Rural-urban migration: Declining trend

Around 30 years ago, in 1981, a United Nations Expert Committee had advocated discouraging rural-urban migration in developing countries by promoting an equitable level of infrastructure and long term planning in rural regions that would square off the divide between villages and the metros. Whether that squaring off has happened or not, the day of reckoning seems to be approaching in India with the long time trend of rural migration finally declining.

This particular pattern was never more profound than in the so called ‘City of Dreams' – Mumbai. The soaring thought that the city was swamped by outsiders (most of them from villages) has to be seen in the context that migrants constituted only 26 per cent of the overall Mumbai population in 2001 as against 36 per cent in 1960s. Even the migration from the rest of Maharashtra declined from 27 per cent to 19 per cent of the population during the above time period. According to a study by Tata Institute of Social Sciences, 49 per cent of male migrants are from rural belts employed in marginal and unskilled occupations compared to the urbane Mumbaikars who dominate the white-collar jobs. If Mumbai’s dwindling migration is noteworthy, what has perplexed the demographers even more is the population of Kolkata that has dropped in actual numbers! The 2011 census details a decline of 1.88 per cent in population; this works out to 86,197 lesser people in the city over a decade. However, the same period saw the flooding of people in other parts of West Bengal whose population witnessed an increase of 13.93 per cent. If one were to believe that these two instances are simply aberrations among the plethora of Indian cities, then our National Capital Region census results are more surprising! One of the largest chunks of unskilled or semi-skilled rural migration into the NCR that takes place from Bihar, has shown a drop by massive 26 per cent.

Strangely, a peculiar problem has now started surfacing in metropolitan cities due to this falling migration! For example, approximately 50 per cent of the labour force in, say, real estate and infrastructure firms in the NCR is made up of people from Bihar – with the migration from the state plummeting by a third, these sectors are facing a sudden drop in the available labour force and subsequently, this labour shortfall has pushed up wage bill of the said industries by 35-50 per cent.

So why is migration falling? Apart from agricultural reforms, many sectors like telecom, BPO and microfinance are creating thousands of jobs in the rural and semi-urban areas. Moreover, with MNCs moving their production facilities to rural hinterland, the rural population finds it less attractive to shift their base to urban centres, which are not only expensive but rarely welcoming. On the one hand, this reducing migration has eased the lives of millions of labourers, while on the other hand, it’s creating a vacuum in the urban labour market! Whatever one might make of it, what cannot be denied is that for once, the trends in migration prove that if economic growth is spread equitably, there’s no reason why the urban regions need be considered the promised lands.