Internal Labour Migration

Chetan Choithani & Arslan Wali Khan

The current stage of country’s demographic transition has created a youth bulge which provides the country a ‘demographic window of opportunity’ to accelerate economic growth. But widespread joblessness amongst youth has also raised apprehensions about losing this opportunity and transforming the youth population into an obligation that will have far-reaching social consequences.

India’s demography lies at the heart of a trend of a growing North-South divide. A significant proportion of India’s population resides in a few economically backward states in the country’s north, while the income and employment opportunities have come to be concentrated in the demographically advanced southern states. Recent patterns of work migration show that young workers from the employment-scarce north are moving to the economically dynamic south for work. But these dynamics have also prompted resurgent regionalism in the political rhetoric. Southern states have increasingly questioned the current demographic basis to determine political representation and the sharing of the country’s tax resources that they say currently favours the north, despite their own greater contributions to the country’s finances and superior track record of governance. These regional tensions have begun to be manifested in resentment against inter-state migration in some southern states.

India has now overtaken China to become the most populous country in the world. India’s current population of 1.45 billion exceeds China’s 1.42 billion, and the projections show India’s continued demographic dominance in the foreseeable future (UN-DESA 2024). This change in the demographic ranking has led to the revival of alarmist views that posit high population growth resulting in a grim future for India. Poor and marginalised communities, particularly those belonging to country’s religious minorities, are the target of these ill-informed views.
A significant proportion of India’s population resides in a few economically backward states in the country’s North, while the income and employment opportunities have come to be concentrated in the demographically advanced Southern states.

The evidence, on the contrary, shows that India has completed its fertility transition and achieved the replacement level fertility of 2 children per couple. Moreover, India has experienced one of the fastest fertility declines in the world, and birth rates have been converging across socio-economic groups with most women desiring less than two children. But there is a significant net addition to the country’s population because of the population momentum stemming from its young age structure. The current trajectory of replacement-level fertility means that India’s population is growing but at a slower pace.

The present demographic regime of falling fertility (and reduced mortality) also offers India a demographic dividend. Currently, half of India’s population is aged 25-64 years, and this figure increases to nearly 70% when one considers the population in the age group of 15-64 years. This demographic advantage will prevail over the next few decades with the share of those in the ages of 25-64 years reaching over 900 million around 2050.

There is some evidence that the demographic dividend has contributed to India’s economic growth, and the future of the country’s economy is also predicated on the availability of a large pool of workers. However, significant concerns remain on whether the country will be able to tap this opportunity fully due to past policy neglect of human development.

A defining feature of India’s demography is the wide regional heterogeneity. Although different states vary in terms of population size, age structure, fertility rates and mortality regimes, a distinct broad regional pattern of demographic behaviour is the North-South divide. This divide has increasingly defined the country’s politics in recent years.

Southern Indian states that include Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana led the country’s demographic transition to reach a low-mortality-low-fertility regime, while northern states have fallen behind. Data provided by the National Commission on Population (2020) show that in Rajasthan 44 newborns die before reaching their first birthday, compared with 10 children in Kerala. Similarly, while fertility has fallen below replacement level in all the southern states, with Kerala achieving replacement fertility way back in 1988, the four large northern states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh are yet to reach the two-children-per-couple birth rates.

It is important to note that birth rates in these large northern states have seen significant reductions in recent years with the overall trend pointing to fertility convergence across states. In fact, the recent National Family Health Survey (2019-21) shows that Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan have achieved replacement fertility (IIPS and ICF 2022). At the same time, the effect of high population growth in the past means that these four large northern states account for nearly 40% of India’s population, almost twice the share of the five southern states.

This North-South demographic divide will deepen further in the future. The north will continue to add significant numbers to India’s population while the south’s share will decline. For example, between 2011 and 2036, Kerala’s population will increase from 33 million to 37 million, whereas Bihar will add nearly 45 million people during the same period–in addition higher than the total population of Kerala (National Commission on Population 2020).

Population growth in the north also accompanies aging in the south. In 2011, the median age in Bihar was 19.9 years whereas this was 29.9 years in Tamil Nadu, a gap of 10 years that will increase to 12.4 years by 2036. Similarly, in 2036 nearly 23% of Kerala’s population will be aged 60 years and older where the corresponding share for Bihar will be 11%.

