A recent UNESCO report reveals how widely prevalent migration within India has become, and has once again revived the apparently endless debate on whether this trend should be curbed or encouraged. Under the United Progressive Alliance government, internal migration has been seen as a sign of distress rather than of aspiration, and thus there have been various bids to control it through anti-poverty and employment generation schemes, including the flagship rural job guarantee programme, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. In spite of that, however, internal migration kept increasing. The report, titled 'Social Inclusion of Internal Migrants in India', cites Census data to bear this out: the migrant population has swelled from 226 million in 1991 to 309 million in 2001 and further to 400 million in 2011. That includes a floating population of between 15 million and 100 million which moves back and forth between the original and destination locations. At this count, people who have migrated internally constitute roughly about one third of India's total population. This is the largest number in the world, far exceeding China's 221 million.
Apart from the scale of migration, what makes this debate significant is the 'sons-of-the-soil' demand being voiced in some parts of the country and violent attacks on migrants in others, notably in Maharashtra where north Indians have been selectively targeted. The UNESCO report, however, views outsiders as catalysts in economic development and key factors behind prosperity of many cities. It maintains that migrants do not "steal" opportunities from locals, given that most of them do menial and dangerous jobs which most others are unwilling to touch. Migrants contribute 10 per cent of GDP; they send remittances back home of between Rs 70,000 crore and Rs 120,000 crore. There are odd fiscal and federal implications to this. The tax revenue generated from the utilisation of these remittances in procuring consumer goods and services goes to the recipient states, instead of where these funds are generated.
Interestingly, metro towns are no longer the preferred destinations; Tier-II and Tier-III towns are, along with agriculturally progressive states that offer lucrative, even if seasonal, employment. Many relatively smaller towns now have larger proportions of outsiders than Mumbai and Delhi, where they form some 43 per cent of the population. Surat, Ludhiana, Faridabad and Nashik are all more than half migrant. Yet, as migrants are frequently invisible to the Indian state, the fiscal bases of these cities are not commensurately beefed up; and thus civic amenities are not created that take into account this new reality. Politicians and town planners responsible for providing civic amenities formulate policies inimical to migration. As both cause and consequence, many migrants are denied access to public services, social protection and even political participation for want of formal residency rights and identity proof. This is a crucial direction for policy once the Aadhaar-based unique identity numbers become widely available, and give people biometrically established, and not residency-based, identity. But a change in outlook is also essential. India may live still in its villages, but its soul is migrating to its towns.
