Mains Practice Questions

Approach

• Define Migration and give its types
• While enumerating the issues faced by migrants also list down the benefits of migration
• Discuss how a national migration policy will help tackle migration issues.

Answer

• Migration is the movement of people from one place to another. It can be over a short or long distance, be short-term or permanent, voluntary or forced, intranational or international.
• According to Economic Survey 2016-17 in the last five years from 2011 to 2016, an average of nine million people migrated between states within India every year for either education or work.

Push and pull factors

• A pull factor is a feature or event that attracts a person to move to another area.
• Pull factors include things like better opportunities in that area  like educational, job propects, higher quality of life, security, freedom etc. The core pull factors of migration are employment and marriage
• Push factors are those that drive people away from that place such as war, famine, natural hazards such as earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes, threat to life, repressive state, no job or educational facilities, difficult and harsh living conditions etc.
• Insurgency, Naxalism, terrorism and militant groups in modem times force people to move out of their home.

Benefits of migration

• The areas of destinations benefit due to the reduction in the cost of production, availability of the human resource,  rising productivity, size of consumer and capital market.
• At the same time, areas of origin also benefit through the flow of remittances, information, and innovations influencing the households and people left behind.

Issues related to migration

• Low quality jobs: Migrants mostly dominate the low-paying, hazardous and informal market jobs in key sectors in urban destinations, such as construction, hotel, textile, manufacturing, transportation, services, domestic work etc.
• Access to employment: Certain states have introduced domicile requirements with regard to employment.  This puts migrants at a disadvantage.
• Housing and sanitation:  One of the key issues with regard to housing is poor supply, for both ownership and rental.  Short-term migrants do not have access to short-duration accommodation. So migrants live in overcrowded colonies in unhygienic conditions.
• Exploitation and intimidation: Usually migrants are exploited at the behest of majoritarian native population, they are target of social profiling, stereotyping, abuse and are made to work under exploitative conditions with no social security cover. For ex: Gujarat migrant crisis.

Need for national migration policy

• To address the issues related to migration it is necessary to have a national policy on migration.
• A national policy will help in addressing the issues related to the working condition of the migrants, their wages.
• It will help ensure social protection and medical benefits to migrants workers in the place they migrated to.
• It will help in addressing the issue of access to benefits such as PDS under legal and social entitlements (such as PDS) at their source location.
• National Policy will help in addressing not only the housing problem which migrants face. But also access to basic services water supply, electricity, and sanitation.