If Indian cities have become successful in turning away migrants, we should see that as the first sign of their demise, not their dynamism.
“Stop migration into cities.” These were the words of finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman during last week’s budget speech, even as she — confusingly — called urbanization an “opportunity rather than a challenge.”
A call to stop rural-urban migration should alarm, but not surprise us. The FM’s statement is grounded in three powerful myths that have persisted for decades in India and continue to cloud the vision of our policymakers and politicians. These myths must be debunked.
Myth 1: Rural migrants are flooding into Indian cities
According to the government’s own data, surprisingly few rural Indians are relocating to cities. Between 2001 and 2011, net rural-urban migration stood at about 20 million people. In China, the only country in the world of comparable size, migration alone swelled the urban population by 177 million in the first decade of the century. In fact, the rate of migration into cities in India has remained essentially stagnant since the 1970s — even after liberalisation unleashed a wave of economic growth.
Contrary to the popular imagination of migrants flooding into megacities like Mumbai and Delhi, India’s urbanisation is increasingly driven by the conversion of villages into towns through natural population growth and local shifts in employment — i.e. the creation of census towns — and the majority of these settlements are not on the fringes of the country’s big cities.
Myth 2: Migration is bad for cities and the country as a whole
Migration is the hallmark of a dynamic economy where people have the resources to move to the places where their skills will be best utilised. Because it facilitates labour market matching, migration is better for both people — who end up with higher wages — and businesses — who end up with more productive workers. Migration enables specialisation, which in turn fuels trade and economic development.
Perhaps what the finance minister meant was: No one should be forced to migrate due to destitution or extreme poverty. We would agree. At the same time, to suggest migration is a social ill that ought to be “stopped” misses the forest for the trees. Even China, with its draconian limits on people’s movement, has not succeeded in controlling migration, because in a dynamic economy the benefits of migration are too great for people to ignore.
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