Chapter 8: Migration Trends
Once every ten years, an enumerator walks from door to door across India, clipboard in hand, and asks a question that sounds almost too simple to matter: were you born in this village or town? If the answer is no, a second question follows — and where did you come from? On these two plain questions rests one of the largest counting exercises the world attempts. From the answers, India learns something it can see in no other way: how many of its people now live somewhere other than where they began.
For a long time the answers seemed to tell a settled story. At every census, roughly nine in ten people were counted in the very district where they were born. India, it was concluded, was a nation that stayed put — held in place by farming, by family, and by the pull of home. Textbooks repeated it as a fact.
Then better records arrived — large-scale surveys and new ways of tracking movement — and the settled story cracked. They revealed a country far more restless than the census had suggested: hundreds of millions of people had moved, and the movement was speeding up, not slowing down.
That gap — between a nation thought to be immobile and one quietly on the move — is where this chapter begins. Migration is not a list of journeys. It is a process that steadily redistributes people, and reshapes both the places they leave and the places they reach.
Diagram
Fig. 8.0-1 Caption: The same person is an out-migrant to the place left behind and an in-migrant to the place reached. Brief: Draw two labelled places — ‘Place of origin’ on the left, ‘Place of destination’ on the right — joined by a single bold arrow pointing left to right (origin → destination). Beside the origin label the traveller ‘out-migrant’; beside the destination label the same traveller ‘in-migrant’. At the origin show a small downward arrow marked ‘population falls’; at the destination a small upward arrow marked ‘population rises’. Below, add a second panel with a dashed international-boundary line that the arrow crosses, marked ‘emigration’ where the arrow leaves the home country and ‘immigration’ where it enters the other. Schematic only — no real place names.
8.1 Understanding Migration
People are not fixed to the spot where they are born. They move — for a season, for a job, for marriage, for a lifetime — and every such move quietly changes two places at once. Before we can trace where India’s people go, and why, we need a precise language for movement, and a reliable way to count it.
8.1.1 Migration and the Migrant
Migration is the movement of people from one place to settle in another, so that their usual place of residence changes. That last condition matters: it is what separates a migration from a holiday or a trip to the market, where the home stays the same.
A move need not be for good. Permanent migration is a move in which a person leaves one place for another and settles there for the long term. Temporary migration is a move meant to be reversed, and it may be daily, seasonal or annual — as with a labourer who works in a city through the dry months and returns home to farm.
In the language of counting, a migrant is a person who, at the time of the census, is recorded at a place other than where they were born or last lived. Their stay in the new place may be brief or lifelong; what defines them is simply that they are no longer where they began.
Because every migrant leaves one place and joins another, migration steadily redistributes population across space. The place left behind loses people; the place reached gains them. It also shifts the age and sex balance of both, because those who move are rarely a random slice of the population.
8.1.2 The Vocabulary of Movement
A single journey looks different from each of the two places it touches, so geographers describe it with paired terms.
When people leave a place, the movement is out-migration for that place; when people arrive and settle, it is in-migration. The very same journey is out-migration for the village left behind and in-migration for the town reached. Out-migration lowers a region’s population, while in-migration raises it.
The place a migrant leaves is the place of origin, and for that place the traveller is an out-migrant. The place they reach is the place of destination, and there the same person is an in-migrant. These are the two faces of one move, as Fig. 8.0-1 showed.
When the move crosses an international border, different words apply. Leaving one’s own country to settle in another is emigration, and the person is an emigrant; arriving to settle in a new country is immigration, and the person is an immigrant. Someone who leaves India to live abroad is an emigrant from India and an immigrant in the country that receives them.
Not every daily movement is migration. Commutation is the regular to-and-fro travel between home and workplace — into a city each morning from a suburb or nearby village, and back again each evening. The commuter’s home does not change, so commutation is movement without migration.
Migrants also rarely leap straight from a village to a great city. In stepwise migration, a person moves up a ladder of settlements in stages — from a village to a small town, and later from that town to a larger city — rather than in a single bound. Each step is a shorter, more manageable move than the whole distance would have been.
8.1.3 How the Census Counts Migrants
The census — India’s headcount of its entire population, taken once every ten years — is the country’s main record of migration, and it has tracked movement for a long time. Migration was first recorded in the census of 1881, on the basis of a person’s place of birth. Later counts sharpened the picture: duration of residence was added in 1961, place of last residence in 1971, and the reasons for moving from 1981 onward.
