Covid may have forced return of 51.6% urban men to villages: PLF survey

The coronavirus pandemic may have forced 51.6 per cent of men in urban India to migrate to their rural homes in what could be the country’s worst reverse migration, according to a report released by the National Statistical Office.

The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) conducted during July 2020-June 2021 collected information on migration and temporary visitors to households. The statistics office brought out the report titled “Migration in India, 2020-21” on the basis of information collected in the PLFS survey.

In India, since it is the male partner who migrates in search of work to urban places while the female stays back home, there is a huge gap between men in rural areas who have migrated from urban India (51.6 per cent) and women who have similarly moved from urban to rural areas (11 per cent) during the pandemic year.

Pronab Sen, former chief statistician of India, said 51.6 per cent is a huge number and depicts the extent of reverse migration. “Though the government spent a lot of money and provided free ration during this period, one is not sure whether the migrants benefitted from it, as they might not have ration cards,” Sen said.

Besides, the annual PLFS survey showed that the unemployment rate, according to usual status (reference period of last 365 days preceding the survey), eased to 4.2 per cent from 4.8 per cent in 2019-20. However, the drop in unemployment rate was accompanied by a rise in low-quality jobs, depicting that a lot of migrants may have opted for rural job guarantee schemes in which the government pumped in significant amounts of money during the pandemic year.
 

The high rural-to-rural male migration (44.6 per cent) shows that a lot of people staying away from their native places in other rural locations returned home during the pandemic. The high rural-to-rural female migration (88.8 per cent) is the result of women in India migrating to their husbands’ homes after marriage.

Male migration from other countries to rural areas (3.9 per cent) was also higher as compared to urban areas (2.3 per cent).

The survey pegged the rural migration rate at 26.5 per cent and urban migration rate at 34.9 per cent with the overall migration rate at 28.9 per cent. While it estimated the number of rural migrants at 21 crore, it pegged urban migrants at 11 crore, both totalling 32 crore. However, the survey clarified: “Estimated number of migrants given in the above table are design-based estimates and may be used as control totals for combining and arriving at rates and ratios. These figures are not intended for providing estimates of the number of migrants.”

The survey covered 1.1 lakh migrants — 59,000 in rural and 55,000 in urban areas. It covered the entire country except the villages in Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which remained difficult to access throughout the year.

Migrants are classified as those whose last usual place of residence is different from the present place of enumeration. The usual place of residence is the village or town where the person stayed continuously for a period of six months or more or intends to stay for six months or more.

On the other hand, for the purpose of the survey, temporary visitors in the households were determined as those who arrived after March 2020 and stayed in the households continuously for a period of 15 days or more but less than six months.