Migration, Food Security and Development: Insights from Rural India

by Chetan Choithani, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022

Reviewed by Kunal Munjal and Amrita Datta

Migration is a gendered phenomenon. In the context of male-dominated outmigration streams from rural areas, left-behind women, or women at source, emerge as an important category of analysis. Additionally, the impact of migration and remittances on rural lives and livelihoods – an important area of research, popularly known as the migration and development literature – is gendered. The literature on internal migration in India tends to discuss migration as a strategy to ensure the food security of households by measuring the magnitude of migration, demarcating the reasons behind it (push–pull factors), and identifying the streams and patterns, particularly for inter-state migrants. However, the literature has not delved into the direct and gendered household-level linkages of migration with food security. What are the micro-processes of this dual relationship where food needs drive migration, and migration affects food security? How does single male migration impact the intra-household relations for women at source? Does it enhance the autonomy and decision-making agency of women? Or, does it increase the burden of productive and reproductive work for them? These complex and interconnected questions are at the core of analysis in Chetan Choithani’s book, which is situated at the junction of this research gap, discussing the impact of migration as a rural strategy on nutritional and food security outcomes. It also delves into how migration-led changes in intra-household bargaining relations alter household food security outcomes.

The key contribution of the book is empirical. Drawing on a case study-based approach, Choithani employs mixed methods, encompassing household surveys, semi-structured interviews, and a separate survey of women, focusing on the linkages among migration, food security, and gender. The eastern Indian state of Bihar, with a long history of male outmigration, is an apt site for this research to study the gendered impacts of migration. The initial chapters (1, 2, and 3) lay the foundation for the empirical work in the subsequent chapters. Chapter 1 presents an overview of food insecurity in India, highlighting the role of food security legislation amidst the paradox of high economic growth and inadequate nutrition outcomes. It traces the trajectory of right-to-food legislation, emphasises rural–urban disparities in nutritional outcomes, and justifies reasonings to focus on food and nutritional security outcomes in the context of rural outmigration. Chapter 2 draws on the literatures of entitlements and livelihoods to provide theoretical and analytical foundations for possible pathways between migration and food security. Choithani argues that the lack of scholarship on the nexus between migration and food security stems from four key factors. First, there is a greater emphasis in data, academia, and policy on international migration over internal migration. Second, migrants are treated as separate entities at their destination, which overlooks the crucial linkages between origin and destination. Third, the focus on migrant food security in urban areas undermines the importance of remittances that rural households rely on for their food security. Last, there is a dominant notion that improving rural households’ food and nutrition outcomes is primarily tied to land-based livelihoods. Chapter 3 assesses India’s performance in the Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals, and presents social, cultural, and regional dimensions of food insecurity. It discusses the social correlates of poverty and food security from the lens of gender and caste, followed by a reiteration of the newer agrarian reality of rural India where persisting agrarian distress drives out-migration, linking the changes in rural livelihood trajectories with processes of urbanisation.

Chapter 4 presents the development context of Bihar and traces the evolution of migration from the research site of Siwan in Bihar. In the post-liberalisation scenario, Choithani finds a weakening of the ‘optimising peasant migrant’ phenomenon as seasonal migration is increasingly being replaced by more permanent forms of circular migration – with a high incidence of casual work implying insecure employment tenure – to major cities (Delhi-National Capital Region (NCR), Kolkata, Bengaluru, Surat, Mumbai-Pune), which are largely male-dominated. This finding opens the door for exploring two key pathways for further enquiry: first, the rural–urban linkages created through remittances because of permanent forms of circular migration; and second, the changes triggered by a male-dominated pattern of migration, leading to a transformation of gender relations. Before delving into these two pathways, Chapter 5 interestingly talks about the niche literature on food safety nets and connects it with migration processes. This is achieved by assessing the efficacy of three major rights-based social policies by the central government that contribute to food, nutrition, and employment security for the rural poor in India: the Public Distribution System (PDS), the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS).

Chapter 6 delves into the conditions, intentions, and motivations of people, to migrate and stay in the source villages. The author emphasises emerging familial arrangements where the roof is shared, but income and financial responsibilities are separated. The study finds an increasing incidence of migration across caste-class categories and migrant households to be faring better in food security than non-migrant households mainly because of increasing remittances. The extent and duration of remittances vary by duration spent working outside by migrant members, and 98 per cent of remittances are used for food, followed by health, education, durables, and debt repayment. A two-way relationship between migration and land-agriculture is portrayed wherein the latter is unable to provide sustainable incomes, so the household chooses the former, whereas remittances from migration are recycled to be invested in land-agriculture. Although the author acknowledges the methodological limitation to capturing tenancy relations in detail, he still discusses tenant farmers as being more food insecure than others, at par with the conditions of landless labourers. Despite the unequal exchange arrangements of sharecropping, he suggests it is a helpful buffer against food shocks, thus contributing to food security. A novel contribution of this chapter is an equal focus not just on who migrates (and why), but also on why people are unable to migrate or decide to stay in the source region.

Chapter 7 deals with the black box of the household. Choithani treads the territory of intra-household power relations to understand the relationship between male migration, women at source, and food security. The chapter is dedicated to understanding the intra-household relations with men migrating and women at source navigating livelihoods through improved autonomy, increased responsibility, but also increased work burden and reduced leisure time. He finds that while ‘male migration enhanced women’s participation in household decision-making … in many families, women acted as the de facto household heads in the absence of men’ (p. 242). At the same time, it emerges that there is no straightforward relationship between male migration and women’s empowerment. Women’s participation in social and economic life, autonomy, and agency are also linked with food insecurity. Though remittances are associated with increased access to food among women who stay put at source, there is gender- and class-based vulnerability to food insecurity. Nuclear households are comparatively more food insecure compared to joint households (or extended families), where women often do not have to work, and resource aggregation with multiple sources of income acts as a buffer against shocks. Thus, the author argues that ‘the most marginalised (poor, lower-caste women) experience intersectional effects of migration, gender relations and food insecurity more intensely’ (p. 266). The diverse vignettes from the primary data in this chapter and other empirical chapters of the book – for instance, related to cash disputes in families and changing household arrangements – in a simple yet powerful manner, portray changing gender relations in a region with a long history of male migration patterns.

In sum, the book fills a major research gap as research on migration and food security is quite limited, and the interconnections with gender are further understudied. Through meticulous primary research, the book questions the linear migration and development discourse, offering a complex and nuanced picture of the burdens of male migration on women at source, arguing that increased autonomy and agency in the context of a poor rural and agricultural setting are not necessarily healthy developments; this cannot be equated with women’s empowerment. The book explains the journey of varied interconnected developmental issues situated around the core subject – migration, food security, and gender – talking to different streams of academic subjects (mobility, agrarian change, urbanisation, worker rights) and policy disciplines (social welfare and protection, rights-based policy). The issues outlined in the book focus on hunger and food insecurity in India, divergences between growth and development, the nature of structural transformation, farm–non-farm linkages, food-based safety nets, intra-household bargaining, and female-autonomy-responsibility aspect of male migration. The writing style of the book is clear and lucid, which balances accessibility with academic rigour, offering nuanced insights into the complex relationships between migration and food security. It caters to the interests of and is relevant for a wide range of audiences – students, scholars, policymakers, activists, and practitioners in the development sector.