Migration: Moving to Where the Work Is
The train arrives at Mumbai Central at 5:47 in the morning.
Rajendra Kumar steps onto the platform with a cloth bag, a steel tiffin, and the phone number of a distant relative's neighbor who lives somewhere in Dharavi. He is twenty-two years old. He comes from a village near Darbhanga in Bihar, where his father farms one and a half acres of land that floods every monsoon.
Rajendra has never been to Mumbai. He has heard stories — the buildings so tall you cannot see the top, the sea that stretches to the horizon, the wages that are three or four times what you can earn at home. He has also heard other stories — the cost of a room, the loneliness, the way the city treats people who come from UP and Bihar.
He finds his way out of the station. The city hits him like a wall. The noise. The crowds. The smell of exhaust and fish and frying oil. He asks for directions in Hindi and is answered in Marathi, which he does not understand.
Within a week, Rajendra will find work at a construction site. He will carry cement and steel reinforcement bars up eight flights of stairs because the lift is reserved for materials, not for the men who carry them. He will earn four hundred rupees a day. He will sleep on the site — on the bare concrete floor of the building he is constructing — sharing a room with eleven other men.
He will send two-thirds of what he earns back to Darbhanga. His mother will use it for his sister's school fees, for medicine for his father's bad knee, for repaying the loan they took last year when the flood took the crop.
Rajendra is one of perhaps 140 million internal migrants in India. His story is the story of modern India — and of the modern world. People have always moved to where the work is. What has changed is the scale, the speed, and the distance.
Look Around You
In any Indian city, look at who builds the buildings, who drives the taxis, who cooks in the restaurants, who guards the gates. Most of them are not from that city. They have come from somewhere else — from Bihar, from UP, from Odisha, from Rajasthan, from Jharkhand.
Now look at who benefits from their labor. The building's owner. The restaurant's customers. The families who employ domestic help.
Migration is not just the movement of people. It is the movement of labor from where it is cheap to where it is needed — from poor places to richer places, from villages to cities, from one country to another.
The migrants make the city run. But the city rarely acknowledges them as its own.
Why People Move
No one leaves home for fun.
Migration — leaving your village, your family, your language, your familiar world — is almost always an act of economic necessity dressed up, sometimes, as ambition. People move because staying is worse.
Economists describe the forces that drive migration in terms of "push" and "pull."
Push factors are the conditions at home that make people leave: poverty, unemployment, landlessness, debt, natural disasters, social discrimination, lack of schools and hospitals. When the flood takes the crop, when the well runs dry, when there is no work between harvest seasons — these are pushes.
Pull factors are the conditions elsewhere that attract people: higher wages, more jobs, better opportunities, the promise of a different life. The construction boom in Delhi, the factories of Gujarat, the service economy of Bangalore — these are pulls.
But the push-pull framework, while useful, can be too clean. Migration is not a neat economic calculation. It is a human decision made under uncertainty, with imperfect information, shaped by networks, rumors, family obligations, and hope.
Rajendra did not sit down with a spreadsheet comparing wages in Darbhanga to wages in Mumbai. He heard from a cousin who heard from a friend that there was work in Mumbai. He knew other men from his village who had gone and come back with money. He knew the risks — he had also heard about men who went and never sent money home, men who got sick, men who were cheated by contractors.
He went anyway. Because the alternative — staying on one and a half acres of flood-prone land, watching his family slide deeper into debt — was worse.
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
| WHY PEOPLE MIGRATE |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| PUSH FACTORS (at home) | PULL FACTORS (at destination) |
| ===========================|===============================|
| Poverty / low wages | Higher wages |
| Unemployment | More jobs |
| Landlessness | Economic growth |
| Drought / floods | Better services |
| Debt | Education for children |
| Social discrimination | Anonymity (escape stigma) |
| Violence / conflict | Safety |
| Lack of schools, hospitals | Hospitals, schools |
| | |
| ========================================================== |
| MIGRATION DECISION is also shaped by: |
| - Networks (who do you know there?) |
| - Information (what have you heard?) |
| - Cost (can you afford the journey?) |
| - Risk tolerance (what can you afford to lose?) |
| - Family obligations (who depends on you?) |
| - Social norms (is migration accepted in your community?) |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
Internal Migration in India: The Scale
Most people, when they think of migration, think of people crossing borders — Mexicans going to the United States, Syrians fleeing to Europe, Indians working in the Gulf. But the largest migration flows in the world are internal — people moving within their own country.
