Rural-urban migration and the informal sector

Detail

1. What rural-urban migration is

• Rural-urban migration means people moving from villages to towns and cities to live and work there for a long time.
• It is the main human link between the countryside and the urban problems in this chapter: slums, crowding, urban waste and pollution.
• Three causes:
• High demand for labour in cities. Factories, construction sites and services need many workers.
• Few jobs in villages. Farm work is seasonal and landholdings are small.
• Unbalanced development between rural and urban areas. Cities get more industry, roads, schools and hospitals, so incomes and chances are better there.

2. Why migrants skip small towns

• Poor migrants often bypass small and medium towns and go straight to megacities (very large cities; in India, cities with 50 lakh or more people, such as Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata).
• The chain of cause and effect:
• Small and medium towns have few factories and little building work.
• So they offer few jobs to unskilled workers.
• Migrants head for megacities. This overloads those cities' housing, water, sewerage and waste systems, and slums grow.

3. Where urban growth comes from

• A city's population grows in three ways:

Component	Meaning in simple words
Natural increase	More births than deaths among people already living in the city
Net in-migration	People moving into the city minus people moving out
Reclassification	Villages that grow and change are officially counted as towns, so their people become "urban" without moving

• India after 1961: about 60% of urban growth came from natural increase and about 29% from rural-urban migration (NCERT; treat both shares as approximate).
• So migration matters, but most urban growth in India comes from the city's own births.

4. The world picture (UN, World Urbanization Prospects 2018)

• 55% of the world's people lived in urban areas in 2018. This is projected to reach 68% by 2050 [3].
• Most urban regions (2018): Northern America 82%, Latin America and the Caribbean 81%, Europe 74%, Oceania 68% [3].
• Urbanisation plus population growth could add about 2.5 billion people to cities by 2050. Close to 90% of this rise will be in Asia and Africa [3].
• India, China and Nigeria will together account for 35% of world urban growth between 2018 and 2050 [3].
• India will add about 416 million urban dwellers, China 255 million and Nigeria 189 million [3].
• India tops this list, so migration-led urban pressure will keep rising.

5. Case study: Ramesh (Odisha)

• His background:
• He came from a family in debt.
• The family had three acres of land, shared among three brothers, so each share was too small to live on.

• He left school after Class 9.

• His journey:

Stage	Place (State)	What happened
1	Ludhiana (Punjab)	Worked in a woollen factory for ₹20 a day (1988). He struggled to adjust to a new language, food and culture
2	Surat (Gujarat)	Learnt welding, which gave him a skill
3	Many sites	Now works for a contractor in Surat, Mumbai (Maharashtra), Gandhinagar, Bharuch, Jamnagar (Gujarat) and Talcher (Odisha coalfield)

• Remittances: he sends home about ₹20,000 a year. A remittance is money a migrant sends back to the family.

• His family spends it on daily needs (consumption), health, schooling, farming, buying land and building a house.

• Push and pull factors:

• Push factors (problems at home that drive people out): poverty, debt and small landholdings.
• Pull factors (attractions that draw people to a place): jobs people believe exist in the city, and networks of successful migrants from the same village who show the way and help newcomers settle.

• Push and pull factors together explain why migration happens.

• Pattern to note: Ramesh moved from east India (Odisha) to west and north-west India (Gujarat, Maharashtra, Punjab). This is the typical direction of long-distance labour migration.

6. The informal sector

• Informal sector: small, unregistered businesses and casual work (paid by the day or by the job). Workers have no job security (they can lose the job any day) and no social protection (no pension, insurance, paid leave or health cover).
• Who ends up there:
• Most migrants are poor, semi-literate and unskilled.
• So they get low-paid manual jobs: construction, loading, street vending, domestic work and small workshops.

• Low wages mean they cannot pay city rents, so many live in slums close to work sites.

• Size today: the e-Shram portal recorded 31.89 crore registered unorganised workers (as on 18 August 2026) [2].

• Women make up 54.28% of those registered and men 45.72% [2].
• 55.21% are aged 18–40 years [2].
• The biggest job groups are agriculture, domestic and household work, construction and apparel [2].