An enumerator — the official who records each household — turns all this into a count with two questions. First: was this person born in this village or town, and if not, where? Second: has this person come here from another place to live, and if so, from where, how long ago, and why?
From these answers, India measures migration on two bases, and it is worth holding them apart. On the place of birth basis, anyone enumerated away from their birthplace is a migrant — a life-time migrant, since the move is measured across a whole life. On the place of last residence basis, anyone whose previous home differs from where they are now counted is a migrant; this second basis picks up more recent and more frequent moves that the birth basis would miss. The two questions can be read as a single branching decision, shown in Fig. 8.1-1.
Flowchart
Fig. 8.1-1 Caption: The census turns two simple questions into two ways of counting a migrant. Nodes: A person is enumerated at a place → Question 1: born in this place? → no → counted as a migrant by place of birth (life-time migrant), record district, state or country of birth; yes → not a migrant on the birth basis → Question 2: was the last place of residence different from this place? → yes → counted as a migrant by place of last residence, record the previous place, duration and reason; no → non-migrant → both migrant counts together give the migrants of that area
This limit matters for the whole chapter. Because the census fixes people where they happen to be found, a worker who returns to the village before the count is invisible in it. For decades this made India look far more settled than it was — the very impression this chapter set out to question. Just how much India actually moves is a question we return to once the types, streams and causes of migration are in place.
8.2 Types of Migration
Every migration can be sorted by how far it reaches. The first and largest division is simply whether the move stays inside the country or crosses out of it — and for India, the two are wildly unequal in size.
8.2.1 Internal and International Migration
Internal migration, also called national migration, is movement that stays within the borders of one country — a worker moving from a village in one state to a city in another, for instance. International migration is movement from one country to another, across an international border.
The two differ in scale as much as in kind. International migration is dramatic and much discussed, but the great bulk of all movement in India happens inside the country. Most people who move do so over short distances, within their own state. India has taken part in international migration too — sending people out, and receiving them — but on a far smaller scale than its vast internal churn.
International migration itself runs in two directions. The out-migration of Indians to other countries is emigration; the arrival of people from other countries into India is immigration. We take each in turn before turning to the far larger story of movement within India.
8.2.2 International Migration: Out of India and Into India
Indians have left for other lands for a very long time, but the reasons have changed across the centuries. In the colonial period, hundreds of thousands were carried abroad as indentured plantation labour. From the 1970s a very different wave followed, as workers went in large numbers to the oil economies of West Asia — the Gulf — for construction and service jobs. Since the 1990s the fastest-growing stream has been skilled professionals — doctors, engineers and software workers — moving to advanced economies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.
Today about 30 million people of Indian origin live abroad, spread across roughly 200 countries — one of the largest such populations in the world. Their remittances and skills bind India to the wider world, a link we return to when we weigh the consequences of migration.
The single largest movement across India’s borders, however, was not gradual at all. It came in the space of a few years, when the subcontinent was partitioned in 1947.
The two national counts are strikingly close — about 7.3 million into India and 7.2 million out of it — so the exchange was very nearly balanced in numbers. But the numbers hide what mattered most. The move was permanent, forced and swift, and it redrew the human map of three countries at once. A line drawn on a map turned millions of people into foreigners in the place they had always lived, and its effects on the economy and society of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh lasted for generations. The overall pattern of these flows is shown in Map 8.1.
Map
Map 8.1 Caption: The partition of 1947 sent two great counter-flows of people across the new western and eastern borders. Brief: Political map of India and its neighbours showing the migration flows at Partition (1947–51). India must be shown in its full extent as officially defined by the Government of India, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh; all boundaries as officially recognised by the Government of India. Use bold arrows: arrows pointing into India across the western border (from present-day Pakistan) and across the eastern border (from present-day Bangladesh), and arrows pointing out of India in the opposite directions across both borders. Make arrow thickness roughly proportional to the volume of movement. Label the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the neighbouring countries. Key: ‘into India’ and ‘out of India’.
India has also received people from beyond its borders. Its present population itself descends from many ancient waves of arrivals. In recent decades, most immigrants have come from neighbouring countries — Bangladesh and Nepal above all. Distance shapes where they settle: Assam, close to Bangladesh, receives more Bangladeshis, while the northern plains bordering Nepal receive more Nepalese.
India has also been a major refuge for people fleeing conflict nearby, even though it has not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention — the international agreement that defines who counts as a refugee and what protections they are owed. Tibetans arrived after 1959, when a government-in-exile was allowed to form at Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh; Sri Lankan Tamils came during the 1980s and were housed in camps in Tamil Nadu; more recent arrivals have come from Afghanistan and Myanmar. Through these decades India has been one of the world’s larger refuge-giving countries.
