Punjab’s poverty has urban bias, thanks to migrants

There are 8.65 lakh poor people in the cities as against 4.86 lakh in rural areas of the State with the former constituting 64 per cent of the total population living below the poverty line, according to the report prepared by HS Shergill, professor of economics along with Gurmail Singh.

The trend three decades ago was the reverse when the urban poor formed only 34 per cent of the total, they have pointed out. Admitting that poverty has been declining over the decades, the report points out that the rate of decline has been slower in towns but faster in villages. The study debunks another notion that urban poverty is a spill-over of the mass poverty prevailing in the countryside, that urban poor are actually rural poor who have migrated to urban centres for livelihood and sustenance. While this trend may be true for other regions of the country, the two economists assert this does not hold good in Punjab. “An outflow of poor from the much lower poverty incidence rural areas to higher poverty incidence urban areas is inconceivable,” they have opined.

“Most of the urban poor in Punjab are migrants from other states who are engaged in petty informal sector jobs and casual labour,” the study concludes. This thesis is based on the fact that lakhs of labourers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh continue to migrate into Punjab and the occupational profile of the migrants.

The occupational distribution of the urban poor reveals that 27 per cent of them are natives whereas 73 per cent are migrants, the latter comprising 26 per cent who hail from neighbouring states of Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and Haryana and 47 per cent from Bihar and UP.

Significantly, 79 per cent of the migrant labourers are engaged in activities such as self-employment in petty jobs in informal sector and 26 per cent as casual labourers. These jobs are the usual first refuge of migrants everywhere. The influx of migrants also explains the slower rate of poverty reduction in urban centres of Punjab since the pool of urban poor is being continuously replenished from other regions.