Socio-Economic Impact of Male Out-migration on Households in Rural Garhwal, India

Migration has been adopted as a significant livelihood strategy for poor households in several regions of India and the hilly part of the state of Uttarakhand is no exception to this. Hence, the paper expounds the socio-economic and demographic characteristics by type of households i.e. households with out-migrant males who have left their wives behind and households with non-migrant males staying with their wives. The diagnostic statistics allows seeing whether there exists a significant difference in the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of the two groups under study. At the household level, the income, savings and investments are higher for the households with out-migrant husbands than households with non-migrant husbands. The mean monthly per capita expenditure is also higher for the former category of the households than the latter. Higher percentages of households with left-behind wives live in pucca houses, have electricity, have source of drinking water within their premises and own pit toilet than households of wives with non-migrant husbands. In line with the findings with housing and economic conditions, the wealth index reveal that the households with out-migrant husbands have better economic conditions as compared to the households with non-migrant husbands.