India's internal migration is staggering in scale and almost invisible in public conversation.
The 2011 Census counted 450 million internal migrants — people living in a place different from where they were born. Of these, roughly 140 million had migrated for work. The actual number is almost certainly higher, because the census has difficulty capturing temporary and circular migrants — the construction workers who spend eight months in the city and four months in the village, the seasonal agricultural laborers who follow the harvest from state to state.
The flows have a clear geography. People move from the poorer states — Bihar, UP, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh — to the richer states and cities: Maharashtra (Mumbai, Pune), Gujarat (Surat, Ahmedabad), Delhi-NCR, Karnataka (Bangalore), Tamil Nadu (Chennai), and Kerala.
They do the work that the local population does not want to do — or cannot do cheaply enough. Construction, domestic service, factory work, driving, cleaning, cooking, security. The economic contribution of internal migrants is enormous and almost entirely unacknowledged.
During the COVID-19 lockdown of March 2020, this invisible population suddenly became visible. When India shut down with four hours' notice, millions of migrant workers found themselves stranded — no work, no wages, no food, no way home. They began walking. Images of families with children on their shoulders, walking hundreds of kilometers along highways in the summer heat, became the defining images of India's pandemic.
The lockdown did not create migrant vulnerability. It revealed it. The workers who built and cleaned and served the cities were not citizens of those cities. They had no ration cards, no rental agreements, no local identity. They existed in a legal and social limbo — present in the economy but absent from the polity.
What Actually Happened
The COVID-19 migrant crisis exposed a fundamental failure of Indian governance: the inability to see, count, and protect internal migrants.
India has no national registry of migrant workers. The Inter- State Migrant Workmen Act of 1979, designed to protect migrants, was barely enforced. Most migrants were not registered with any government agency. They had no access to the Public Distribution System (PDS) for subsidized food outside their home state. They could not vote in local elections where they lived and worked.
When the lockdown hit, an estimated 10 million workers attempted to return to their home states. Some walked for days. Some died on the road — of exhaustion, of heat, of traffic accidents, of the sheer indifference of a system that had never acknowledged their existence.
The government eventually arranged special trains — "Shramik Special" trains — to transport migrants home. But by then, the damage was done. Many migrant workers who returned to their villages vowed never to go back to the city. Many did go back, of course — because the push factors that drove them out in the first place had not changed.
International Migration: The Gulf, the IT Park, and the Hospital
India is also one of the world's largest sources of international migrants. The flows go in several distinct streams.
The Gulf stream. Since the oil boom of the 1970s, millions of Indian workers — mostly from Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, and UP — have gone to the Gulf states: Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain. They work in construction, domestic service, retail, and the oil industry.
The conditions are often harsh. The kafala (sponsorship) system ties a worker to their employer. If the employer is abusive, the worker has limited legal recourse. Workers' passports are sometimes confiscated. Wages are sometimes withheld. Living conditions in labor camps can be squalid.
And yet they go. Because wages in the Gulf, even for the lowest- paid work, are several times what the same work pays at home. A construction worker who earns Rs. 400 a day in India can earn Rs. 1,500 to 2,000 in Dubai. The calculation, for a man with a family to feed and a daughter to educate, is simple — even if the cost is years of loneliness, heat, and subjugation.
The IT stream. Indian software engineers, particularly from the 1990s onward, have migrated in large numbers to the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. This is a very different kind of migration — highly educated, well-paid, and socially prestigious. The Indian diaspora in Silicon Valley has produced CEOs of some of the world's largest companies: Google, Microsoft, IBM, Adobe.