8.2.3 Internal Migration: Intra-state and Inter-state
Within India, migrants are grouped by how far they travel — and the groups nest inside one another like widening rings. A person may move outside their home locality but stay within the same district, cross into another district of the same state, cross into another state, or cross out of the country altogether.
This gives four categories of increasing distance. An intra-district migrant moves outside the place of enumeration but stays within the same district. An inter-district migrant crosses the district boundary but stays within the same state. An inter-state migrant crosses the state boundary but stays within India. Beyond all three lies the immigrant, who was born or last lived outside the country. The first three are internal; only the last is international.
The syllabus groups these moves in a simpler pair. Intra-state migration covers every move that stays within one’s own state — the intra-district and inter-district moves together — while inter-state migration is any move that crosses a state border. Fig. 8.2-1 sets out the four rings.
Diagram
Fig. 8.2-1 Caption: Internal migrants are classified by distance, from a move within the district to a move across the country. Brief: Draw four concentric rectangles nested inside one another, labelled from innermost to outermost: ‘district’, ‘state’, ‘country (India)’, and — outside all of them — ‘another country’. Place a starting dot at the centre marked ‘home’. Draw four outward-pointing arrows of increasing length, each ending in a different ring and labelled with the migrant type it produces: a short arrow ending within the same district → ‘intra-district migrant’; a longer arrow crossing into another district but staying within the state → ‘inter-district migrant’; a longer arrow crossing the state boundary but staying within India → ‘inter-state migrant’; the longest arrow crossing out of India → ‘immigrant (international)’. All arrows point outward from the central ‘home’ dot. The figure is schematic (labelled rings, not a drawn map).
These four are not equal in size. Short-distance moves are by far the commonest: most Indian migrants stay within their own state, and a large share stay within their own district. Inter-state migration draws the most attention, because it carries people across cultures and languages, yet it involves far fewer people than the quiet, short-distance movement close to home.
8.3 Streams of Internal Migration
Internal migration does not flow evenly in every direction. Because both the origin and the destination can be either rural or urban, every internal move falls into one of four streams — rural-to-rural, rural-to-urban, urban-to-urban and urban-to-rural. These four are very unequal in size, and each has its own typical migrant. Table 8.1 gives their shares.
The four shares together cover about 90 per cent of migrants; the remaining tenth could not be classified as rural or urban (Census of India, 2011). Even so, the pattern is clear: movement between villages dwarfs every other kind, and the two streams ending in a town come next.
8.3.1 Rural-to-Rural Migration
Rural-to-rural migration is by far the largest stream, about half of all internal movement. Its most striking feature is that it is dominated by women, and the reason lies in custom rather than in economics.
Across most of India, a woman moves to her husband’s home after marriage — a patrilocal custom, in which the bride leaves her parents’ village for her in-laws’. Because most marriages join one rural family to another, this marriage migration produces a huge and steady flow of women from village to village. Roughly three-quarters of short-distance intra-state migrants are women, and marriage is the main reason (Census of India, 2011).
Marriage is not the only reason villages send people to other villages. Agricultural labourers follow the work, moving to areas of large farms or to newly irrigated and reclaimed land that needs extra hands. In the slack season, when there is little to do on the fields, many villagers move out for casual jobs on irrigation works, roads and building sites. Large development projects have also moved rural families deliberately — the Dandakaranya resettlement scheme, for instance, opened farmland across parts of Odisha and Chhattisgarh for thousands of displaced families.
One movement stands out for its size. The Green Revolution — the sharp rise in crop yields from the 1960s, using new seeds, fertiliser and irrigation — pulled a great stream of farm labour into Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh from the poorer countryside of eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. This was rural-to-rural movement over long distances, and much of it became permanent as labourers settled where the work was.
8.3.2 Rural-to-Urban Migration
Rural-to-urban migration is the second largest stream, and it is the one people usually picture when they speak of migration. It is driven by both the push of the countryside and the pull of the city — the two sets of forces we examine closely in the next section.
Where rural-to-rural migration is largely a movement of women, rural-to-urban migration is largely a movement of men. Men leave villages for city work in far greater numbers than women, at least to begin with, often sending money home and returning between spells of work.
