In Transit: The Making of Urban Migrants in India

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The neo-liberal transformation of India was aided by the restructuring processes launched by the SAP in 1991 and brought the open market to the centre of economic imagination for new India. As the Indian economy opened up to the global financial capital systems and the private sector expanded, a large proportion of labour was relocated to the private, unorganized sector in India. This sector swallowed a majority of the migrant population that was flowing into the urban centers of India. The “middle class aspirations” that the migrants to the cities harbored materialize as a part of the larger neo-liberal aspiration of being upwardly mobile and living a ‘good life’. Based on an ethnographic study conducted in two phases, this paper accounts the narratives of men and women migrants who are employed in the various service sector units of two shopping malls in the city of New Delhi. This paper maps the diversity in the migrant experience by comparing the experiences of two distinct groups of migrants employed in these sectors in India- the indigenous migrants from North East India and the migrants from the rural hinterlands of North India. By comparing the narratives of two groups of migrants my paper tries to argue that in addition to education and credentials, classifications of caste, community and ethnicity play an important role in determining ‘life chances’ and employment opportunities for migrants in urban India.