Internal Migration and Socio-Economic Development

INTERNAL MIGRATION

AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC

DEVELOPMENT

IMPLICATIONS AND DEVELOPMENT

N.R. PRABHAKARA

Internal Migration and Socio-Economic Development

Copyright © 2024 by N.R. Prabhakara

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024918800

ISBN

978-1-964982-52-6 (Paperback)

978-1-964982-53-3 (eBook)

978-1-964982-51-9 (Hardcover)

Preface

Internal migration is an important element of population redistribution and equilibrium. The purpose of this work is to explain the changing patterns of internal migration in India over the period 1971 to 2011. Further, an attempt has been made to find out the various determinants causing the changing patterns of migration. The rate of migration among major states of India in last two decades were determined. In all the four censuses, rural-rural migration was found the dominant migration steam in India. Employment for males and marriage for female were found to be the main reason for migration respectively. Maharashtra and Madya Pradesh lead among all in-migrating states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar occupied top place among out-migrating states.

This multidisciplinary comparative study of internal migration in several regions of the world is the combination of several years’ collaboration by leading anthropologists, demographers, economists, and sociologists. It fills a gap in the migration literature by providing the opportunity for scholars in these fields to ask new questions and give new answers to the key problems in the study of internal migration, in a comparative context, and to address the problems in regions of varying levels of economic development, and with different economic systems. Despite high rate of internal migration, India is urbanizing relatively slowly.

The problem of migration is a prime example of a subject that requires the skills and ap-proaches of scholars from several disciplines; neither the questions that must be asked nor the methods of analysis required to answer them are within the province of any single discipline. Mi-gration statistics are used primarily to study demographic trends and their economic and social relationships.

Emigration of people from the rural areas to the cities has been a major factor of socio-economic change in developing societies. If on the one hand, emigration has acted as a feeder to urban growth, it has on the other, played an important role in the modernization and development of the rural areas. From both points of view the study of emigration assumes a special significance for sociologists. Although this work is only an attempt to investigate the social and economic

consequences of migration in Karnataka state (India), the findings of this work can be generalized, safely, for the rest of the countryside as well.

The present study examines the relationship between population change and migration with emphasis on the changes that occur in the population redistribution. It has been generally accepted that the cause-effect relationship between population change and migration can go in either direc¬tion. That is, population change once generated has significant influence on the migration and vice¬verse. That they are mutually interdependent and interacting hardly needs to be emphasized. There is need to understand the nature of these changes, and there is even greater need to un reveal the casual interrelations, if any.

Migration is a basic social process. As Durkheim has shown, in the early stages of social growth, it has been the foremost factor in the division of labor and specialization of functions. In fact, for migration, societies would have hardly attained the complex form of organization they have attained today. I am thankful to my wife K V Padma Lata for her help.

N. R. PRABHAKARA

Table of Contents

Preface

Statement of the Problem

Drift In Population of Karnataka:

Patterns of Child Migration:

The Rural Urban Internal Migration

Internal Migration and Population Redistribution In India

Appendices

References

Statement of the Problem

In recent years, several changes in India are likely to have impacted on the pattern and pace of migration. The pattern of growth in the last two decades has steadily widened the gap between agriculture and non-agriculture and between rural and urban areas, and it has steadily concentrated in a few areas and a few states. The growing spatial inequalities in economic opportunities must have necessarily also impacted on the pace and pattern of migration. Uneven growth and a growing differential between agriculture and industry is a necessary condition of the pattern of development. Since migration is diverse, attention has been focused on distinct groups of internal migrants, and a great deal of analysis has focused on the poorest segments, for whom both the cost and benefits could potentially be the highest.

Data on internal migration in India is drawn from two main sources- the Census of India and the quinquennial migration surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey. Census results for migration are available only till 2011, whereas NSS results are available till 2007-2008. Migration is one of the three basic components of population growth of any area. It influences the size, composition, and distribution of the population. In the middle of the 20th century volume of inter-state migration in India was low due to predominance of agriculture, rigidity of the caste system, the role of joint families, the diversity of language and culture, food habits and lack of education (Chatterjee and Boss,1997, Nair and Narayan, 1985, Zachariah, 1964). But the rapid transformation of Indian economy, improvement in level of education and that of transport and communication facilities, shift of work force from agriculture to industry and other tertiary activ­ities accelerated mobility among Indian people in recent times.

In the 2001 census, 309 million people were migrants on the place of last residence, which constitutes about 30 percent of the total population of the country. This number indicates an increase of around 37 percent from 1991 (226 million) and 100 percent since 1971 (159 million). Some of the main determinants of migration have been identified as high population density, surplus of labor force, high employment rate, meager incomes, dissatisfaction with housing, demand for higher schooling, rural-urban wage differentials. India has embarked upon the new economic policy in the year 1991-popularly known as liberalization of the Indian economy. The basic features of new economic policy are to reduce governmental expenditure to reduce fiscal deficit, opening of the economy for export-oriented growth, removal of governmental control andlicensing and encouraging private participation for competition and efficiency. Both the supporters and critiques of new economic policy believed that economic reforms would increase internal migration.

