Human Geography: Migration and settlements

Migration: streams, causes and consequences

Migration is a change of usual residence. Census records it by place of birth and by place of last residence. Census 2011 counted about 45.6 crore internal migrants by last residence, about 37% of the people. There are four streams: rural to rural (the largest, mostly women moving on marriage), rural to urban, urban to urban and urban to rural.

Push factors drive people out: poverty, small farms, floods and droughts, and lack of jobs. Pull factors draw them in: jobs, wages, schools, health care and city life. For women, marriage is the main reason; for men, work. The big work streams run from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, Jharkhand and Rajasthan to Maharashtra, Gujarat, Delhi, Punjab, Karnataka and Kerala.

Mains 2015 asked about the changes in the trends of labour migration within and outside India in the last four decades. Within India, migration has moved from seasonal farm work in Punjab towards construction, factories and services in cities, and more women now migrate for work. Abroad, the stream moved from unskilled workers to the Gulf after the 1970s oil boom, to skilled IT and health workers to the USA, UK, Canada and Australia. India is the world’s largest recipient of remittances.

Consequences cut both ways. Areas of origin gain remittances and skills but lose young men, leaving women and the old to run farms. Destinations gain labour but face slums and strain on services. Migrants often lose ration, voting and welfare rights when they move; One Nation One Ration Card (portable ration cards) and the e-Shram portal for unorganised workers try to fix this.

Settlements: rural types, towns and pastoral

communities A settlement is any cluster of homes. Rural settlements depend on land; urban ones on secondary and tertiary work. Site factors matter: water, flat land, defence and freedom from floods. Many north Indian villages sit on raised land above flood level; desert villages sit near wells and ponds.

NCERT names four types of rural settlement. Clustered villages are compact, in fertile plains (the northern plains) and in the north-east where defence mattered. Semi-clustered ones grow when a group splits off, often by caste. Hamleted villages are broken into units called panna, para, palli, nagla or dhani, as in the middle and lower Ganga plain and Chhattisgarh. Dispersed homes appear in hills and forests (Meghalaya, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh) and on the Kerala plain.

Census 2011 defines an urban area in two ways. Statutory towns have a municipal body or cantonment. Census towns have no such body but meet three tests: a population of at least 5,000, at least 75% of male main workers outside agriculture, and a density of at least 400 per sq km. Census 2011 counted 7,933 towns, of which 3,892 were census towns.

Some communities still move with their herds. Prelims 2014 asked about the Changpa community: they rear the Pashmina goats that yield a fine wool and are listed as Scheduled Tribes, but they live in Ladakh, not Uttarakhand (option b). Prelims 2013 matched a region where the climate is extreme, rainfall is scanty and the people used to be nomadic herders to the Central Asian Steppe (option b). In India, the Gaddis of Himachal, the Bakarwals and Gujjars of Jammu and Kashmir, the Raikas of Rajasthan and the Bhotiyas of Uttarakhand practise transhumance.

Mains 2015 argued that smart cities in India cannot sustain without smart villages. Villages feed cities with food, water and workers; if they stay poor, migrants pour into city slums. The answer is rural–urban integration: roads, broadband, rural industry and services (as the Shyama Prasad Mukherji Rurban Mission tried with clusters of villages), so that people can earn without leaving.