In Ludhiana’s cinema halls showing
Bhojpuri movies, it is tough to get tickets. In Surat, getting a job is
easier than a train reservation for Bihar or UP. In a cluster of
villages outside Amritsar, most landlords are from UP.
Bade Lal Chaurasia’s father shifted to Ludhiana from Uttar Pradesh, set
up a small paan shop, which is now a landmark. Chaurasia now employs a
chartered accountant to look at his finances (after an Income Tax raid).
This migrant story is now repeated many times over all over the country
and — sorry to disappoint Raj Thackeray — these people are are
not headed for cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai. Their
destination is a Category-II city or town like Ludhiana, Surat or
Kochi. The pace is lot less hectic, there are plenty of jobs going
around — they feel wanted — and they are relatively free of idle
xenophobes.
This trend was first recorded during 1991. Now, of course, it is
official that some of India’s second-rung cities are the new hot
destinations at a time when in-migration is consistently slowing down
in most metros. Delhi and Bangalore are exceptions to that trend. But
Mumbai and Kolkatta, two of India’s top destinations of the Fifties and
Sixties, are falling behind. And if Thackeray continues to act tough,
Mumbai may drop completely.
In places like Kochi, Ludhiana and Surat, the percentages of
in-migrants are higher than the population growths. The Census of India
figures of in-migration as a percentage of decennial growth have been a
staggering 77.7 per cent in Kochi, 75.2 per cent in Ludhiana, 67.3 per
cent in Surat and Nasik. The big daddies scored between 37 and 49 per
cent: Kolkata at 37.5 per cent, Hyderabad at 41.9 per cent, Chennai at
43.4 per cent, Delhi at 48.3 per cent and Bangalore at 48.9 per cent.
Even Greater Mumbai’s in-migration, the highest among metros at 66 per
cent of its decennial growth, has been significantly lower than some
second rung cities.
Ludhiana already has three migrants as municipal councillors and many
locals fear that one day a migrant could easily represent this
quintessentially Punjabi city in Parliament. The metro cities are also
behind second rung cities in terms of their exponential growth rates,
which factors the presence of already-settled migrants in normal growth
rates. Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai and Hyderabad are growing at 1.8 per
cent and 2.6 per cent. (Delhi and Bangalore buck the trend at 4.1 and
3.2 per cent).
In sharp contrast, Surat is growing at 6.16 per cent, Pune at 4.1 per
cent, Gandhinagar at 4.7 per cent and Chandigarh at 3.42 per cent.
Average annual growth rates of Patna and Lucknow, the capital cities of
the two states being blamed for Mumbai’s influx, are also much higher
at 3.0 and 4.7 per cent, according to Census figures.
The main concern of policy experts is not that the volume of migration
in the country is high. It is the exact opposite. Professor Amitabh
Kundu of JNU believes that the slowing countrywide migration rate
should be a cause for worry. The percentage of migrants through the
decades has fallen from 15 per cent of the total population of the
country in 1961 to 9.5 per cent in 2001. At present the highest form of
migration is rural-rural (53.35 per cent) where Bihar tops the list
with 79.9 per cent people moving from one village to another.
Population expert Om Mathur of the National Institute of Public Finance
and Policy believes that the dip in India’s rural-urban migration is
for the short term and is bound to pick up in the years to come.
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