic:
  • Male-selective migration lowers the sex ratio and raises the working-age share at destinations. It leaves origins older and more female, as in the Uttarakhand hills and parts of Bihar.
  • Migrants carry lower fertility norms home.
• Economic:
  • Remittances from internal migrants are the lifeblood of thousands of villages in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Odisha.
  • The Green Revolution belt and the industrial west run on migrant labour.
  • Wages at the origin rise as labour leaves.
• Social: migration loosens caste and gender constraints and spreads urban norms, but also brings anonymity, exploitation and the stress of split families.
• Political:
  • “Sons of the soil” movements and domicile quotas in private jobs. Haryana’s 2020 law reserving 75% of private jobs for local residents was struck down by the Punjab and Haryana High Court in 2023.
  • Migrants often cannot vote where they work, which weakens their political voice.

International Migration

Emigration from India

• Colonial phase (1834–1917):
  • After Britain abolished slavery, Indians were shipped as indentured labour (girmitiyas) to sugar colonies:
    • Mauritius from 1834;
    • Guyana, Trinidad, Suriname, Fiji and Natal;
    • French and Dutch colonies (Réunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Suriname).
  • Recruits came mainly from eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and from Tamil Nadu and Andhra for Natal.
  • The kangani system took Tamil labourers to the tea estates of Ceylon and the rubber estates of Malaya; the maistry system recruited for Burma.
  • Free “passenger” migrants, Gujarati traders, Punjabis and Sindhis, settled in East Africa, South Africa, Hong Kong and Singapore.
  • Indenture ended in 1917.
• Post-independence phase:
  • Punjabi and Gujarati workers went to the UK in the 1950s–60s, filling post-war labour shortages.
  • After the US immigration reform of 1965, doctors, engineers and scientists went to the USA and Canada, creating fears of brain drain.
• Gulf phase (from 1973):
  • The oil boom drew semi-skilled and unskilled contract workers to the GCC states, first from Kerala, then from Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, and increasingly from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
  • About one crore Indians (NRIs) now live in the six GCC states (MEA, January 2026).
• Knowledge phase (from the 1990s):
  • IT professionals on the H-1B route, nurses, and a fast-growing flow of students to Canada, the USA, the UK and Australia.
  • New government-to-government labour mobility agreements with Japan, Germany, Israel and Taiwan.
• Present size:
  • 18.5 million Indian-born people abroad (UN DESA, 2024), the most of any country.
  • MEA counts 3.73 crore overseas Indians (January 2026): 1.78 crore NRIs and 1.95 crore Persons of Indian Origin.
  • Largest communities: the USA (61 lakh), the UAE (43 lakh), Canada (32 lakh), Malaysia (29 lakh), Saudi Arabia (28 lakh), Myanmar (20 lakh), South Africa (18 lakh), Sri Lanka (16 lakh), the UK (13 lakh) and Kuwait (10 lakh).
  • Old diaspora (PIOs) dominates Mauritius, Fiji, the Caribbean, Malaysia and South Africa. New diaspora (NRIs) dominates the Gulf, the USA and Canada.
• Regional specialisation:
  • Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana → the Gulf, and nurses worldwide.
  • Punjab, Gujarat → the UK, Canada, the USA, East Africa.
  • Uttar Pradesh, Bihar → Gulf construction.
  • Metro professionals → the USA, Europe, Australia.

Remittances

• India received US$ 137.7 billion in 2024 (World Bank), the highest of any country and about 3.7% of GDP. Remittances have more than doubled since 2010–11. They finance around half of the merchandise trade deficit.
• Source shift (RBI remittance survey, 2023–24):
  • The USA (27.7%) has overtaken the UAE (19.2%); the UK (10.8%), Saudi Arabia (6.7%) and Singapore (6.6%) follow.
  • The GCC’s share fell from 46.7% (2016–17) to 37.9%, while advanced economies now send more than half. This reflects the shift to skilled and student migration.
• Receiving states: Maharashtra (20.5%), Kerala (19.7%), Tamil Nadu (10.4%), Telangana (8.1%), Karnataka (7.7%).

