Abstract
The study examines the effects of seasonal and permanent migration on rural inequalities in India. We apply the counterfactual method to estimate income using the Indian Human Development Survey, Wave II (2012) dataset. Findings reveal that seasonal migration is a distress-driven strategy adopted by the poor as opposed to permanent migration wherein there is high participation of better-off migrants. The effects of seasonal and permanent migration on income inequalities show similar paths. Using Gini decompositions and instrumental quantile regression, we find that while both seasonal and permanent migration improves within-group and between-group inequalities, seasonal migration benefits the poorest of the poor. The effect of migration follows an approximate U-shaped pattern for permanent migration and a decreasing trend for seasonal migration. The robustness of the results is checked using propensity score matching and instrumental variable regression. The study advocates that successful policy intervention rests in realising migration as an inevitable feature of development.
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Notes
IHDS is a collaborative research project of the University of Maryland, USA and National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), India. The dataset has been made publicly available for researchers, and has been used in scholarly studies in different fields of research (Thorat et al., 2017; von Carnap, 2017) including on aspects of internal migration in the Indian context (Desai & Banerji, 2008; Nayyar & Kim, 2018). The detailed IHDS-II sampling methodology is explained in Desai et al. (2012).
IHDS-II has a higher proportion of SC households in their survey than the Census (Desai et al., 2012). These samples are comparable to the NSS and the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) since both these surveys also have a slightly higher representation of SC and ST households.
Panchayats are village-level local bodies with elected members primarily responsible for implementing various public welfare programs in rural areas such as health, education, and infrastructure.
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Tiwari, C., Bhattacharjee, S., Sethi, P. et al. Internal Migration and Rural Inequalities in India. Popul Res Policy Rev 41, 1673–1698 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-022-09707-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-022-09707-5