This migration has been celebrated as a success story. But it raises uncomfortable questions. When a brilliant engineer trained at IIT — at public expense — moves to California and creates wealth for an American company, who benefits? The individual, certainly. The American economy, clearly. But India has invested in their education and lost their contribution. Is this "brain drain" — a loss for India — or "brain gain" — a connection to global networks of knowledge and capital?
The care stream. Indian nurses and healthcare workers have migrated in large numbers to the Gulf, the UK, the US, and other countries. Kerala, which invested heavily in education and healthcare, became one of the world's largest exporters of nurses. This migration transformed Kerala's economy through remittances — but it also left gaps in local healthcare.
Remittances: The River That Flows Uphill
When migrants work, they send money home. These transfers — called remittances — are one of the most powerful and least understood forces in the global economy.
India is the world's largest recipient of remittances. In 2022, Indian migrants sent home over $100 billion — more than India received in foreign direct investment. This money supports families, funds education, builds houses, pays medical bills, and sustains entire regional economies.
In Kerala, remittances from Gulf workers have transformed the landscape. Drive through any town and you will see the evidence: large houses, often half-empty because the men who built them are working in Dubai or Riyadh. Schools and hospitals funded by remittance money. Consumer goods purchased with Gulf earnings. Kerala's remarkable human development indicators — high literacy, low infant mortality, long life expectancy — are partly a product of remittance-fueled investment in health and education.
But remittances flow uphill — from poor workers to slightly less poor families — in a way that no government program can match. They are targeted with perfect precision: the migrant knows exactly what their family needs. There is no bureaucratic middleman, no corruption, no leakage.
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
| MIGRATION AND REMITTANCE FLOWS |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| SOURCE REGIONS DESTINATION REGIONS |
| (Poor, rural) (Rich, urban) |
| |
| Bihar ----workers----> Mumbai, Delhi, Gujarat |
| UP ----workers----> Delhi-NCR, Maharashtra |
| Odisha ----workers----> Gujarat, Karnataka |
| Jharkhand ----workers----> Construction sites everywhere |
| Rajasthan ----workers----> Gulf states, cities |
| Kerala ----workers----> Gulf states, US, UK |
| |
| <---money (remittances)--- |
| <---skills, ideas--- |
| <---aspirations--- |
| |
| Remittances to India (2022): $100+ billion |
| More than Foreign Direct Investment |
| Supports ~800 million people directly or indirectly |
| |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
Brain Drain vs. Brain Gain
When talented people leave a poor country for a rich one, is the poor country losing or gaining?
The traditional view — "brain drain" — sees emigration of skilled workers as a loss. India spent money educating an engineer at IIT. That engineer moves to the US and creates value there. India's investment is wasted. The country is left poorer.
There is truth in this. The scale of India's brain drain is significant. Of all IIT graduates from certain cohorts, more than half went abroad. The best medical students, the most talented researchers, the most ambitious entrepreneurs — many of them left.
But the picture is more complicated than "loss."
Remittances. Skilled migrants send money home — often large amounts. An Indian software engineer in Silicon Valley earning $200,000 a year might send $50,000 home annually. Over a career, this dwarfs the cost of their education.
Networks. The Indian diaspora creates connections between India and the global economy. Indian-origin executives at American tech companies opened doors for Indian IT companies. Silicon Valley Indians invested in Indian startups. The knowledge, contacts, and cultural bridges that diaspora communities create have real economic value.
Return migration. Some migrants come back — bringing skills, capital, and global experience. India's startup boom has been partly driven by returning Indians who gained experience at Google, Amazon, and McKinsey and came home to build companies.
Aspiration. The possibility of migration motivates investment in education. In Kerala, the prospect of a Gulf job encourages families to invest in their children's schooling. In Punjab, the hope of a Canadian visa drives English-language education. The brain drain, paradoxically, creates more brains — even if some of them leave.