This stream has shaped India’s cities more than any other. It is estimated that about one-third of the growth of urban India has come from rural-to-urban migration rather than from births within the cities themselves. The pressure this places on housing, water and services is one of the defining strains of Indian urban life — a consequence we return to at the end of the chapter.
8.3.3 Urban-to-Urban Migration
Urban-to-urban migration — about a sixth of the total — moves people from one town or city to another. It is largely a movement of the middle class, from smaller towns with fewer facilities to larger cities with more: better colleges, hospitals, offices and opportunities.
This is the stream that completes stepwise migration. A family may move from a small town up to a big city; the gap they leave behind is filled by people moving in from smaller towns and villages nearby, and those gaps in turn by people from still farther out. Through this absorption, large cities grow faster than small ones, and the movement ripples outward until the city’s pull is spent. Fig. 8.3-1 traces the ladder.
Flowchart
Fig. 8.3-1 Caption: In stepwise migration, each place draws people from the smaller places below it, and the gap ripples outward. Nodes: Village → person moves up → small town → person moves up → large city; large city gains people → gap left in the small town → filled by in-migration from surrounding villages → gap left in those villages → filled from still more distant villages → ripple continues outward until the city’s pull is spent
8.3.4 Urban-to-Rural Migration
Urban-to-rural migration is the smallest stream — only about one in twenty migrants — but it has grown a little in recent years. It runs against the usual current, carrying people from city back to countryside.
Two things drive it. At an advanced stage of urbanisation, some people leave cities that have grown overcrowded, costly and polluted, in search of a quieter or cheaper life; this is a reverse, or ‘pushback’, movement. And, as in the rural-to-rural stream, marriage moves some women from towns to villages. For that reason, women once again tend to outnumber men in this smallest of the four streams.
8.4 Why People Migrate
No one moves without a reason, and the reason almost always has two halves — something wrong with the place a person is in, and something better about the place they are going. Understanding migration means holding both halves in view at once.
8.4.1 Push and Pull Factors
Every migration is the outcome of two opposing sets of forces. Push factors are the conditions at the origin that drive people away — poverty, unemployment, tiny or worn-out landholdings, crop failure, and a shortage of schools or hospitals. Pull factors are the conditions at the destination that draw people in — jobs, higher and steadier wages, better schooling and health care, and the pull of city life itself.
The two work together. A person leaves a village because there is no work there (a push) and heads for a city because there is work there (a pull); neither force alone usually explains the move. Fig. 8.4-1 shows the two acting on a single migrant.
Diagram
Fig. 8.4-1 Caption: A migrant is pushed out of one place and pulled towards another; both forces act at once. Brief: Draw a person figure at the centre, with a bold movement arrow showing them travelling from left (origin) to right (destination). On the left, a box ‘place of origin’ with arrows shoving the figure rightward, labelled with push factors: ‘unemployment’, ‘poverty’, ‘small landholdings’, ‘crop failure’. On the right, a box ‘place of destination’ with arrows reaching leftward toward the figure, labelled with pull factors: ‘jobs’, ‘higher wages’, ‘schools and hospitals’, ‘city amenities’. Show push acting from behind and pull from ahead, both moving the migrant origin → destination.
Push and pull also solve a puzzle: why the poorest and the richest villagers may make the very same journey to the city. For the poor, the move is forced — push dominates, and they migrate out of sheer economic compulsion to survive. For the well-off, the move is chosen — pull dominates, and they migrate towards greater comfort, better schooling for their children, or a wider life. The same road carries people leaving out of need and people arriving out of ambition.
8.4.2 The Causes of Migration
Behind the push and pull lie four broad kinds of cause. In the order the syllabus sets them, they are natural, economic, political and social. The census records the stated reason for each move, and Table 8.2 shows how those reasons were distributed across two censuses.
The table repays a close look (Census of India, 2011). Marriage is by far the largest single reason, and its share rose from 44 to 49 per cent between 2001 and 2011. Work fell over the same decade, from 15 to 10 per cent — even though the total number of migrants was climbing fast. ‘Moved with household’ and ‘moved after birth’ together cover much of the rest: these are dependents — children and family members — carried along by someone else’s move.
Natural causes are sudden and forced. Droughts, floods, earthquakes and other calamities can make a place briefly or permanently unlivable, driving people out until conditions recover — or for good, if they do not. A run of failed monsoons can empty parts of the countryside as families move in search of food, water and work.
