Migration: Causes & Consequences

Causes of Migration

People, generally are emotionally attached to their place of birth. But millions of people leave their places of birth and residence. There could be a variety of reasons. These reasons can be put into two broad categories:

(i) push factor, which causes people to leave their place of residence or origin; and

(ii) pull factors, which attract people from different places.

Push factor: In India, people migrate from rural to urban areas mainly due to

poverty,
high population pressure on the land,
lack of basic infrastructural facilities like health care, education, etc.

Apart from these factors, natural disasters such as,

flood,
drought,
cyclonic storms,
earthquake,
tsunami
wars and local conflicts also give an extra push to migrate.

Pull factors: Pull factors that attract people from rural areas to cities. The most important pull factor for the majority of rural migrants to urban areas is

the better employment opportunities
availability of regular work
relatively higher wages.
Better opportunities for education
better health facilities and
sources of entertainment

Note: The reasons for the migration of males and females are different. For example, work and employment have remained the main cause for male migration (38 per cent) while it is only three per cent for females. Contrary to this, about 65 per cent of females move out from their parental houses following their marriage. This is the most important cause in the rural areas of India except in Meghalaya where the reverse is the case.

As can be seen in the following figure

Noteworthy Findings of Migration by economic survey 2016-17

First, India is increasingly on the move – and so are Indians. A new Cohort-based Migration Metric (CMM)—shows that annually inter-state labour mobility averaged 5-6 million people between 2001 and 2011, yielding an inter-state migrant population of about 60 million and an inter-district migration as high as 80 million.

The first-ever estimates of internal work-related migration using railways data for the period 2011-2016 indicate an annual average flow of close to 9 million people between the states.

Both these estimates are significantly greater than the annual average number of about 3.3 million suggested by successive Censuses and higher than previously estimated by any study.

Second, migration is accelerating.

In the period 2001-11, according to Census estimates, the annual rate of growth of labour migrants nearly doubled relative to the previous decade, rising to 4.5 per cent per annum in 2001-11 from 2.4 per cent in 1991- 2001.
There is also a doubling of the stock of out-migrants to 11.2 million in the 20- 29-year-old cohort alone.
This acceleration has been accompanied by a surge in the economy.
As growth increased in the 2000s relative to the 1990s, the returns to migration might have increased sufficiently to offset the costs of moving, resulting in much greater levels of migration.

Third, and a potentially exciting finding, for which there is tentative, not conclusive evidence, is that while internal political borders impede the flow of people, language does not seem to be a demonstrable barrier to the flow of people.

Results from a gravity model indicate that political borders depress the flows of people, reflected in the fact that, controlling for distance, labour migrant flows within states are 4 times the labour migrant flows across states.
However, language barriers appear not to create comparable frictions to the movement of goods and people within India.

Workforce Migration in India Trends 1991 to 2011

Major migration routes in India

Consequences of Migration

Migration is a response to the uneven distribution of opportunities over space. People tend to move from places of low opportunity and low safety to places of higher opportunity and better safety. This, in turn, creates both benefits and problems for the areas, people migrate from and migrate to. Economic, social, cultural, political, and demographic consequences can be observed.

Economic Consequences

Positive impacts:

A major benefit for the source region is the remittance sent by migrants. Remittances from international migrants are one of the major sources of foreign exchange.

According to the World Bank, India received more than $100 billion in remittances in 2022, the amount of remittances sent by internal migrants is very meagre as compared to international migrants, but it plays an important role in the growth of the economy of the source area. Remittances are mainly used for food, repayment of debts, treatment, marriages, children’s education, agricultural inputs, construction of houses, etc.

For thousands of the poor villages of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, etc. remittance works as the lifeblood of their economy.

Migration from rural areas of Eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha to the rural areas of Punjab, Haryana, and Western Uttar Pradesh accounted for the success of their green revolution strategy for agricultural development.

Negative impacts:

Besides this, unregulated migration to the metropolitan cities of India has caused overcrowding.

Development of slums in industrially developed states such as Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Delhi.

Demographic Consequences

Migration leads to the redistribution of the population within a country.

Rural-urban migration is one of the important factors contributing to the population growth of cities.

Age and skill-selective out-migration from the rural area adversely affect the rural demographic structure.

