What is the issue?
- Despite the absence of any explicit barriers to mobility, India's inter-state mobility is relatively lower.
- Analysing the reasons behind and making necessary policy alterations are essential to facilitate mobility to seek opportunities.
How is the internal migration pattern in India?
- Internal migration rates across states are relatively lower in India than in other many other countries.
- Roughly, internal migrants represented 30% of India’s population as per 2001 Census.
- However, two-thirds of these were migrants within districts.
- There is a higher rate of migration from faraway districts of the same state than from nearby districts of a different state.
- Moreover, more than half of them were women migrating after marriage.
- Notably, states with higher rates of access to higher education and public employment have relatively less student and skilled migrants moving out.
- The rate of migration has almost doubled between 2001 and 2011 relative to the previous decade.
- However, labour migrant flows within states are much larger than flows across states.
- Evidently, state borders remain impediments to mobility though there are no explicit barriers to inter-state mobility in India.
What are the reasons?
- Barriers to internal mobility include physical distance and linguistic differences.
- Differences in economic and social features among different states are also among notable reasons.
- Despite these, there are a range of other factors that works as disincentives to inter-state migration.
- Social Benefits - A majority of social entitlement programmes are administered by state governments, even when they are centrally funded.
- In essence, many of the social benefits and entitlements are not portable across state boundaries.
- Access to subsidised food through the public distribution system (PDS) is a major reason.
- Evidently, in states where the PDS offers higher levels of coverage, unskilled migrants are less likely to move out-of-state.
- Even admissions to public hospitals, schools, etc are administered through ration cards issued and accepted only by the home state government.
- Education - Many universities and technical institutes are administered by state governments.
- Notably, state residents get preferential admission in these through “state quota seats”.
- The “domicile certificates” necessary for this require continuous residence in the state, ranging from 3 to 10 years in different states.
- Employment - Though accounting for only about 5% of total employment, public sector employs more than half of the higher-skilled.
- However, in most states, more than three-fourths of government jobs are with the state rather than the central government.
- Here again, state domicile is a common requirement for jobs in state government entities.
- Moreover, states are increasingly expanding and promoting the “jobs for natives” policies in the recent period.
- E.g. Karnataka recently directed both public and private sector firms to reserve 70% of their jobs for state residents or would lose access to state government industrial policy benefits.
What could be done?
- India's “fragmented entitlements” should be integrated to offer citizens access to social benefits irrespective of the residing state.
- This is essential to boost growth and check poverty, by facilitating access to productive opportunities available across the country.
- A nationally portable identity could prove to be an important step.
- States should rationalise the discriminatory policies and become more inclusive in offering employment and education.
Source: Indian Express