Economic causes are the largest reason men move. The land of a village cannot give work to everyone born on it; small farms, few village industries and long idle seasons leave many without a livelihood. Cities, by contrast, offer work in industry, trade, transport and services. So people move from where labour is surplus to where it is wanted — often when a natural shock at home turns want into distress.
Political causes drive some of the most painful migrations. Wars, persecution and prolonged conflict can force people from their homes. Over past decades, disturbed conditions in parts of Jammu and Kashmir and the North-East, and periods of militancy elsewhere, displaced many people who left in search of safety. Such moves are rarely made by choice.
Social causes are the largest reason women move, and marriage leads them all — the patrilocal custom we met with the rural-to-rural stream. Families also move together when one member relocates, so children and elders migrate as dependents. And education draws young people to towns and cities that have the colleges and training the countryside lacks; many settle there for work once they have studied.
Together these four causes, working through push and pull, decide not only whether people move but who moves — men more for work, women more for marriage, whole families when a household shifts, and whole communities when disaster or conflict strikes.
8.5 Trends and Magnitude of Migration in India
We began this chapter with a puzzle: a country long believed to sit still, and evidence that it does not. This section measures the movement — how much of it there is, how fast it is growing, and which way it runs.
The Myth of Immobility
For a long time, the census seemed to show a nation that stayed put. At every count, roughly nine in ten people were enumerated in the district where they were born, and only a small share in a neighbouring district. From this, India was judged one of the least mobile of the world’s large populations, held in place by farming, family, custom and the pull of home.
But the picture was misleading. Counting people by their place of birth, on a single census night, misses most short-term, seasonal and circular movement — the worker who spends the dry months in a city and returns before the count is simply never recorded. As better data arrived, the myth of immobility broke apart.
How Much India Moves
The fuller measure is dramatic. By the census of 2011, about 45 crore people — some 453.6 million, or roughly 38 per cent of the whole population — were migrants by place of last residence, up from about 31 per cent a decade earlier. Of these, about 312.7 million were women and 140.9 million men; the female majority reflects the vast marriage-driven movement between villages.
Migration is not only large, it is speeding up. The annual rate at which the migrant population grew nearly doubled between the two decades — rising to about 4.5 per cent a year in 2001–11, from about 2.4 per cent a year in 1991–2001 (Census of India estimates). India is moving more, and moving faster.
Counting Movement in a New Way
Even these figures may understate work-related movement, because marriage and family moves crowd out the shorter, repeated journeys people make for jobs. A study using railway passenger data for 2011–16 put annual inter-state movement for work at close to 9 million people — almost three times the roughly 3.3 million a year that successive censuses had suggested. Fig. 8.5-1 sets the two estimates side by side.
Graph
Fig. 8.5-1 Caption: Railway-based estimates put yearly inter-state work migration far above the census figure. Brief: Simple two-bar column chart. X-axis: two categories — ‘census-based estimate’ and ‘railway-data estimate’. Y-axis: annual inter-state migrants for work, in millions, scaled 0 to 10. Bar 1 (census-based) at about 3.3 million; bar 2 (railway-data) at about 9 million. Data sources: successive Censuses of India, and the Economic Survey of India 2016–17 (railway passenger data). Label each bar with its value.
Where the Movement Runs
The direction of the flow follows wealth. As a rule, less affluent states send people out, while the most affluent states receive the most. The great source region is the Hindi heartland: Uttar Pradesh and Bihar together account for about half of all out-migrants, alongside Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand, which also show net loss. The main destinations are the richer, faster-growing states and cities — Delhi has been the single largest recipient, taking more than half the migration in some recent years, while Maharashtra, Gujarat, Goa and Tamil Nadu draw large numbers in.
Whether a state gains or loses through migration is measured by its net migration — its in-migrants minus its out-migrants. A state with more arrivals than departures has positive net migration; one losing more than it gains has negative net migration. Map 8.2 shows the broad pattern.
Map
Map 8.2 Caption: Poorer states tend to send migrants out, and richer, faster-growing states receive them (Census of India, 2011). Brief: Thematic (choropleth) map of India showing net migration by state. India must be shown in its full extent as officially defined by the Government of India, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh; all boundaries, including state boundaries, as officially recognised by the Government of India. Shade net out-migration states (net senders) in one colour — clearly including Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and Rajasthan — and net in-migration states (net receivers) in a contrasting colour — clearly including Delhi, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Goa and Tamil Nadu. Two-colour key: ‘net out-migration’ and ‘net in-migration’. Do not print precise figures.
