Migration and the Changing Indian Household

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Discussion of Indian migration usually turns quickly to visas, universities and the diaspora. That is a small part of the picture. The census counts internal migrants, meaning people enumerated somewhere other than their place of last residence, in the hundreds of millions, a figure many times larger than the entire population of Indians living abroad. Most of those internal moves are made by women at marriage, moving from one village to another within the same district or state, and they are so normal that they are rarely described as migration at all. Layered on top is a much smaller but economically decisive flow of workers, overwhelmingly male, moving long distances to cities and to other states, often seasonally, and sending money home.

The geography of that labour flow is stable. The main sending regions are the densely populated agrarian belts of eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal and parts of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. The main receiving regions are Delhi and its surrounding industrial districts, Mumbai and the Maharashtra corridor, Gujarat's textile and diamond towns, the southern manufacturing and construction economies of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, and, distinctively, Kerala, which has become a destination for workers from the east and north east even as it continues to send its own people abroad. An analysis published in the Economic Survey of 2016 to 2017, which used unreserved railway passenger data as a proxy, put annual inter state work migration in the years around 2011 to 2016 at several million people a year, considerably higher than census based measures had suggested, because census methods systematically undercount people who move for a season and return.

What happens to the household left behind

Migration reorganises families more thoroughly than it reorganises cities. When an adult man leaves for eight months of the year, someone else has to do what he did. In practice that is usually his wife, and often his mother. Field studies across the eastern sending states describe a consistent pattern: women take on cultivation decisions, dealings with input dealers, irrigation and marketing, roles that were formerly male, while typically lacking the land title, the credit access and the standing at the village level that would make those roles easy to perform. Economists call this the feminisation of agriculture. It increases women's workload and their practical authority at the same time, and the two do not always move together.

Money changes the household in a second way. Remittances from internal migration are smaller per head than international remittances but reach far more households, and they are spent in a recognisable order: food and debt repayment first, then health and schooling, then house construction. In many sending districts the most visible sign of migration is a concrete house with a steel door in a village of mud walls, built over several years as instalments arrive. Because the money is a household transfer and not a wage paid locally, it also shifts bargaining power inside the family, sometimes towards the migrant's wife who receives and manages it, sometimes towards the migrant's parents if the money is routed through them.

International migration produces the same effects at higher intensity. Kerala is the best documented case anywhere in India, because the Centre for Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram has run a series of Kerala Migration Surveys since 1998, giving decades of comparable data on emigration, return and remittances. That work established how heavily the Kerala economy came to depend on Gulf earnings, and documented household level consequences including a large population of women managing households alone for years at a stretch, sharp increases in schooling and healthcare spending, land and construction inflation, and a difficult phase of return when workers come back in middle age without a pension. Return migration is the part of the cycle least prepared for by policy anywhere.

Whether the joint family is really dissolving

It is frequently asserted that migration and urbanisation are destroying the Indian joint family. The evidence is more interesting than that. Average household size has been falling gradually across census rounds, and nuclear households are the most common form in Indian cities. But a household is defined by who eats from one kitchen, and Indian families routinely operate as a single economic unit across two or three separate kitchens in different places. A son working in Bengaluru who sends money monthly, whose parents hold the family land, whose wife may live with those parents, and who returns for harvests and weddings, appears in the statistics as a separate household while functioning as part of a joint one. Sociologists have long argued that what has changed is co residence rather than the joint family as a system of obligation.

Migration nonetheless creates genuine strain. Elderly parents in sending villages may be left without daily care in a country with limited institutional aged care and no comprehensive pension for the informally employed. Children in split households show mixed outcomes: better funded schooling on one hand, an absent parent on the other. Marriage markets adjust, with migrant earnings raising a young man's standing and, in some communities, the dowry expectations attached to him. And migrants themselves live badly at the destination, typically in shared rooms or on site, excluded from urban entitlements that are registered in their home state.

That last problem became national news in March 2020, when abrupt pandemic restrictions stranded migrant workers without wages, transport or rations, and very large numbers set out for home districts hundreds of kilometres away. The policy response included accelerating a portability scheme allowing subsidised food entitlements to be drawn at any ration shop in the country, and renewed attention to registering unorganised workers nationally. Whether that translates into portable healthcare, schooling and housing rights is unresolved.

For families whose migration is international, an additional layer applies: immigration rules in destination countries determine who may follow. Skilled migration streams to Australia, Canada, Britain and the United States generally admit a spouse and dependent children readily, but make it slow, expensive or effectively impossible to bring ageing parents. The result is a familiar pattern in the diaspora, of adult children abroad managing an elderly parent's care remotely across a difference of several time zones, arranging paid help and travelling back when they can. It is the same reorganisation the migrant labourer's household undergoes, at a different income level and a longer distance.

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