As has happened across the world at least over the last two and a half centuries, development in India has been marked by a substantial movement away from agriculture. This has typically been accompanied by movement of the population from rural to urban areas. Earlier IHDP research on the inequalities of rural transformation in India, however, brought to the fore the divergence between these two transitions: while the share of agriculture in GDP has declined dramatically, the process of urbanization has been much less rapid. This has led to four different responses in terms of migration. There is migration hesitancy in areas where jobs available from dispersed industrialization can be tapped while continuing to reside in the village; when industrialization is not available in the vicinity of the village there is permanent migration out of that rural setting; when permanent migration to an expensive city is unaffordable there is short-term migration in an effort to earn in the city and spend in the village; and when none of these options are available there is migration from one rural area to another as well as the return to the village of migrants who are unable to find a foothold in the city.
The four migration related responses to a declining agriculture point to a number of inequalities that the programme seeks to address. At the very outset there is the question of who gets to migrate. It is often the case that the very poor households, typically belonging to traditionally disadvantaged social groups, lack the financial and social capital to engage in economic migration. Within the household, socio-cultural norms often restrict women’s mobility to distant labour markets. In other words, socio-economic inequalities create what can be termed as ‘left-behind populations’ that emerge from the inequality between those who get to migrate and those who don’t, and then form a part of the changing inequalities that remain in the village. Those who do migrate – either short-term or permanently – face a variety of inequalities in the processes of migration. There are the inequalities in the learning of the skills needed in urban centres; differences that are accentuated by the informality of the processes learning. The need for short-term migrants to rely on identity groups to bargain for jobs in the city can at times extend existing inequalities in the village to the processes of migration, even as the earnings of migrants can alter inequalities in the village. And the sheer volume of migrants, both permanent and temporary, as well as the informality they bring with them, alters the nature of inequality in the urban centre as well. This project will explore aspects of inequalities in three elements of migration: inequalities of those left behind, inequalities in the processes of migration including in the learning of skills, and urban inequalities generated by migration.