The flow is not a single leap from village to metropolis. It moves in steps and eddies: around a fast-growing city, nearby districts feed migrants in, and the gaps they leave are filled from farther out. Some cities grow large enough to catch migrants who would otherwise go to a bigger one — a counter-magnet. Surat has begun to act as a counter-magnet to Mumbai, holding workers who might once have gone there, while Jaipur and Chandigarh play a similar part for Delhi. Kolkata, for its part, draws mainly on its nearer neighbours in Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Odisha.
Put together, these findings overturn the old picture. India is not a still country but a restless one — tens of millions on the move each year, the movement accelerating, and flowing steadily from where opportunity is scarce to where it is plentiful.
8.6 Consequences of Migration
Every migration changes two places at once — one emptied a little, the other filled a little. The effects reach far beyond the head-count, into the age and sex balance of populations, the culture of communities, the economy of regions and the fabric of cities. They fall into demographic, social, economic and environmental kinds, and they are rarely all good or all bad.
8.6.2 Economic, Environmental and Other Consequences
Most people migrate for economic gain, and the economic effects run deepest. One is on the balance between people and resources — the resource-population ratio. An area may be under-populated, with too few people to develop its resources; over-populated, with too many for its resources to support well; or optimally populated, with just enough to use its resources without lowering the quality of life. Migration from an over-populated area to an under-populated one can bring both closer to balance; migration the other way can push both further from it.
Migration also shifts the occupational structure. The source region loses working people and grows more dependent, while the receiving region gains them and grows more productive. At the far end of this lies brain drain — the loss of a region’s most skilled people, such as doctors and engineers, to richer countries offering better pay. The numbers are small, but the loss of talent hits a poorer source region hard, and can deepen the very under-development that drove people out.
Against these losses stands the great economic gift of migration — remittances, the money migrants send back to their families. Remittances from Indians abroad are among the country’s largest sources of foreign exchange, and states such as Kerala have been reshaped by money sent home from the Gulf. Internal migrants send money too, and for many poor villages — in parts of Andhra Pradesh and elsewhere — these transfers are a lifeline, paying for food, medicine, schooling, the repayment of debts and the building of houses.
Rapid rural-to-urban migration crowds cities faster than they can be built. It feeds the unplanned, haphazard growth of slums and shanty colonies and strains housing, water, transport and power. The over-crowding also over-exploits the land and water around cities, worsening water shortage, air and water pollution, and the disposal of sewage and solid waste.
Finally, migration can reinforce the very inequalities it springs from. As the world’s most dynamic economies recruit the best-trained people from poorer regions, skills drain away from where they are most needed, and the gap between sending and receiving regions can widen rather than close.
So migration neither simply helps nor simply harms. It drains youth and skills from some places while enriching others; it strains cities while feeding villages with remittances. Whether a given flow leaves people better or worse off depends on where you stand — and on what you choose to count.
8.7 Summary
Migration is movement that changes a person’s usual place of residence. It may be permanent or temporary, and a temporary move can be daily, seasonal or annual. A migrant is someone counted at a place other than where they were born or last lived.
A single move has two faces: it is out-migration for the place left and in-migration for the place reached; across a national border it becomes emigration and immigration. Commutation — daily travel to work — is movement without migration, while stepwise migration climbs from village to town to city in stages.
India counts migration on two bases: place of birth (giving the life-time migrant) and place of last residence. Because the count is taken on a single census night, it misses much seasonal and circular movement.
Every move is either internal (within the country) or international (across a border), and internal movement is by far the larger. Internally, migrants are graded by distance — intra-district, inter-district and inter-state — which the syllabus groups as intra-state and inter-state migration.
International migration runs out and in. Out-migration (emigration) grew from colonial plantation labour, to Gulf workers from the 1970s, to skilled professionals since the 1990s, building a diaspora of about 30 million. In-migration and refuge come mainly from neighbouring countries. Partition in 1947 was the single largest border crossing, moving an estimated 14 to 15 million people.
Internal migration flows in four streams. Rural-to-rural is the largest, about half of all movement and mostly women, driven by marriage; rural-to-urban is mostly men and drives urban growth; urban-to-urban is a middle-class, stepwise flow; urban-to-rural is the smallest, reverse flow.
People move under two forces: push factors drive them from the origin, and pull factors draw them to the destination. The poor are mainly pushed, the rich mainly pulled. The causes are natural, economic, political and social — with marriage the largest recorded reason overall, and work the main economic one.