Early public investment in human development, particularly education, fuelled the demographic transition in the South. In particular, female education played a crucial role in the fertility decline in the South. This favourable social policy environment that prompted the early onset of demographic transition in the south also produced development dividends for the region.

Better governance and the availability of an educated workforce meant that when India opened its economy in the early 1990s, private investment favoured the southern states (along with some other regions in the country’s west with long entrepreneurial histories, such as Gujarat and Maharashtra) via-a-vis its northern counterparts. To cite just one statistic, in 2011-12 the fresh Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Karnataka amounted to $1.53 billion which was nearly 2.5 times the total FDI investment of $619 million received by the four large northern states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh combined.

The widening North-South demographic and economic split also underpins recent shifts in work migration which is now moving southward. In broad terms, post-independence India has seen two major work migration streams involving low-skilled workers who constitute a large majority of migrants: rural-rural migration in the 1970s and 1980s following the Green Revolution, and rural-urban migration beginning in the 1990s since the advent of economic reforms.

Of course, rural-urban migration was also not insignificant prior to the 1990s. In fact, large-scale migration from rural areas fuelled the growth of India’s large metropolitan centers of Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai. Similarly, rural-rural migration for farm work in the Green Revolution belt states of Punjab and Haryana still continues. But the growing stress on farm-dependent livelihoods and an urban-centric economic growth trajectory post-1990s means cities now attract an increasing number of migrants in India.

Most labour migration involves movement by low-/semi-skilled workers for informal jobs. This migration is predominantly circular and largely involves men.

Official statistics on migration severely underestimate work mobility. The Census 2011 enumerated 45 million economic migrants, and the numbers from the more recent Periodic Labour Force Survey 2020–21 showed that of the estimated 317 million migrants in India, only 34 million (11%) moved for work-related reasons (Census of India 2011 bm National Statistical Office 2022). Alternative estimates suggest that there are over 100 million labour migrants in India comprising nearly 20% of the country’s workforce.

Most labour migration involves movement by low-semi-skilled workers for informal jobs. This migration is predominantly circular and largely affects men. But agrarian decline means that migration is becoming ‘permanent circular’, in that male migrants now spend a large part of year away from their origin villages for non-farm work. This contrasts with earlier patterns of seasonal migration that occurred in agriculturally lean periods.

The underdeveloped states of Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh in the country’s north along with the backward eastern states of Odisha and West Bengal are the key outmigration hotspots. Some of these states, such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, have a long history of high labour migration and continue to be leading migrant-sending regions. Work destinations vary widely and depend on networks, work availability and wages. India’s megacities of Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai remain popular age-old work destinations for low-skilled rural migrants from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. And there are other established migration corridors such as Odisha’s Ganjam district that send a million migrants to Suratin Gujarat for work in the diamond industry and textile power looms.

The growing North-South migration stems from spatial disparities. But migration also provides a means to address these inequalities.

Migrants can help fill the labour vacuum [in the South] created by the greying of the local population and help the region to maintain its economic edge.

There is a recognition of the importance of migration in some quarters. To welcome outside migrants, Kerala, for example, has introduced various benefits for low-skilled inter-state migrants, such as health insurance, allowance for children’s education, and shared housing. Kerala has benefitted enormously from remittances from the Gulf countries but there also seems to be a realisation amongst political and policy circles that its migrant workers also enriched the Middle East. Kerala’s policy initiatives for low-skilled migrant communities appear to also encourage more permanent, family-based migration, driven in many ways by poor communities’ desire to take advantage of free and superior public education for their children. The success of the Roshnischeme that bridges language barriers to encourage greater school enrolment among migrant children is a good illustration. Migrant children have counterbalanced Kerala’s dwindling school-age population and rejuvenated Kerala’s schools, and they provide potential human resources for the state’s future economic development.

While the concentration of economic opportunities in the South is leading to migration moving southward, the concerns around replacement migration are unfounded. A bulk of labour mobility is circular and not permanent. If anything, the southern states need to encourage replacement migration to offset population decline. Given the demographic and development differences between the north and the south, migration provides an important means to reap the demographic dividend as well as achieve regionally balanced development.

[Chetan Choithani is an assistant professor at the School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru and author of Migration, Food Security and Development: Insights from Rural India (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Arslan Wali Khan is a doctoral candidate at the School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru.]