7. Effects on families and villages

• Male-dominated streams:
• Men migrate alone.
• Wives stay in the village to look after children and elderly parents.

• So rural-urban work migration has far more men than women.

• Gains: remittances raise living standards in the village. Families pay for food, health care, school fees, farm inputs, land and better houses.

• Costs: families live apart for years. Women carry more of the farm and household work. Children grow up with an absent father.

8. Migration in India: Census 2011 and after

• Census 2011 counted about 45.6 crore migrants by place of last residence (a person counts as a migrant if they now live somewhere other than where they last lived).
• Most moves were short-distance, within the same district or state.

• Most migrants were women who moved after marriage.

• Long-distance work migration (the main corridors):

Source states (out-migration)	Destination states (in-migration)
Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand	Maharashtra, Delhi, Gujarat, Punjab, Kerala

• COVID-19 exodus (2020):
• The lockdown shut down informal work, and millions of migrants walked or travelled back to their villages.

• It showed that welfare was not portable: ration cards and benefits worked only in the home state.

• Policy responses:

• One Nation One Ration Card (ONORC): a migrant can draw subsidised food grain from any ration shop in India.
• e-Shram portal: launched by the Ministry of Labour and Employment on 26 August 2021 to build the National Database of Unorganised Workers (NDUW), linked to Aadhaar [4][2].
  • Each worker gets a 12-digit Universal Account Number (UAN) [2].
  • The portal records family details of migrant workers, so their families can be reached by schemes for children's education and for women [4].
  • Its stated goal is portability of social security and welfare benefits for migrant and construction workers [2].
  • It links to schemes such as PMSBY, PMJJBY, NSAP, ONORC and PMAY-G [2].
  • The e-Shram "One-Stop-Solution" (21 October 2024) brings different welfare schemes onto one platform [4].
  • Registrations rose from 30.48 crore (19 December 2024) [4] to 31.89 crore (18 August 2026) [2].
  • Since 2025 the portal works in 22 languages [2].

Prelims Hooks

• NCERT's three causes of rural-urban migration: high urban labour demand, few rural jobs, and unbalanced rural-urban development.
• Urban growth has three parts: natural increase, net in-migration and reclassification. In India after 1961, natural increase (about 60%) was larger than rural-urban migration (about 29%).
• World urban share: 55% (2018) → 68% (2050), per UN World Urbanization Prospects 2018 [3].
• India will add the most urban dwellers between 2018 and 2050 (416 million), ahead of China (255 million) and Nigeria (189 million) [3].
• Place–state pairs from the Ramesh case: Ludhiana–Punjab; Surat, Gandhinagar, Bharuch, Jamnagar–Gujarat; Talcher–Odisha; Mumbai–Maharashtra.
• Push factors: debt, poverty, small holdings. Pull factors: perceived jobs, networks of earlier migrants.
• Census 2011: about 45.6 crore migrants by last residence. Marriage, not work, was the main reason, so most migrants were women. Trap: work-led rural-urban streams are male-dominated.
• e-Shram: launched 26 August 2021 by the Ministry of Labour and Employment. It gives a 12-digit UAN. Women make up 54.28% of registrants (2026) [2][4].

Mains Points

• Causes and spatial pattern (GS-I): uneven regional development pushes labour from the poorer eastern and northern states (UP, Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand) to the industrial west and north (Maharashtra, Gujarat, Delhi, Punjab) and to Kerala. Migrants skip small towns that create few jobs and pile into megacities, which feeds slums and overloads urban services.
• Informal-sector trap: low skills lead to casual, unprotected, low-wage work, which leads to slum housing and exposure to pollution and waste. COVID-19 (2020) showed how fragile this is. Portable welfare (ONORC, e-Shram with 31.89 crore registrants in 2026 [2]) is part of the answer.
• Village-level effects: remittances pay for consumption, health, schooling, land and housing (the Ramesh case), but male-dominated migration leaves women and the elderly behind, splits families and puts more farm work on women.
• Way forward: grow small and medium towns as job centres to balance development. Use skilling (Ramesh moved up only after learning welding), affordable rental housing in cities, and welfare that travels with the worker across states.