India is far more mobile than long believed. By 2011 about 453.6 million people — roughly 38 per cent — were migrants, the number growing faster each decade, and railway data suggest inter-state work migration is close to 9 million a year. Poorer states send migrants out; richer states receive them.
Migration reshapes both regions. Source areas lose young workers, gaining a high sex ratio and a high dependency ratio; receiving areas gain workers and grow faster. Migration builds a composite culture, but also crowds cities into slums, drains skilled talent as brain drain, and sends home remittances that are a lifeline for poor villages.
The whole chapter can be read as a single chain — from the forces that start a move to the marks it leaves on two places at once.
Flowchart
Fig. 8.7-1 Caption: Migration as one process — from the forces that start a move to the marks it leaves on both places. Nodes: push factors at the origin + pull factors at the destination → decision to migrate → the move, recorded by the census (by place of birth or last residence) → sorted by type (internal or international) and by stream (rural-rural, rural-urban, urban-urban, urban-rural) → consequences at the source (loses young workers → high sex ratio, high dependency ratio, but gains remittances) and at the destination (gains workers → faster growth, but crowding and strain) → remittances and returning migrants change conditions at the origin → back to the push and pull that begin the next move
What This Chapter Cannot Tell You
The census counts people where they are on a single night, so it undercounts seasonal, circular and return migration. The true scale of movement, especially for work, is larger than any single figure printed here.
State and national averages hide what lies inside them. A ‘sender’ state still contains fast-growing cities that pull people in, and a single reason recorded per migrant hides the work a woman may take up after moving for marriage.
The chapter can say who tends to move, and why, and with what effects on regions — but not how any one family fares. Whether a given move is a gain or a loss depends on where you stand, and on what you choose to count.
8.8 Key Terms
brain drain — the loss of a region’s most skilled people, such as doctors and engineers, to richer places offering better pay.
commutation — regular daily to-and-fro travel between home and workplace, with no change of residence.
composite culture — the blended culture that forms where migrants from different regions mix and share customs.
counter-magnet — a city that grows large enough to intercept migrants who would otherwise head to a bigger city.
dependency ratio — the number of dependents, the young and the old, supported by each hundred people of working age.
emigration — leaving one’s own country to settle in another; the person is an emigrant.
immigration — arriving from another country to settle; the person is an immigrant.
in-migration — the arrival of people to settle in a place, which raises its population.
inter-district migrant — a person who moves outside their district but stays within the same state.
internal migration — migration that stays within the borders of one country; also called national migration.
international migration — migration from one country to another, across an international border.
inter-state migrant — a person who moves outside their state but stays within India.
inter-state migration — migration that crosses a state boundary.
intra-district migrant — a person who moves outside their locality but stays within the same district.
intra-state migration — migration that stays within one’s own state.
life-time migrant — a migrant counted by place of birth: someone enumerated away from where they were born.
marriage migration — migration on marriage, chiefly of women moving to the husband’s home.
migrant — a person counted at a place other than where they were born or last lived.
migration — the movement of people to settle in another place, changing their usual place of residence.
net migration — a place’s in-migrants minus its out-migrants; positive if it gains people, negative if it loses them.
optimally populated — having just enough people to develop an area’s resources without lowering the quality of life.
out-migration — the departure of people from a place, which lowers its population.
over-populated — having too many people for the resources available to support them well.
patrilocal — the custom by which a wife moves to live in her husband’s, or his family’s, home after marriage.
permanent migration — a move made for the long term, with no intention of returning.
place of birth — the census basis that counts anyone enumerated away from where they were born.
place of destination — the place a migrant arrives at, where they are an in-migrant.
place of last residence — the census basis that counts anyone whose previous home differs from their present place.
place of origin — the place a migrant leaves, for which they are an out-migrant.
pull factors — conditions at the destination that draw migrants in, such as jobs, wages and amenities.
push factors — conditions at the origin that drive migrants away, such as poverty and unemployment.
remittances — money that migrants send back to their families at the place of origin.
resource-population ratio — the balance between the number of people in an area and the resources available to them.
sex ratio — the number of females per 1000 males in a population.
stepwise migration — migration that climbs a ladder of settlements in stages, from village to town to city.
temporary migration — a move meant to be reversed, whether daily, seasonal or annual.
under-populated — having too few people to develop an area’s resources fully.
8.9 Points to Ponder
If a worker spends half the year in a city yet is never counted there, is the city’s true population the number the census prints — or a larger one that no single count can reach?
For a century the census ‘proved’ that India was immobile, until better data overturned it. If a settled fact can be undone by a sharper instrument, how much should we trust the migration figures we rely on today?