The economist Devesh Kapur has called this "brain gain through brain drain" — the idea that emigration can, under certain conditions, benefit the sending country.
But this benign view has limits. When the best doctors leave a country where millions lack basic healthcare, when the best teachers leave a country where millions of children cannot read, the loss is not just economic. It is moral.
"Why should I stay? What has this country done for me?" — A young Indian doctor, explaining her decision to move to the UK
It is a fair question. And the answer — that the country invested in her education, that millions of people in her country need the skills she possesses — is also fair. The tension between individual freedom and collective obligation has no easy resolution.
The Great Migration
Migration is not an Indian phenomenon alone. It is a universal human experience.
One of the most significant migrations in modern history was the Great Migration of Black Americans — roughly 6 million people who moved from the rural South to the urban North and West of the United States between 1910 and 1970.
They left because the South was a place of sharecropping, violence, segregation, and systematic economic oppression. They went to Chicago, Detroit, New York, Los Angeles — to factory jobs, to higher wages, to a life with at least the possibility of dignity.
The Great Migration transformed American culture — jazz, blues, and eventually rock and roll flowed from the communities that Black migrants created in Northern cities. It transformed American politics — Black voters in Northern states became a political force that eventually made the civil rights movement possible.
But it did not end racism. Northern cities had their own forms of discrimination — redlining, housing segregation, police violence, discriminatory hiring. Migrants escaped the worst of Southern oppression but found new forms of exclusion in the North.
The parallels with Indian internal migration are striking. A Bihari migrant in Mumbai, like a Black migrant in Chicago, escapes the worst deprivations of home but encounters new forms of discrimination in the city — linguistic prejudice, housing discrimination, political exclusion, and the constant reminder that they are outsiders in a place they helped build.
The Forgotten Migration: Indian Indentured Labor
There is a migration in India's history that is less remembered but deeply significant.
After the British abolished slavery in 1833, plantation economies in the Caribbean, Mauritius, Fiji, South Africa, and Southeast Asia faced a labor shortage. The solution: indentured labor from India.
Between 1834 and 1920, roughly 1.5 million Indians were transported as indentured laborers to British colonies around the world. They were recruited — often through deception — from Bihar, UP, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh. They signed contracts (which many could not read) committing them to work for a fixed period, usually five years, in exchange for passage, food, and a small wage.
The conditions were, by many accounts, barely distinguishable from slavery. Workers were confined to plantations. Movement was restricted. Punishment for disobedience was harsh. Many workers died of disease, exhaustion, and malnutrition.
Yet from this suffering emerged vibrant communities. The Indian diaspora in Trinidad, Guyana, Fiji, Mauritius, and South Africa traces its roots to these indentured laborers. They preserved languages, customs, religious practices, and food traditions across oceans and generations.
Mahatma Gandhi's political awakening happened in South Africa, where he witnessed the discrimination faced by Indian workers — many of them descendants of indentured laborers. The struggle for Indian rights in South Africa shaped the man who would lead India's independence movement.
The Human Cost
Migration stories are usually told in economic terms — wages, remittances, GDP. But behind the numbers are human beings living fractured lives.
The construction worker in Mumbai who has not seen his children in six months. The nurse in Kuwait who misses her mother's funeral because she cannot afford the ticket home. The software engineer in San Francisco who makes more money than he ever imagined but lies awake at night thinking about his aging parents in Hyderabad, wondering if he will make it home in time if something happens.
The loneliness of the migrant is a universal experience. You are surrounded by people but belong nowhere. You are building a life in a place that is not home, sending money to a home you rarely see. Your children grow up without you. Your parents grow old without you. You miss weddings and festivals and the monsoon rains and the taste of the water from your own well.
The novelist Amitav Ghosh, in his Ibis Trilogy, wrote about Indian migrants in the nineteenth century — opium farmers pushed off their land, indentured laborers shipped across the sea. The details change, but the emotional core remains the same across centuries: the ache of leaving, the hope of arriving, the discovery that neither place is fully home anymore.