Kerala: A Migration Economy

• The Kerala Migration Survey 2023 estimated 22 lakh emigrants, about the same as in 2018, and 18 lakh return emigrants, up from 12 lakh.
• Student emigrants doubled to about 2.5 lakh: Kerala’s emigration is shifting from Gulf labour to study and skilled work in the West.
• Remittances reached about ₹2.17 lakh crore in 2023, yet only 12% of households received them, down from 16% in 2018.
• Malappuram sends the most emigrants. Nine of fourteen districts sent fewer than in 2018, a sign of saturation.
• Kerala is also an immigration state, with lakhs of workers from Bihar, West Bengal, Odisha and Assam filling construction and farm jobs that locals no longer take.

Problems of Emigrants and Left-behind Families

• For low-skilled emigrants:
  • Fraudulent recruiters and high fees.
  • Wage theft, passport confiscation and the Gulf kafala sponsorship system.
  • Unsafe work and heat stress; deaths abroad.
  • Exposure to crises: evacuations from Kuwait (1990), Libya (2011), Yemen (2015), Ukraine (Operation Ganga, 2022) and Sudan (Operation Kaveri, 2023).
• Policy:
  • The Emigration Act, 1983 and the eMigrate system.
  • Emigration Check Required (ECR) passports for less-educated workers bound for 18 countries.
  • Pravasi Bharatiya Bima Yojana insurance and the Indian Community Welfare Fund.
  • The MADAD grievance portal.
  • The Overseas Citizen of India card and Pravasi Bharatiya Divas for the wider diaspora.
• Left-behind families:
  • “Gulf wives” manage households and farms alone: more autonomy, but also loneliness and stress.
  • Elderly parents lack care.
  • Children face weaker supervision and, in some studies, poorer schooling.
  • Households depend on remittances and carry migration debt.
  • Return migrants may be unemployable, ill or indebted, a growing concern in Kerala.

Immigration and Refugees

• Census 2011 recorded 55 lakh migrants whose last residence was abroad, mostly from Bangladesh, then Nepal and Pakistan. The UN estimates India’s immigrant stock at 4.8 million in 2024.
  • Nepal citizens move freely under the 1950 treaty.
  • Undocumented movement across the porous Bangladesh border remains a political issue in Assam and West Bengal.
• Partition (1947):
  • About 14–15 million people crossed between India, West Pakistan and East Pakistan, one of the largest migrations in history. Between 2 lakh and 10 lakh people died.
  • India’s 1951 Census counted 73 lakh displaced persons: 47 lakh from West Pakistan and 26 lakh from East Pakistan. Pakistan’s 1951 census counted about 72 lakh muhajirs.
  • Resettlement:
    • refugee colonies (Lajpat Nagar and other Delhi colonies, Faridabad, Nilokheri, Kolkata’s suburbs);
    • Tarai farms in Uttar Pradesh;
    • the Andaman Islands;
    • later Dandakaranya for East Bengal refugees.
  • Consequences:
    • Punjab and Bengal were demographically reshaped.
    • Refugee entrepreneurship marked Delhi’s commerce.
    • A new Sindhi diaspora formed.
    • The communal geography of north India changed lastingly.
• Later refugee inflows:
  • Tibetans after 1959 (Dharamshala, Bylakuppe and Mundgod in Karnataka).
  • About 10 million from East Pakistan in 1971, most of whom returned after Bangladesh’s creation.
  • Sri Lankan Tamils from 1983 (camps in Tamil Nadu).
  • Chakmas and Hajongs (Arunachal Pradesh).
  • Afghans; Rohingya after 2012–17; people from Myanmar in Mizoram and Manipur after the 2021 coup.
• Legal position: India is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention. It handles refugees through executive policy. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (rules notified in 2024) offers a faster path to citizenship for Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian migrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan who entered before 2015.

Conclusion

• India is at once a major global labour supplier, the world’s leading remittance economy, and a regional refuge in South Asia.
• Internally, migration follows regional disparity: from the Ganga plain and the eastern plateau to the industrial west, the capital region and the south.
• Its future depends on whether jobs come closer to the origins, as the post-2011 slowdown suggests, and on whether migrants gain portable rights at their destinations.