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Indians, and in particular men seeking education and jobs, display a puzzling reluctance to cross state borders. This column explores the reasons for this surprising migration pattern. A major culprit is India’s system of ‘fragmented entitlements’, whereby welfare benefits are administered at the state level, and state residents get preferential treatment when it comes to higher education and government employment. These administrative rules prevent the more efficient allocation of labour across the country.
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Migration facilitates growth and poverty reduction through the more efficient allocation of labour to more productive opportunities. It is therefore no surprise that every successful development experience and growth episode is accompanied by large labour movements. Conversely, impediments to mobility are antithetical to development.
That international borders, the focus of considerable political attention in recent years, limit migration is obvious. But we would not expect provincial or state borders to prevent people from moving within a country. Most countries do not impose restrictions on internal mobility – China’s ‘hukou’ system being the best-known exception. In many cases, freedom of movement is a constitutionally protected right. In this regard, India presents a puzzle (Munshi and Rosenzweig 2016).
In 2001, internal migrants represented 30% of India’s population, but this number is deceptively large. Two-thirds were migrants within districts (an administrative unit within a state), and more than half were women migrating for marriage. Internal migration rates across states were nearly four times higher in Brazil and China, and more than nine times higher in the US in the five years ending in 2001 (or 2000). In fact, India ranked last in a comparison of internal migration in a sample of 80 countries over five year-year intervals between 2000 and 2010 (Bell et al. 2015).
In a recent article, we find evidence of ‘invisible walls’ between Indian states (Kone et al. 2017). Indians, particularly men, seeking education and jobs reveal a surprising reluctance to move to another state. To understand and explore the causes of this pattern, we worked with the Indian census authorities and obtained unique data from the 2001 Census on district-to-district migration between each pair of India’s 585 districts. These data were further disaggregated by age, education, duration of stay and reason for migration, leading to a very detailed migration profile for India.
District-to-district migration data have several advantages. Most existing studies of migration in India use household survey data, which suffer from sampling and aggregation biases and rarely capture bilateral flows. Other studies use proxies for migration, like railway passenger data as in Government of India (2017). These datasets cannot precisely measure bilateral migration and distinguish between different durations, education levels, and motivations of migrants.
To illustrate the (restrictive) role of state borders on internal migration, consider the district of Nagpur in Maharashtra. Nagpur is geographically located at the centre of India and close to three other states: Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh. Figure 1 plots the color-coded distribution of the origin districts of the migrants coming to Nagpur, with darker shades implying higher shares of migrants. The thin lines represent district borders and thick lines are the state borders. The four neighbouring districts in Maharashtra (Bhandara, Wardha, Amravati, and Chandrapur) sent a total of 31% of Nagpur’s immigrants. In contrast, the remaining three neighbouring districts in Madhya Pradesh (Balaghat, Chhindwara, and Seoni) sent a total of only 13%. More migrants came to Nagpur from other districts in Maharashtra that are hundreds of kilometres away than from neighbouring districts in other states.
Similar patterns are observed when we look at out-migration from Nagpur to other districts in Figure 2. The most popular destinations of Nagpur’s emigrants are again the four neighbouring districts in Maharashtra, which receive a total of 32% of emigrants. Neighbouring districts in other states receive much fewer migrants when compared to the distant coastal districts of Maharashtra.