Migration: A dream or a nightmare for labour and national integration?

Accelerating inter-state migration will not only enhance the efficiency of the labour market but also foster national integration

India has witnessed internal migration for centuries. For instance, even in the 19th century, Marwaris from Rajasthan could be found as businessmen in the easternmost regions of the country, Marathas as warriors in its northwestern and southern parts, and Bengalis, Tamils, and Telugus spread across the nation as employees of the John Company and the subsequent British imperial government.

 

With economic development, the spread of education, and a bulge in the proportion of youth in the population, internal migration has accelerated in recent times. Its scale came into sharp focus during the Covid-19 lockdown. Special trains and buses had to be arranged to transport migrant workers to their home states. In the initial confusion, there were heartbreaking scenes of hundreds of migrant workers trudging along roads on foot, carrying their kids in their arms and baggage on their heads. It was a stark revelation—almost a nightmare.

 

Undeniably, lurking somewhere in our psyche, there is a streak of “rural communitarianism”, which is against laissez-faire and capitalistic industrialism. Many of us have a nostalgic vision of idyllic, unchanging rural life, as reflected in the young Mahatma’s Hind Swaraj.  Migration is antithetic to this vision.

 

Furthermore, we must acknowledge that migration has a profound emotional and psychological impact on individuals. This impact can be especially severe when the move is from a village to an unplanned and chaotic urban centre. There are initial problems of settling down and issues related to accommodation, water supply, proper sewerage and sanitation, as well as access to education and medical services, which can be quite severe. While we have to facilitate the lives of the migrants in their new place of residence and expedite planned urbanisation, we have to accept that internal migration has been a persistent trend of history, particularly with economic development. We should welcome it.

 

In 2005, 763 million people, or 12 per cent of the global population, lived outside the region of their birth. People relocate frequently, and much more within a country than outside it. As nations develop, migration typically occurs from rural to urban areas. Major rural-to-urban migration accompanied the economic growth of the 19th to mid-20th centuries in most of today’s high-income countries.

 

Regions develop and will continue to develop at different paces according to their locational and comparative advantages. We know from experience how trying to equalise industrial growth and gross state domestic product (GSDP) across states—through policies such as freight equalisation — can backfire. GSDP will grow at different rates in different states. People will move to faster-growing regions and this movement will help per capita income converge across regions.

 

In 2016, approximately 77 million Chinese migrant workers moved to find work in a different province within China. In contrast, only an estimated 9 million people migrated annually between states in India from 2011 to 2016.  Inter-state migration in India is low not only compared to China but also to the United States. According to estimates by the US Census Bureau, 7.9 million people moved between states in the US in 2021. It is also worth noting that the population of the United States, at 340 million, is less than a quarter of India’s 1.45 billion.

 

 The youth, especially those with some education, tend to migrate more than old people. So, given our demographic profile, growth in literacy, and moderately high growth, rather than decelerating, internal migration should be accelerating. We need to monitor internal migration trends in the country much more carefully and more frequently.

 

In this context, the trend of internal migration in the country, fortunately, is the subject of inquiry of “400 Million Dreams”, a Working Paper of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM), released in December 2024. Written by Bibek Debroy, jointly with Devi Prasad Misra, it enriches our data reservoir on migration by using high-frequency data from the Indian Railway Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS), mobile telephone subscriber roaming data from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), and district-level banking data. This is an important addition, especially since detailed migration data on an exhaustive scale are available only in Censuses, with the last Census conducted way back in 2011. One of the important conclusions drawn by 400 Million Dreams from the new data on non-suburban UTS II Class passenger numbers is that the number of migrants in 2023, at 402 million (equivalent to 28.9 per cent of the population), was down from the Census 2011 figure of 456 million (equivalent to 37.6 per cent of the population).

 

Bibek, who was the chairman of EAC-PM and whom we unfortunately lost on November 1 last year, was an ingenious thinker. I am sure the paper will be widely discussed, quoted, and even criticised, but we should all be grateful to Bibek and his co-author for urging us to look more broadly at the evidence on migration and think more deeply about this important issue.

 

Without getting into the precise extent of the decline in internal migration between 2011 and 2023, we can agree that internal migration in the country is not as fast as it should be. Accelerating such migration will not only improve the efficiency of the labour market, but also contribute to national integration. More internal migration to well-planned urban centres in search of a better standard of living should be seen as an integral part of our collective dream.

 

The author is an economist and a member of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly