A Study on the Causes and Consequences Inter-State Migration and Reverse Migration in Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract

In a huge populous country like India, migration is an acceptable reality and inevitable. It is a most effective tool for balancing between shortage of workers at one place and excess population at another area. In the present VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) business environment, Inter-state migration has socio-economic and political consequences in both donor and recipient states. Migrants do not always relocate willingly or voluntarily. Most of the migrations occur for economic reasons. If continuous employment and consistent income is guaranteed to everyone who are willing to work at all states, there is no need to migrate at all. The state of Tamil Nadu has been forerunner for inter-state migration; presently there is huge number of migrants working in the state. Places like Tirupur, Erode, Coimbatore, Chennai, Thiruvallur and Chengalpattu are having huge number in-migrants. While excessive inflow of migrants is economically advantageous to source states, it has mix of benefits and challenges to destination states. Long working hours, payment of low wages (about 70% of what the local workers get), poor living conditions, stagnated garbage and waste water, lack of sanitation facilities makes the lives of the migrants vulnerable. Reverse migration is an act of migrants getting back to home places. In extreme cases, migrants could not tolerate and decide to relocate to their native places. The decision made is not based on luxury or added quality of life at their places, but issues faced is migrated state It is a logical mechanism available to the migrant labourers when the whole economy is severely hit by a thunderstorm like covid-19.Migrants’ lives are badly affected to the standstill business environment which could not provide livelihood, shelter and any other social security this labour force. Migration is a constitutional right stronger implementation of labour and migration laws and More concrete measures to curb exploitation and harassment of in-migrants will only solve challenges in such a sensitive issue. The present study attempts to find out the impact of inter-state labour in-migration in Tamil and also the effect of reverse migration from the state.