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.
