According to Census 2001, 33 million people or 8.1% of the Indian workforce were migrants for economic reasons. Over 80% of these migrants were male. Labour mobility also appears to be low because urbanization rates have not picked up sharply over the years, changing by roughly three percentage points per decade, irrespective of the urban definition used.
Recent research has however questioned this view. First, labour migration in India tends to be circular in nature in both short and long-term migration streams and is not adequately captured by Census data.
While Census migration data is useful to understand certain aspects of migration, it has its limitations in capturing circular migration and female migration for work.
Alternative estimates place the share of migrants in the workforce to lie between 17% and 29%.
As per Census 2011, the size of the workforce was 482 million people and based on extrapolation, this figure will exceed 500 million in 2016. If the share of migrants in the workforce is estimated to be even 20%, the size of the migrant workforce can be estimated to be over 100 million in 2016 in absolute terms.
Three Broad Trends
India is increasingly on the move – and so are Indians. Inter-state labour mobility averaged 5-6 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.
Migration is accelerating. In the period 2001-11, according to Census estimates, the annual rate of growth of labour migrants nearly doubled relative to the previous decade, rising to 4.5% per annum in 2001-11 from 2.4% in 1991-2001.
While internal political borders impede the flow of people, language does not seem to be a demonstrable barrier to the flow of people. Political borders depress the flows of people, reflected in the fact that, controlling for distance, labour migrant flows within states are 4 times the labour migrant flows across states.
