India on the Move and Churning: New Evidence

Study on internal migration in India which analyses census data (using Cohort-based Migration Metric (CMM) and gravity model) and railway passenger traffic flow data  provided by the Ministry of Railways. The study is a chapter from the Economic Survey of India 2016-2017 and is endorsed by the Government of India.

The chapter presents two new approaches to estimating migration within India. The first is based on comparing similar cohorts across the two census periods, 2001 and 2011. The second is based on data on railway passenger traffic in the unreserved category for the period 2011-2016. Each is described in detail.

The study concludes that an India on the move is an India of churn; these new estimates, showing that migration within India is between 5 and 9 million annually, indicate that labour mobility in India is much higher than has been previously estimated. Another interesting finding is that the acceleration of migration was particularly pronounced for females and increased at nearly twice the rate of male migration in the 2000s.