Unfree Mobility: Adivasi Women's Migration

Tribal community practices and cultures, particularly the lack of traditional restrictions on women’s work and labour, have indeed been a significant factor in bringing larger proportions of tribal women into more mobile forms of labour in comparison to other social groups in India. However, this paper shows that the longstanding and higher propensity to labour migration among tribal women has not fundamentally altered their conditions of historical disadvantage in the agrarian economy, and in fact has integrated adivasi women in the developing labour market under capitalist development at several levels of additional disadvantage. While the principal patterns of tribal women’s migration have been identified in the paper with an eye to the sectors/segments in which they have critical mass, the focus of the description, discussion and analysis has been on the nature of work/employment relations being shaped by their migration, and its implications for an equality and emancipatory agenda. [CWDS Occasional Paper No. 60].