Internal Migration and Urban Employment in India: Evidence from NSS data

The purpose of this paper is to study the current employment pattern of internal migrants and the determinants of migrants’ sectoral employments in urban India, using the recent NSS (2007-08) data. It is found that about 43 per cent of the total urban workers are migrants with 32.2 percent within self-employed, 48.8 per cent within regular-employees and 41.3 per within casual-employed in India. The empirical findings from probit and multinomial logit models suggest that the existing wage rate, possessions of human capital, job market experience and household’s living standard are the major determinants of labour force participation of both seasonal and non-seasonal migrants in urban India. On the basis of above findings, it is suggested that the government of India ought to take strong rural development policy measure to create production networks within rural areas in order to restrict rural out-migration and the consequent urban casual employments, rather than depending too much on the existing Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), which fails to help all sections of rural people.