Freedom to Move, Barriers to Stay: An examination of rural migrants’ urban transition in the Indian Capital of Delhi

Prospects of Indian cities are greatly tied to rural migrants’ ability to transition into productive urban citizens. However, their ability to do so depends not only on economic opportunities but also on the city’s ability to deliver on quality of life indicators. While there is increasing work on micro-level dimensions of poverty and wellbeing in rural developing country contexts, little empirical work examines parallel dimensions in urban areas. This gap is especially pronounced in scholarly work on migrant outcomes, especially in Indian urban destinations. Within this context, I carry out an assessment of rural-urban migrants’ multidimensional wellbeing in India’s capital city, Delhi. The analysis uses two unique geo-referenced data sources that allow for combining socio-economic survey data with neighborhood level indicators of service provision extracted from Delhi GIS. I find that as compared to urban native dwellers, rural-urban migrants are significantly poorer across economic as well as non-economic formulations of wellbeing in Delhi. More importantly, the disadvantage arising from being a rural migrant does not disappear with an increased duration of residence in the city, implying a persistent lack of socio-economic mobility for the urbanizing individuals and important implications for urban inequality in India.