Internal labour migration in India: Recent trends and patterns

摘要

Migration is the characteristic feature of any growing economy and occurs as a result of surplus labour force in one region flow towards the region of scarcity in search of employment and better conditions of living. India being second in the world withmore than 1.2 billion population accounts for more than 30 million internal migrants. Thus labour migration occupies an important feature in the development process in India.With this the present study tries to capture the changing scenario of internal migration between rural and urban areas, migration data from NSSO and CSO have been made use for the study. Results at the macro level shows that there has been an increasing magnitude of labour migration over the years. We can see from the data that it is more prevalent among the males for employment related reasons, around 30% occurring prominently from certain backward regions of the country. Among the streams of migration rural to urban is the most dominant stream of migration, accounting to 50%. Further short term migration differs sharply in its characteristic features.