Distress migration
Topic: Employment, Unemployment and Informalisation · NCERT: Beyond NCERT
Meaning
Distress migration is migration that people are forced into by crop failure, debt, disaster or lack of livelihood. They are not drawn by a good opportunity elsewhere. The move is a way to survive, not a choice. Such migrants usually end up in low-paid, insecure informal work at the destination.
Example
After a drought ruins their crop and moneylenders press for repayment, a small farmer's family leaves their village. They take daily-wage construction work in a city.
Don't confuse with
- Circular migration: this describes the pattern of repeated, temporary moves. Distress migration describes the cause, which is compulsion.
- Rural-urban migration driven by opportunity: here people are pulled by development and better jobs. In distress migration they are pushed out by a crisis.
Related concepts
- Unemployment
- Open unemployment
- Disguised unemployment
- Underemployment
- Seasonal unemployment
- Educated unemployment
- Youth unemployment
- Rural-urban migration
- Circular migration
- Reverse migration