In India, urbanisation is a process largely driven by migration. Despite this, migrants remain invisible in most urban policies and planning processes. While programmes such as the Smart Cities Mission aim to modernise urban India, there is still no reliable and updated database on city populations. Planners have to depend on Census 2011 data, which results in cities being governed without a clear understanding of who lives and works in them.
Urban policies seldom integrate the concerns of migrants since the common conception is that migrants place additional pressure on infrastructure such as housing, healthcare, and public services. Therefore, there is limited effort to include migrants in long-term urban planning. Although economists always argue that urbanisation leads to development, this view ignores the fact that urbanisation itself is a process shaped by migration. Migrants contribute significantly to urban economies, yet they remain excluded from policy discussions.
The COVID-19 pandemic briefly made migrants visible, leading to initiatives such as One Nation One Ration Card and Ayushman Bharat. However, these responses were largely crisis-driven. Additionally, there are social and political challenges related to migration, including language barriers and “sons of the soil” narratives that push migrants out of the city through discrimination. There is a pertinent need to recognise migrants as integral to urbanisation and to have a migration-sensitive approach to urban policies which have to be supported by better data systems.
This event will run from 9 -10 a.m. EST and 7.30–8.30 p.m. IST
*Please note: this is on online event. Zoom details will be sent out closer to the session*
About the speaker
Prof. S. Irudaya Rajan is Chair of the International Institute of Migration and Development (IIMAD), Kerala. He is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Migration and Development Journal now with Sage, and the editor of two Routledge series – the annual series of India Migration Report since 2010, and South Asia Migration Report, and lead editor of Springer Series – South-South Migration since 2017. He is also the Founder Editor in Chief of Migration and Development (Taylor and Francis). He was previously a professor at the Centre for Development Studies (CDS), Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India. Currently, he is the chair of the KNOMAD (The Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development) World Bank working group on internal migration and urbanization. He is one of the expert committee members to advise the Government of Kerala on COVID-19. With more than four decades of research experience, he has coordinated nine large-scale migration surveys in Kerala since 1998 (with K.C. Zachariah) and replicated the Kerala model of migration surveys in other states, including Goa (2008), Punjab (2009), Tamil Nadu (2015), and Odisha (2023), and has been instrumental in similar surveys in Gujarat (2011), and Jharkhand (2023). He has published extensively in national and international journals on social, economic, demographic, psychological, and political implications of migration.
