Migration and Development in India: The Bihar Experience

by Amrita Datta, Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge, 2023

Reviewed by Pushpendra

Though not abundant, longitudinal studies have a long tradition in India. They have served the purpose of analysing social order, socioeconomic conditions, and the impact of planning and development measures by the state and changes therein. A joint study of employment, poverty, and population dynamics in 48 villages of the undivided state of Bihar by the A.N. Sinha Institute of Social Studies (ANSISS) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in 1981–1983 laid the foundation for longitudinal studies in the state. Subsequently, the Institute of Human Development (IHD) studied these villages in 1998–1999, 2011, and 2016. In the first two revisits, migration was one of the components of the studies. However, the 2016 revisit was exclusively on migration. Amrita Datta has skilfully used the data of the three revisits to 12 of the original ANSISS-ILO study villages to trace changing migration patterns in Bihar. Additionally, she has incorporated qualitative data from her 2014 study of migrants from one of the study villages in Bihar at their destination in Delhi. This is one of the few book-length academic works on migration using longitudinal data and, more importantly, connecting the source and destination areas. These attributes make the book an important contribution to the evolving discipline of migration studies.

The volume is divided into eight chapters, including the Introduction and Conclusion. The introductory chapter underlines bias towards long-term and permanent migration in two major sources of enumeration of migrants – Census and National Sample Surveys – resulting in under-enumeration of internal migrants in India. The IHD surveys overcome this under-enumeration by adopting a longer cut-off period of eight months to differentiate short-term migration from long-term migration. The inter-/multi-/trans-disciplinary nature of migration defies attempts to explain migration using a single theory. Datta uses neoclassical models and New Economics of Labour Migration (NELM), widely used in economics, to study decision-making, wage differentials, and remittances. This is supplemented by drawing from disciplines like anthropology, sociology, and human geography, particularly for some non-financial, subjective dimensions of migration. Methodologically, this implies adopting both the positivist approach of economics and the interpretive approach widely used in sociology and human geography. This first chapter ends by giving a detailed, useful summary of each subsequent chapter.

The second chapter briefly discusses state discourses on rural–urban migration both during British colonial rule and in independent India. It points to the colonial roots of ambivalence in the state policy towards migration, beginning with the Royal Commission on Labour (1931), which preferred keeping the nature of migration circular, while the Labour Investigation Committee (1946) advocated for mass transition of workers from the primary sector to the urban industrial sector, in line with the dual-sector model of development propounded by Arthur Lewis. This dilemma has continued until now, where migration is often portrayed as a failure of rural development policies of sending states and, at the same time, potentially destabilising for destination cities. Datta holds this disconnect between urbanisation and migration responsible for the denial of migrant rights, welfare, and integration in the city – all contributing to the perpetuation of the circular nature of migration.

The next three chapters are based on survey datasets. Chapter Three, the longest of the data chapters, uses the 2016 IHD Bihar Migration Survey and gives a well-presented and argued statistical exposition of various facets of migration, from incidence and duration of migration to the socioeconomic profile of migrants, reasons for migration and its circularity, migrants’ occupations, earnings, remittances, and their destinations. The most useful observations come out of Chapter Four, which uses datasets of three points – 1999, 2011, and 2016 – to study changes in the migration pattern with respect to the socioeconomic background of migrants arranged along occupational class, caste/community, landholding size-class, and income quintiles. Using two cross-sections of data covering the same households in 1999 and 2011, Chapter Five presents multivariate analyses of individual and household characteristics to identify determinants of migration and household characteristics to assess the impact of migration. Interestingly, it finds evidence of some shift towards pull factors of migration and positive impact on household income.

Chapters Six and Seven present a micro view of migration by visiting migrants from one of the study villages at their destination in Delhi. Chapter Seven is based on interviews with ten migrants in Delhi and their family members and key informants in their village. What comes out striking is the hardship and pessimism involved in working in the informal sector, where migrants often make an entry, and the exclusionary nature of our cities pushing the migrants into isolation and ghettoised living. This results in, on the one hand, migrants’ longing for an opportunity to start their own enterprise, however small, and on the other, disaffection with the city reinforcing a desire to return to their village life. Chapter Eight explores the emotional burden of long separation from family in circular migration (short-term migration wherein migrants do not permanently settle at the destination and return to their native place periodically), which they alone have to cope with. Drawing on narratives of two migrants in Delhi, it closely looks at the gendered roles of men and women in a patriarchal social setting, pushing men to hostile geographies and their inherent desire to withdraw their women from work. However, one is left wishing for more and extensive narratives.

This is an engaging book, both informative as well as analytical, and written in accessible language and style. Some statistical tables are for experts, but their explanations are accessible to non-expert readers. Data-dense chapters are well illustrated by tables. One shortcoming of the book may be the absence of any discussion on migration theories other than neoclassical and NELM, and social network theory to some extent. It has completely neglected, for example, the segmented labour market theory. Even in applying neoclassical and NELM theories, there is a lopsided emphasis on their decision-making aspects. The author should have engaged with literature that arrived at opposite conclusions, such as disenchantment with village life among the youth and their compulsion rather than ‘preference’ to return to the village at the end of the migration life cycle. Nonetheless, this volume is a useful addition to the corpus of migration literature and will immensely interest students and researchers of gender, development and labour studies, and public policy, as well as development practitioners and policymakers.