Internal Migration in Contemporary India

This book explores internal migration in contemporary India from various vantage points and examines its relationship with development. Showcasing a multidisciplinary understanding of the processes and experiences of migration, it looks specifically at the fragmented nature of the migration process. Internal migration in India is considered to be low in comparative terms. However, structural changes over the past few decades have resulted in increasing regional disparities in economic growth, which has fuelled a new wave of migration. Migration has also raised some fundamental questions about how states and societies have handled mobility and the political, economic, and cultural reactions that they have generated. The volume explores the role of the state and civil society in the backdrop of conflicts among host and migrant populations in several parts of India, exploitation, and marginalisation of migrants based on their class, caste, religion, gender, ethnicity and regional location, and the changing policy framework that deals with migration in post-reforms India. This revised second edition also addresses the relatively newer dimensions of internal migration, including the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, policy frameworks for addressing the vulnerability of migrant labourers, and the linkages between migration and social reproduction. Comprehensive and insightful, this book will be of interest to researchers of economics, sociology, labour studies, development studies, and geography, besides being useful to research organisations, UN agencies and government departments.