The story of economic migration in India is decades old but policymakers need to realise that the script has been changing. No longer is it solely a case of men travelling out of villages to cities in search of work, as women and children wait at home. A new paper reveals that the number of women migrants in the country has been rising over the last three decades, both in urban and rural areas. According to the 64th round of the National Sample Survey (NSS), carried out in 2008, 45.6 per cent of women in urban India were migrants, up from 38.2 per cent in 1993.
There has been a lot of hand-wringing about the lack of women in the Indian workforce. The first step, however, is to acknowledge this swathe of Indian women, who are weighed down by domestic and familial responsibilities, but who have struck out on their own for a better economic life. Government and industry must now be able to work together to push them on the path of upward mobility.
