Rural-Urban Migration And Urban Informal Sector In India: An Inter-State Analysis

Migration is a process that gets intensified with the process of economic development. Among the various migration streams like rural-urban, rural-rural, urban-rural and urban-urban, population mobility from rural to urban areas is a common and ever-increasing phenomenon in India. Interestingly, this rural-urban migration is observed to have significant implications to the development of urban informal sector. Less skilled migrated labour are, in fact, less equipped for the urban formal jobs due to their lack of knowledge and experience and hence they end up forming ‘urban informal sector’. Thus there is an intense linkage between rural-urban migration and the expansion of urban informal sector. In fact there exists a two-way causation: migration helps in booming of urban informal sector, while the development of informal sector attracts further. Using mainly census and National Sample Survey data sources, this paper attempts to examine the nature and pattern of internal migration and its determinants across the states of India. Among various factors explaining the extent of internal migration in India, rural unemployment, rural indebtedness, opportunity cost of migration, rural industrialization, extent of urban informal sector etc. have been identified as key variables. Attempts have also been made to examine the inter-relationship between the extent of rural-urban migration and the expansion of urban informal sector in India.