The proponents believed that the new impetus would boost economy and job opportunities leading to increased pull factors conducive for accelerated rural to urban migration. On the other hand, the opponents held that economic reforms would adversely affect the village and cottage industries and impoverish rural population leading to increased rural-urban migration (Kundu 1997). Although there was considerable success in achieving economic growth from 2 to 3 per cent of growth in GDP in the pre reform era to over 6 per cent during 1991-2001, its impact on internal migration has not been assessed. The latest census of 2001 throws several interesting results in respect to the internal migration, its regional pattern, and the contribution of rural to urban migration in urban growth (Bhagat and Mohanty 2008).

This work argues that it is not the poor and disadvantaged who are migrating more, but migrants belong largely to better off sections of Indian society. Although migration is emerging an important phenomenon from economic, political, and public health points of views (Bhagat 2008), migration research finds low priority among Indian Demographers.

This is partly because since the early 1990s with a paradigm shift in the demographic research tilting to the issues of reproductive health, the interest in migration research in general and internal migration has dwindled considerably among Indian demographers. This is also reflected in the new datasets namely Demographic Health Surveys- known as National Family Health Surveys (NFHS– An Indian version of DHS), and District Level Health Surveys (DLHS). However, these datasets did not consider migration as an important variable affecting health status in general and reproductive health in particular. On the other hand, the wealth of data available in Indian censuses on migration is grossly neglected by Indian demographers who are busy with data collection exercises funded by external agencies (Bose 2003). Thus, we find very few recent 3demographic studies on India’s internal migration and its causes and consequences. This study presents the trends and patterns of internal migration during the last three decades and argues that people belonging to the lowest socio-economic categories are less migratory than otherwise.

In 2001, the Census reported 309 million internal migrants. Of these migrants, 70.7 percent were women. Two thirds of the migrants (67.2 percent) were rural and only 32.8 percent urban. Male migrants were relatively more numerous in the urban stream (53.1 percent of male migrants were urban compared with only 24.4 percent of female migrants) and in more distant streams.

The percentage of male migrants in inter-district and inter-state migration was 52.2 percent, 26.7 percent, and 21.1 percent, respectively, compared with 66.9 per cent, 23 per cent and 10.1 per cent, respectively, for female migrants in these three streams.

The National Sample Survey (NSS) estimates 326 million migrants in 2007-2008 (28.5 percent of the population). It gives a picture like the Census in terms of female predominance, and the relatively higher proportion of male migrants in the urban stream and with increasing distance.

Table 1: Number of migrants and migration rate, 1981-2001.

Source: Census of India; Migration Tables, 1981-2001.

According to the Census (Table 1), the migration rate of all segments peaked in 1981 to 30.0 percent, declined in 1991 to 27.0 percent, and increased to 30.1 percent in 2001. Between 1981 and 1991, the total number of migrants grew by only 12 percent, but between 1991 and 2001, the migrant stock increased by 37 percent. However, the successive rounds of the NSS (except the 49th Round, which was also less representative) show an increasing trend in total migration rate since 1983. But the NSS findings are that these trends are mainly due to raising female migration rate both in rural and urban areas.

Internal migration refers to the process of population redistribution within the national boundary of a country. Such movements often involve significant population shift even though the migrants do not cross any international boundary. Evidence indicates a continuous shift of population within a country as a response to a variety of social, economic and demographic factors in both developed and less developed parts of the world. Apart from specific migration waves in different countries, the processes of industrialization and urbanization have provoked significant shift of people from rural to urban areas.

In the less developed parts of the world, another factor that has contributed to this rural- urban migration is the gap in the levels of development between the two areas. In more recent times, the world has witnessed a series of forced internal migration, particularly in Africa, because of civil war, ethnic conflict, famine, deteriorating economic conditions and political repression. These instances of internal migration have had significant bearings on the population geography of the individual countries. In the following section, an account of the levels and nature of internal migration in India is presented.

India’s urban population was 79 million in 1961 and increased to 377 million in 2011 in a half century. By 2030 it is likely to reach about 600 million (Ahluwalia 2011). The share of inmigrants (all durations of residence) in the population of urban areas has increased from 31.6 percent in 1983 to 33.0 percent in 1999-2001 to 35 percent in 2007-2008, for which the latest data are available from National Sample Survey (NSS). The increase in the migration rate to urban areas has primarily occurred owning to increase in the migration rate for females. Although females migrate on account of marriage, many of them take up work sooner