India Economic Survey 2017: Migration for jobs, education rising; more females on the move

Moneycontrol BureauInter-state labor mobility is significantly higher than previous estimates, reveals . the Economic Survey 2016-17 presented in the Parliament today. The study also shows that the migration is accelerating and was particularly pronounced for females. The data sources used for the study are the 2011 Census and railway passenger traffic flows of the Ministry of Railways and new methodologies including the Cohort-based Migration Metric (CMM) .The CMM shows that inter-state labor mobility averaged 5-6.5 million people between 2001 and 2011, yielding an inter-state migrant population of about 60 million and an inter-district migration as high as 80 million. The first-ever estimates of internal work-related migration using railways data for the period 2011-2016 indicate an annual average flow of close to 9 million migrant people between the states. Both these estimates are significantly greater than the annual average flow of about 4 million suggested by successive Censuses and higher than previously estimated by any study, says the Survey.The second finding is that migration for work and education is accelerating. In the period 2001-2011 the rate of growth of labour migrants nearly doubled relative to the previous decade, rising to 4.5 per cent per annum. Interestingly, the acceleration of migration was particularly pronounced for females and increased at nearly twice the rate of male migration in the 2000s. There is also a doubling of the stock of inter-state out migrants to nearly 12 million in the 20-29 year old group alone. One plausible hypothesis for this acceleration in migration, according to the Survey is that the rewards have become greater than the costs and risks that migration entails. "Higher growth and a multitude of economic opportunities could therefore have been the catalyst for such an acceleration of migration," notes the surveyThe Survey has called for greater inter-state coordination to ensure that schemes for migrant welfare are implemented better. Policy actions to sustain and maximize the benefits of migration must include ensuring portability of food security benefits, providing healthcare and a basic social security framework for migrants – potentially through an inter-state self-registration process.