Circular migration
Topic: Employment, Unemployment and Informalisation · NCERT: Beyond NCERT
Meaning
Circular migration means workers repeatedly move between their home area and a work area for short periods, and never settle permanently at the work site. It is often tied to the farm season. Workers leave in the lean months and come back for sowing or harvest. It matters for policy because these workers keep changing places and can lose access to welfare. Portable benefits like One Nation One Ration Card try to fix this.
Example
Every year after harvest, workers from a village go to work in brick kilns or cut sugarcane in another state. They return home when the rains begin and farm work starts again.
Don't confuse with
- Rural-urban migration: this is any move from villages to cities, and it can be permanent. Circular migration is defined by repeated, temporary back-and-forth moves.
- Distress migration: this is defined by the reason (being forced by crop failure, debt or disaster). A move can be both circular and distress-driven.
Related concepts
- Unemployment
- Open unemployment
- Disguised unemployment
- Underemployment
- Seasonal unemployment
- Educated unemployment
- Youth unemployment
- Rural-urban migration
- Distress migration
- Reverse migration