New estimates of labour migration in India have revealed that inter-state labor mobility is significantly higher than previous estimates.
This was stated in the Economic Survey 2016-17.
The study based on the analyses of new data sources and new methodologies also shows that the migration is accelerating and was particularly pronounced for females.
The data sources used for the study are the 2011 Census and railway passenger traffic flows of the Ministry of Railways and new methodologies including the Cohort-based Migration Metric (CMM) .
The new Cohort-based Migration Metric(CMM) shows that inter-state labor mobility averaged 5-6.5 million people between 2001 and 2011.
This is yielding an inter-state migrant population of about 60 million and an inter-district migration as high as 80 million.
The first-ever estimates of internal work-related migration using railways data for the period 2011-2016 indicate an annual average flow of close to 9 million migrant people between the states.
Both these estimates are significantly greater than the annual average flow of about 4 million suggested by successive Censuses and higher than previously estimated by any study.
Migration for work and education is also accelerating.
There is also a doubling of the stock of inter-state out migrants to nearly 12 million in the 20-29year old cohort alone.
Higher growth and a multitude of economic opportunities could therefore have been the catalyst for such an acceleration of migration.
Language does not seem to be a demonstrable barrier to the flow of people.
Fourth, the patterns of flows of migrants found in this study are broadly consistent with what is expected - less affluent states see more out migration migrating out while the most affluent states are the largest recipients of migrants.
Policy actions to sustain and maximize the benefits of migration include:- Ensuring portability of food security benefits,
- Providing healthcare and a basic social security framework for migrants - potentially through an inter-state self-registration process.
Redistributive Resource Transfer and the Economic Survey
Economic Survey also calculates Redistributive Resource Transfers’ (RRT) from the Centre (between 1994 and 2015) and value of natural resources for Indian States (over 1980 and 2014).
It correlates these with several economic outcomes and an index of governance.
Redistributive Resource Transfer or RRT to a state (from the Centre) is defined as gross devolution to the state adjusted for the respective state’s share in aggregate Gross Domestic Product(GDP).
The top 10 recipients are:- Sikkim,
- Arunachal Pradesh,
- Mizoram,
- Nagaland,
- Manipur,
- Meghalaya,
- Tripura,
- Jammu and Kashmir
- Himachal Pradesh
- Assam.
