Fear vs flow: Migration and the city

For decades, Indian cities have been magnets of opportunity, offering hope for social mobility.

- Amit Kapoor

Millions of migrants have moved from the rural hinterlands to urban areas. From the textile mills of Mumbai to the tech parks of Bengaluru, they are the hidden force that continues to power India's urban transformation.

This movement has not been incidental to India's growth story, but central to it. Yet, an emerging pattern of fear-based governance now threatens this circulatory system, raising the question of whether India's cities can continue to serve as engines of migration and, by extension, engines of economic growth and development.

Internal migration in India is massive in scale. According to the 2011 Census, there were over 450 million internal migrants, which is about 37 per cent of the population. This reflected a sharp rise from the 30 per cent recorded a decade earlier, according to the World Bank analysis. Rural-to-urban flows have been a major component, with some states seeing nearly a 30 per cent surge in their urban populations during 2001-2011, driven largely by migration. These demographic shifts have reshaped the economic geography of the country. Migrants are integral not only to the informal economy, which contributes roughly 45 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), but also to the formal sectors that depend on their labour as a low-cost resource.