"The migrant is not merely a person who has moved. The migrant is a person who has been divided — who exists simultaneously in two places, belonging fully to neither."
What Migration Gives and What It Takes
Let us be honest about both sides.
Migration gives:
- Higher income for the migrant and their family
- Remittances that sustain communities back home
- Skills and experiences that would be unavailable at home
- Exposure to new ideas, cultures, and ways of thinking
- A chance — sometimes the only chance — at a better life
Migration takes:
- Years away from family — childhood moments missed, elderly parents unattended
- Physical and mental health — the toll of hard work in hostile environments
- Cultural identity — the slow erosion of language, custom, belonging
- Political voice — migrants often cannot vote where they live and do not return to vote where they are from
- Dignity — the daily experience of being treated as lesser, as outsider, as a problem
The economist sees migration as an efficient allocation of labor. The human being who migrates sees it as a sacrifice — a choice made not freely but from necessity, a deal with the devil that trades presence for provision, home for hope.
Think About It
If you live in a city, count the migrant workers you interact with in a single day. Where do they come from? What do they earn? What would your city look like without them?
Why does Indian society celebrate the IT professional who migrates to the US but often look down on the construction worker who migrates to Mumbai? Is there a real difference, or is it just about money and status?
During the COVID lockdown of 2020, migrant workers walked hundreds of kilometers to get home. What does this tell us about how the Indian state sees migrant workers? What should change?
"Brain drain" is often used as a criticism of skilled migration. But people have the right to seek the best life they can. How do you balance individual freedom with collective responsibility?
If you had to leave your home — your family, your language, your food, everything familiar — to earn a living somewhere else, what would be the hardest thing to leave behind? What would keep you going?
The Bigger Picture
Migration is as old as humanity. The first humans migrated out of Africa. Every inhabited continent was settled by people who moved to where conditions were better. The history of civilization is, in large part, a history of migration.
What is new is not migration itself but the tension between the economic logic of migration and the political systems that try to contain it. Economies want labor to flow freely — from where it is cheap to where it is needed. But nations want to control their borders. Communities want to preserve their identity. Workers at the destination fear competition. Politicians exploit these fears.
The result is a world of profound contradiction. Capital crosses borders freely — a dollar can move from New York to Mumbai in milliseconds. Goods cross borders relatively freely — your shirt was made in Bangladesh, your phone in China. But people — the most fundamental economic resource — face walls, fences, visa regimes, and hostile bureaucracies.
This asymmetry is not accidental. It reflects power. The people who benefit from free movement of capital and goods — investors, corporations, consumers in rich countries — have political power. The people who would benefit from free movement of labor — workers in poor countries — do not.
Within India, the same asymmetry plays out. Companies move capital freely from state to state. Goods flow across state borders (now seamlessly, after GST). But workers who move face linguistic hostility, housing discrimination, exclusion from welfare programs, and the constant threat of being told they do not belong.
The migrant worker is the living embodiment of a fundamental economic truth: labor is not a commodity. It is a human being who has left home, who works and bleeds and dreams, who sends money to children they rarely hold, who builds cities they will never own.
An economy that depends on migrants but refuses to see them as full members of society is an economy built on a lie — the lie that some people's labor is welcome but their presence is not.
Until we resolve that contradiction — in law, in policy, in how we treat the person who serves our food and builds our buildings and drives us home — we have not yet built a just economy.
We have built only a productive one. And productivity without justice is an engine without a conscience.
"No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark." — Warsan Shire
That line captures something that no economic model ever will: the terrible, necessary, human act of leaving everything you know and walking toward the unknown, because the alternative is worse.
The least we owe the people who make that journey is to see them. To count them. To include them. And to build an economy — and a society — worthy of their sacrifice.
This concludes Part V: Work, Labor, and Dignity. In Part VI, we turn to what people make — the story of industry and agriculture, of how nations build the capacity to produce, and why some succeed while others are kept on the outside.