Marriage makes women the majority of India’s migrants, yet the picture in most minds is a man with a bundle looking for work. Does the way we imagine migration hide the very people who move the most?
A village loses its strongest young workers but gains the money they send home. If those remittances build houses while the fields go untended, has the village developed — or hollowed out?
If the poorest are pushed to the city and the richest are pulled to it, the same street holds both. Can one place be an escape for one person and a prize for another at the very same time?
8.10 Objective Questions
- A person who moves from a village to a small town, and later from that town to a big city, is an example of: [1 mark]
- commutation
- stepwise migration
- reverse migration
- life-time migration
- The largest stream of internal migration in India, by volume, is: [1 mark]
- rural-to-urban
- urban-to-urban
- rural-to-rural
- urban-to-rural
- According to the Census of India, the single largest recorded reason for migration is: [1 mark]
- work
- education
- marriage
- business
- The mass movement of people between India and Pakistan at the time of Partition in 1947 was an example of: [1 mark]
- intra-state migration
- inter-district migration
- international migration
- commutation
- A city that grows large enough to intercept migrants who would otherwise head to a bigger city is called a: [1 mark]
- primate city
- counter-magnet
- conurbation
- hinterland
- Assertion (A): Rural-to-rural migration in India is dominated by women. Reason (R): In most of India, a woman moves to her husband’s home after marriage. [1 mark]
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true, but R is false.
- A is false, but R is true.
- Assertion (A): The source region of long-distance migration often shows a high sex ratio. Reason (R): It is mostly young men who migrate over long distances, leaving more women behind. [1 mark]
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true, but R is false.
- A is false, but R is true.
- Assertion (A): The Census of India tends to undercount seasonal migration. Reason (R): The census counts people at their place of enumeration on a single reference night. [1 mark]
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true, but R is false.
- A is false, but R is true.
- Match the terms in Column I with their meanings in Column II. [4 marks]
| Column I | Column II |
|---|---|
| a. Emigration | i. Money sent home by migrants |
| b. Commutation | ii. Daily travel to work without a change of residence |
| c. Net migration | iii. In-migrants minus out-migrants |
| d. Remittances | iv. Leaving one’s own country to settle abroad |
Fill in the blank: A migrant counted on the basis of place of birth is known as a ________ migrant. [1 mark]
Fill in the blank: The money that migrants send back to their families at the place of origin is called ________. [1 mark]
State whether the following statement is true or false: In India, internal migration involves fewer people than international migration. [1 mark]
8.11 Check Your Concepts
Define the term ‘migrant’. State the two bases on which the Census of India counts migrants. [2 marks]
State any two push factors and any two pull factors of migration. [2 marks]
Differentiate between out-migration and in-migration, giving one example of each. [3 marks]
Why do more women than men appear in the rural-to-rural stream of migration in India? Give reasons. [3 marks]
Explain how push and pull factors together produce rural-to-urban migration. Support your answer with an example. [4 marks]
‘Migration harms the source region and benefits the destination.’ Evaluate this claim. [4 marks]
Describe the demographic, social and economic consequences of migration for both the source region and the receiving region. [6 marks]
Discuss the causes of migration in India under the four heads — natural, economic, political and social — with an Indian example for each. [6 marks]
8.12 Map, Diagram & Data Interpretation
- Study Table 8.1 (Streams of Internal Migration in India, 2011). [4 marks]
- Which stream has the largest share of migrants, and what is that percentage?
- What percentage of migrants could not be classified as rural or urban?
- State one thing this table does not tell you about these migrants.
- Study Table 8.2 (Reasons for Migration in India). [4 marks]
- How did the share of migration for ‘work’ change between 2001 and 2011?
- Which reason was the largest in both years?
- Give one reason why this table may understate migration for work.
- In one decade, a state recorded 8 lakh in-migrants and 20 lakh out-migrants. [3 marks]
- Calculate its net migration.
- Is the state a net sender or a net receiver of migrants?
- Name one likely economic effect of this pattern on the state.
- Study Fig. 8.6-1 (the source and receiving regions of migration). [4 marks]
- State what happens to the sex ratio of the source region, and explain why.
- Explain how the dependency ratio changes in the receiving region.
- Look at Fig. 8.5-1 (census-based and railway-data estimates of inter-state work migration). [3 marks]
- By roughly how many times does the railway-data estimate exceed the census-based estimate?
- What does this gap suggest about the way the census measures migration for work?