Internal Migration in Contemporary India

This book explores internal migration in contemporary India from various vantage points and examines its relationship with development. Showcasing a multidisciplinary understanding of the processes and experiences of migration, it looks specifically at the fragmented nature of the migration process. Internal migration in India is considered to be low in comparative terms. However, structural changes over the past few decades have resulted in increasing regional disparities in economic growth, which has fuelled a new wave of migration. Migration has also raised some fundamental questions about how states and societies have handled mobility and the political, economic, and cultural reactions that they have generated. The volume explores the role of the state and civil society in the backdrop of conflicts among host and migrant populations in several parts of India, exploitation, and marginalisation of migrants based on their class, caste, religion, gender, ethnicity and regional location, and the changing policy framework that deals with migration in post-reforms India. This revised second edition also addresses the relatively newer dimensions of internal migration, including the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, policy frameworks for addressing the vulnerability of migrant labourers, and the linkages between migration and social reproduction. Comprehensive and insightful, this book will be of interest to researchers of economics, sociology, labour studies, development studies, and geography, besides being useful to research organisations, UN agencies and government departments.

Deepak K Mishra is a Professor of Economics at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His research interests are in the political economy of agrarian change, rural livelihoods and agrarian institutions, labour migration, gender, and human development. He has co-authored The Unfolding Crisis in Assam's Tea Plantations: Employment and Occupational Mobility (2012). He has co-edited Rethinking Economic Development in Northeast India: The Emerging Dynamics (2017), Land and Livelihoods in Neoliberal India (2020) and Global Poverty: Rethinking Causality (2023).

List of Figures. List of Tables. List of Contributors. List of Abbreviations. Acknowledgements to the First Edition. Acknowledgements to the Second Edition. 1. Introduction: Internal Migration in Contemporary India-An Overview of Issues and Concerns 2. Nature of Migration and Its Contribution to India's Urbanization 3. Women's Mobility and Migration: An Exploratory Study of Muslim Women Migrants in Jamia Nagar, Delhi 4. Migration and Marginalization: A Study of Northeast Migrants in Delhi 5. Labour Migration in the Northeast 6. Educational Migration among Ladakhi Youth 7. Migration in Agrarian Classes: A Study Based on Nine Villages in Andhra Pradesh 8. Migration from Contemporary Bihar 9. Migration and Punjab: Some Perceptions 10. Seasonal Migration from Odisha: A View from the Field 11. Internal Labour Migration in India: Emerging Needs of Comprehensive National Migration Policy 12. Migrant Labour in Contemporary India: The Pandemic and After. Index