Editorial Simplified: Support for Lives on the Move | GS – III

Relevance: GS Paper II (Agriculture and Economy)


Why has this issue cropped up?

A national policy for internal migration is needed to improve earnings and enable an exit from poverty.


Issues with migration

Though migration is expected to enhance consumption and lift families out of absolute poverty at the origin, it is not free from distress —

  • distress due to unemployment or underemployment in agriculture,
  • natural calamities, and
  • input/output market imperfections.

Drivers of internal migration

  • Internal migration can be driven by push and/or pull factors. In India, over the recent decades, agrarian distress (a push factor) and an increase in better-paying jobs in urban areas (a pull factor) have been drivers of internal migration.
  • Data show that employment-seeking is the principal reason for migration in regions without conflict.

The costs of migration

  • However, at the destination, a migrant’s lack of skills presents a major hindrance in entering the labour market.
  • Further, the modern formal urban sector has often not been able to absorb the large number of rural workers entering the urban labour market. This has led to the growth of the ‘urban informal’ economy, which is marked by high poverty and vulnerabilities.
  • Most jobs in the urban informal sector pay poorly and involve self-employed workers who turn to petty production because of their inability to find wage labour.
  • Then there are various forms of discrimination which do not allow migrants to graduate to better-paying jobs. Migrant workers earn only two-thirds of what is earned by non-migrant workers.
  • Further, migrant workers have to incur a large cost of migration which includes the ‘search cost’ and the hazard of being cheated.
  • Often these costs escalate which forces them to borrow from employers in order to meet these expenses. And frequent borrowing forces them to sell assets towards repayment of their loans.

The benefits of migration

  • Despite the above issues, internal migration has resulted in the increased well-being of households, especially for people with higher skills, social connections and assets.
  • Migrants belonging to lower castes and tribes have also brought in enough income to improve the economic condition of their households in rural areas and lift them out of poverty.
  • Circular migrant’s earnings account for a higher proportion of household income among the lower castes and tribes. This has helped to improve the creditworthiness of the family members left behind — they can now obtain loans more easily.

Way forward

  • There exists a need to scale-up interventions aimed at enhancing the benefits from circular or temporary migration.
  • Interventions targeting short-term migrants also need to recognise the fact that short-term migration to urban areas and its role in improving rural livelihoods is an ongoing part of a long-term economic strategy of the households.
  • Local interventions by NGOs and private entrepreneurs also need to consider cultural dimensions reinforced by caste hierarchies and social consequences while targeting migrants.
  • There is a need of national policy on internal migration. Policies on this could be twofold. The first kind could aim at reducing distress-induced migration and the second in addressing conditions of work, terms of employment and access to basic necessities.
  • There is a need to distinguish between policy interventions aimed at ‘migrants for survival’ and ‘migrants for employment’.
  • Local bodies and NGOs which bring about structural changes in local regions need to be provided more space.
  • Government interventions related to employment can be supported by market-led interventions such as microfinance initiatives, which help in tackling seasonality of incomes.
  • Interventions aimed at enhanced skill development would enable easier entry into the labour market.
  • We also need independent interventions aimed specifically at addressing the needs of individual and household migrants because household migration necessitates access to infrastructure such as housing, sanitation and health care more than individual migration does.
  • As remittances from migrants are increasingly becoming the lifeline of rural households, improved financial infrastructure to enable the smooth flow of remittances and their effective use require more attention from India’s growing financial sector.

 

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