7 Traversing Myriad Trails: Tracking Gender and Labour Migration across India

Abstract

This chapter argues that the effacement of gender in macro-analyses of internal migration in India is based on the collective inability to delineate the contours of female labour migration from the official databases. While critiquing the monocausal approach to migration which overwhelmingly privileges social over economic reasons in female migration, the chapter essays a gendered macro-view of labour migration in India, for which new methods of approaching the data of the most recent macro-survey on migration in India (2007–08) are applied. The authors argue that the migration pattern is enhancing structural gender inequalities in the labour market. While the domination of services and industry in male migrant employment has contributed to a degree of diversification in the structure of the male workforce away from agriculture, the same is not the case for the female workforce. Drawing on primary surveys conducted across 2009–2011, the chapter argues that a meso-level view shows a predominantly long- and medium-term migratory pattern among upper-caste women to have brought hitherto home-bound women into diversified employment in more white-collar services. On the other hand, short-term and circulatory migration involving hard manual labour with limited scope for social advancement predominates among women from traditionally disadvantaged castes/tribes. A distinctively gendered process of concentration among migrant women in paid domestic work, however, cuts across caste hierarchies. While women workers’ involvement in family decisions to migrate and ‘autonomous’ migration by women is not insignificant, a broad tendency towards their concentration in a narrow range of occupations is identified. It is argued that the temporary nature of much of employment leads to a pullback to villages, despite agrarian crisis. In foregrounding the intersections between caste, class, and gender inequalities, and arguing that such inequalities are being reconfigured through migration, the chapter draws on the perspective of the women’s movement in India. It is argued that the absolute reduction in employment for women during the most distinctive phase of high GDP growth in India posits the need for more redistributive and equalizing growth as the path forward for social justice.

Keywords

This paper is based on the findings of an IDRC-funded project entitled “Gender and Migration: Negotiating Rights - A Women’s Movement Perspective”, project number 103978-001.