Struggling to Save Cash: Seasonal Migration and Vulnerability in West Bengal, India (2025)

Seasonal Migration for Livelihoods in India: Coping, Accumulation and Exclusion

Precarity as a Coping Strategy of the Gonds: A Study of Insecure and Long-distance Seasonal Migration in Central India

Studies on the informal economy in India show how precarious it is to be a migrant worker in an informal economy and how migrant workers are perpetually at risk of being exploited by market forces. They show how horizontal networks in India along the exploited class of labourers have never worked due to vertical social base (Pattenden, 2010). Therefore, they call for a stronger role of the state in organising and regulating the livelihoods in rural India. On the other hand, scholars studying changing labour, land and capital relations in rural India (Breman, 2010) have shown that there is a constant precarious condition of debt that such workers have to navigate and contest. The article shows how Gonds, a Scheduled Tribe population, who are facing forest evictions and are internally displaced, have resorted to long-distance migration in India. In the absence of state provisioning and formal recourse to law due to the inability to read and write, the Gonds are left to fend for themselves. Precariousness has become a normalised way of life to avoid starvation and indebtedness. However, this article also shows that circular and seasonal migration is valued and considered to be a successful strategy for most rural households. It also involves improving social networking skills and their knowledge of the market and the work. Above all, this strategy helps Gonds to be debt-free and independent as possible.

Seasonal migration of rural labor in India

Population Research and …, 1999

Migrants and their money are not all the same: Migration, remittances and family morality in rural South India

The article analyses the relation between social remittances and migrant families through the perspective of migrant elites' politics of identity in sending contexts. It argues for the importance of looking historically at how competing engagements with migration have led people to morally evaluate the suitability of remittances for kinship well-being. Migrant elites' conceptions of remittances are underpinned by a double meaning associated with 'foreign money', which is in turn highly influenced by local perceptions of different migrant destinations. On the one hand, money (as other goods) symbolizes loyalty towards the family and the community. On the other, money becomes the visible manifestation of distance between kin, and is locally judged insofar as it is not able to replace the lack of family care and affection. In the process, remittances emerge not only as a medium of family care, but also a social phenomenon through which the morality and possibility of kinship solidarity is questioned, if not invalidated.

Migration, remote rural areas and chronic poverty in India

2011

Agrarian Questions of Labor in Urban India: Middle migrants, translocal householding and the intersectional politics of social reproduction

Our paper re-considers the agrarian question in urban India by focusing on the social reproduction of labor in informal economy households. Based on life histories of working-class women of rural origin, we explore lived forms of differentiation within the informal economy, the social division of labor as mediated by intersecting lines of difference, and possibilities of disorienting normative hierarchies through acts of ‘cultural production’. Our term ‘middle migrants’ characterizes households that have managed to establish a foothold in cities, even as they remain enmeshed in their rural lives through translocal householding and cultural dispositions to difference.

Migration as family strategy: Rural-urban labor migration in India during the twentieth century

The History of the Family, 1997

Migration and the invisible economies of care: Production, social reproduction and seasonal migrant labour in India

Transactions of Institute of British Geographers, 2020

This paper focuses on the processes of migrant labour exploitation which are crucial for capitalist growth and the inequalities they generate. Ethnographic research conducted in different sites across India shows how patterns of seasonal labour migration are driven by class relations marked by hierarchies of identity (caste and tribe) and the spatial geopolitics of internal colonialism (region)differences

Women's livelihoods in a transnational social space: Labour Migration from Far West Nepal to Delhi, India

NREGA and labour migration in India: Is village life what the 'rural' poor want?

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) is the flagship welfare programme of the UPA government, and the largest of its kind in India. One of its main objectives is a significant reduction in labour migration through the provision of locally available work in rural areas, but in spite of some successes, the programme has not had the wished-for impact. Drawing on government data, recent independent studies and the Indian media, the present article argues that NREGA’s limited impact partly stems from a misconception of labour migration – as a poverty ‘problem’ and as merely a product of ‘push-and-pull’ economic factors. It contends that this view wrongfully casts ‘rural’ livelihoods and ‘urban’ society as somehow separate, and assumes that farming is what ‘the poor’ really want, thus establishing poverty as chiefly a rural problem to be tackled by rural development. Accepted explanations for NREGA’s relative failure do not account for the possibility that migration for work may be perceived as a more attractive activity. The view of labour mobility as essentially ‘involuntary’ and driven solely by economic considerations overshadows two sets of reasons why people may still prefer to migrate; namely social factors and evolving perceptions of ‘modernity’. The poor too have aspirations, which are not restricted to survival matters. NREGA has benefitted those with little or no access to positive migration opportunities, especially Scheduled Castes and Tribes, but is unlikely to succeed in curbing labour mobility significantly – which is not desirable anyway. Here, the crucial development challenges are not to reduce migration but to improve its conditions, both economic and social – and to account for the poor’s aspirational horizons.