Urban Migration Within India's Growing Cities

Reference library · 1089 words

The Indian migration story that gets international attention involves passports. The far larger one does not. At the 2011 census, something in the order of 450 million people in India were recorded as living somewhere other than their place of birth or previous residence, a figure larger than the entire population of the European Union. The overwhelming majority of that movement was internal, and much of it was over short distances, within a district or a state. But the flows that reshape cities are the long ones: from the eastern Gangetic plain and the tribal belt towards Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Surat, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune and increasingly Kerala.

The mechanics are not mysterious. Landholdings in eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand and West Bengal are small and have been subdivided across generations, agriculture in much of that region is rain dependent and offers work for only part of the year, and the daily wage available in a construction job in a western Indian city may be several times what a farm labourer earns at home. People move because the arithmetic tells them to, and they do not move blindly: recruitment runs along kin and village networks, with an earlier migrant vouching for a newcomer and introducing him to a labour contractor. Contractors and jobbers are central figures, advancing money against future work, which binds the worker for a season and sometimes for much longer.

Circular, seasonal and largely invisible

A great deal of Indian internal migration is circular rather than permanent. Workers leave after the harvest, spend six or eight months at a brick kiln, a construction site or a power loom, and return for sowing or for a family occasion. This pattern is why the census, which asks where people usually reside, systematically undercounts them. The Economic Survey published in early 2017 attempted a different approach, using unreserved railway passenger data to estimate the flow of work related migrants between states, and arrived at figures far larger than the census implied, in the range of several million people a year. The precise numbers remain contested because the methods measure different things, but the direction of the correction is not in doubt: India moves far more than official statistics have traditionally shown.

The census also records the majority of female migration as being for marriage, since patrilocal custom across much of northern India means a woman moves to her husband's village. That classification obscures the fact that many of these women also work after moving, and it has led analysts to argue that female labour migration in India is substantially undercounted. Meanwhile some corridors are highly specific. Surat's power loom sheds draw heavily on Odisha; Kerala, with an ageing population and its own workers in the Gulf, has imported hundreds of thousands of workers from West Bengal, Assam, Odisha and Bihar, whom the state government pointedly calls guest workers and for whom it has created a dedicated health insurance scheme.

Why migrants lose entitlements by moving

The deepest structural problem is that in India a great many rights and benefits are attached to a place rather than to a person. Subsidised food under the public distribution system is drawn against a ration card issued by a state, so a Bihari worker in Mumbai historically could not use his household's entitlement there. Electoral rolls are local, so a migrant who does not re-register loses the practical ability to vote, which in turn removes any incentive for the politicians of the destination city to care about him. Schooling, maternal health programmes and social security registration are similarly rooted. The result is a large working population that builds cities while remaining, administratively, somewhere else.

Policy has moved on this, unevenly. The One Nation One Ration Card scheme, rolled out nationally from 2019 and 2020, uses biometric authentication so that a cardholder can draw rations at any fair price shop in the country, and portability transactions now run into the hundreds of millions. The Inter State Migrant Workmen Act of 1979, which requires contractors to register and to provide displacement allowances and housing, was for decades honoured mainly in the breach, with very few establishments registered; its provisions have been folded into a new labour code passed in 2020 whose implementation has been slow. A cess levied on construction projects under a 1996 law was supposed to fund welfare for building workers, and audits have repeatedly found large accumulated balances left unspent by state boards.

The invisibility of internal migrants became a national emergency in March 2020. A nationwide lockdown was announced with a few hours of notice, work stopped, wages ceased, and millions of people in cities where they had no ration entitlement, no savings and often no tenancy set out for home villages hundreds or thousands of kilometres away on foot, on bicycles and in the backs of trucks, because trains and buses had been suspended. Special trains were eventually organised, but the images from those weeks, and the deaths on highways and railway tracks, forced a reckoning. The Supreme Court took up the matter of its own motion, and among the durable consequences was the launch in 2021 of a national database for unorganised sector workers, intended to give registered workers a portable identity for benefits.

Migration is also outpacing the governance of the cities receiving it. The 74th constitutional amendment of 1992 created elected municipal bodies, but most Indian city governments control neither their police, nor their land use planning, nor most of their revenue, all of which sit with state governments; mayors are frequently ceremonial. Housing supply is rationed by restrictive floor space rules and slow approvals, so arriving workers occupy informal settlements, of which Dharavi in Mumbai is only the most photographed, or sleep on the sites where they work.

Two arguments run through the literature and neither is settled. The first is whether Indian internal migration is best read as distress, people pushed out by agrarian failure into precarious urban work, or as opportunity, people rationally capturing a wage premium and remitting money that visibly improves village housing, schooling and consumption. The evidence supports both, in different corridors and for different groups. The second is whether India is genuinely under urbanised for its income level, as many economists argue, or whether it is simply mis measured, with a vast peri urban population that the categories fail to capture. How that is resolved matters, because it determines whether policy should be trying to move people into cities faster or to make the places they already live function better.

Back to the library