Internal Migration in India: Distress and Opportunities

Millions of footloose and impoverished men, women and children in India, migrate from the countryside each year to cities – in crowded trains, buses, trucks and sometimes on foot – their modest belongings bundled over their heads, in search of the opportunities and means to survive. Some arrive alone; some are accompanied by family or friends. Some stay for a season, some several years, some permanently. Many tend to drift quickly to low-end, low paid, vulnerable occupations – picking waste, pulling rickshaws, constructing buildings and roads, or working in people’s homes. They service a city which does not welcome them. Forever treated as intruders and somehow illegitimate citizens, they live in under-served makeshift shanties, under plastic sheets, or on streets and in night shelters. Police and municipal authorities notoriously harass and drive them away. Laws protect them in theory, but rarely in practice. Their wage rates tend to be exploitative, illegal and uncertain, works hours long, and conditions of employment unhealthy and unsafe. They are often unable to easily access even elementary citizenship rights in the city, like the right to vote, a ration card, supplementary feeding for their children, and school admissions. Their numbers are substantial; their economic contributions enormous; yet internal migrants tend to remain in the periphery of public policy.