However, high migration from Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Eastern Maharashtra have brought serious imbalances in age and sex composition in these states. Similar imbalances are also brought in the recipient’s states.

Social Consequences

Migrants act as agents of social change. The new ideas related to new technologies, family planning, girls’ education, etc. get diffused from urban to rural areas through them.
Migration leads to intermixing of people from diverse cultures. It has positive contributions such as the evolution of composite culture and breaking through narrow considerations and widening the mental horizon of the people at large. But it also has serious negative consequences such as anonymity, which creates a social vacuum and a sense of dejection among individuals.
Continued feelings of dejection may motivate people to fall into the trap of anti-social activities like crime and drug abuse.

Environmental Consequences

Overcrowding of people due to rural-urban migration has put pressure on the existing social and physical infrastructure in the urban areas.
This ultimately leads to the unplanned growth of urban settlement and the formation of slum shanty colonies.
Apart from this, due to the over-exploitation of natural resources, cities are facing the acute problem of depletion of groundwater, air pollution, disposal of sewage and management of solid wastes.

Other consequences

Migration (even excluding marriage migration) affects the status of women directly or indirectly.
In the rural areas, male selective out-migration leaving their wives behind puts extra physical as well mental pressure on the women.
Migration of ‘women’ either for education or employment enhances their autonomy and role in the economy but also increases their vulnerability.
If remittances are the major benefits of migration from the point of view of the source region, the loss of human resources and exceptionally highly skilled people is the most serious cost.
The market for advanced skills has become truly global, and the most dynamic industrial economies are admitting and recruiting significant proportions of highly trained professionals from poor regions. Consequently, the existing underdevelopment in the source region gets reinforced.

Problems of Refugees and Displaced People

The United Nations defines “a refugee as every person, who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.” (U.N. 1984)
Thus many international movements of population involving very large numbers have occurred due to compelling reasons of political, religious or racial character.
Perhaps the largest movement of people in this century has occurred in the Indian subcontinent.
The partition of British India in 1947 into the Indian Union and Pakistan led to a large exodus of refugees into each nation from the other.
Estimates indicate that not less than 7 million persons went to Pakistan from India and more than 8 million people came to India from Pakistan.
Indo-Pakistan war in 1971 also caused a large number of people from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to move into the north-eastern states of India as refugees, and this became a permanent problem for the region, as much as “Bihari” Muslims continue to be problematic for Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Some of the largest forced international migrations in history have occurred through times in Asia. For example, in the 12 years following 1975, more than 1.7 million refugees have left Vietnam, Kampuchea and Laos.
Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, in 1979, produced a flow of refugees which led to some 2.7 million being temporarily settled in Pakistan and 1.5 million in Iran.
Most of these refugees are still in the camps in the neighbouring countries.
Due to political disturbances in Sri Lanka, many Tamilians have entered India, and are staying in Tamil Nadu.
It is found that on humanitarian grounds the refugees are often given shelter by the governments of various countries.
However, the sudden influx of refugees creates enormous pressure on the native society. It leads to a short supply of essential commodities, ecological imbalances and health hazards in the countries of asylum.
The large magnitude and the various economic, political and social dimensions of the exodus of refugees create many problems, particularly for the countries of destination. Sometimes they cause political complications in the receiving countries. They organize themselves by forming groups and pressurize the governments for some concessions. For example, the United Kingdom, Canada and Sri Lanka are facing political and racial crises due to migration. Sometimes this causes clashes between the natives and migrants. Sri Lanka is a recent example of this.
But, in some instances, the refugees do make a positive contribution to the development of the host country, when settled in sparsely populated areas, by clearing and cultivating land.
The UNHCR's annual Global Trends Report 2021 shows that by the end of 2021, 89.3 million individuals worldwide were forcibly displaced as a result of persecution, violent conflict, human rights violations, or events “seriously disturbing public order.”
More than half of refugees globally come from five countries: Syria, Afghanistan Venezuela, South Sudan Myanmar.
One in every six Venezuelans if forced to be displaced
Developing regions host 83 per cent of the world’s refugees.
Turkey hosts the largest number of refugees (3.8 million) followed by Colombia (1.8 million).
At least 4.3 million people are estimated to be stateless.
Asylum applications registered globally increased by 25% from 1.1 million to 1.4 million in 2021.