Hyderabad: Hyderabad, Mumbai, Bengaluru Urban, Howrah and Central Delhi were the districts attracting most migrant arrivals, while Valsad, Chittoor and Guntur in Andhra Pradesh, Paschim Bardhaman, Agra, Villupuram and Saharsa are the top origin districts, according to a working paper by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM).
At the State level, Uttar Pradesh – Delhi, Gujarat – Maharashtra, Telangana – Andhra Pradesh and Bihar – Delhi emerge as the primary dyads of movement. West Bengal, Rajasthan and Karnataka are the States showing the maximum amount of growth in percentage share of the arriving passengers.
Similarly, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh are States where the percentage share of total migrants has reduced. The working paper titled ‘400 million dreams!’ by Bibek Debroy and Devi Prasad Misra was made using TRAI roaming data to identify the seasonality of movement of migration. It found that April-June is the high months for movement with November-December witnessing secondary highs. These are perhaps months where most migrant labour travel back to their places of origin.
A secondary high in winter time is perhaps indicative of travel around the festival or marriage season. January, on the other hand, appears to be the month of lowest travel.
TRAI roaming data was used to identify the seasonality of movement of migration and found that April-June is the high months for movement with November-December witnessing secondary highs. These are perhaps months where most migrant labour travel back to their places of origin.
A secondary high in winter time is perhaps indicative of travel around the festival or marriage season. January, on the other hand, appears to be the month of lowest travel.
In this paper, use high frequency, granular data from multiple sources to address the above issues. The primary data sources are data from the Indian Railways Unreserved Ticketing System (IR-UTS) and data from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Visitor Location Register (VLR) roaming subscribers.
Further, in order to track the impact of out-migration on the originating districts, the publicly available, district level, quarterly banking data published by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) was also used to construct an index to isolate and track effects of remittances originating from outside of the district.
This is intended as a quick proxy for examining the economic impact of out migration in the source districts. The highlights from the study include – overall domestic migration in India is slowing.
It was estimated the overall number of migrants in the country, as of 2023, to be 40,20,90,396. This is about 11.78 per cent lower as compared to the number of migrants enumerated as per Census 2011 (45,57,87,621). Consequently, the migration rate which stood at 37.64 per cent as per Census 2011 is estimated to have since reduced to 28.88 per cent of the population.
The study hypothesizes that this is on account of availability of improved services such as education, health, infrastructure and connectivity as well as improved economic opportunities in or near in major sources of migration and is an indicator of overall economic growth.
