Relevance: Sociology: Population Dynamics: Population size, growth, composition and distribution. Components of population growth: birth, death, migration.
- Functional Consequences:
(1) While urbanization has been occurring at a rapid pace, it is the biggest cities– the metropolises- that have been growing the fastest. These metros attract migrants from the rural areas as well as from small towns. There are now 5,161 towns and cities in India, where 286 million people live. What is striking, however, is that more than two – thirds of the urban population lives in 27 big cities with million-plus populations. Clearly the larger cities in India are growing at such a rapid rate that the urban infrastructure can hardly keep pace. With the mass media’s primary focus on these cities, the public face of India is becoming more and more urban rather than rural.
(2) Increase the average productivity of labour: Migration from a region, characterized by labour surplus, helps to increase the average productivity of labour in that region. Migration encourages labour-saving devices and/or greater work participation by the remaining family workers at the place of origin.
(3) Financial Assistance to Family:- Migrants also support their families back at home in form of financial assistance. Such financial assistance may strengthen local as well as national economy. India received annual remittances of around $70 billion from its migrant population in 2016.
(4) Transfer of Knowledge and technology:- Migrants, when return to their native place, may also support their native regions by spread of knowledge and innovation. Migrants also play the role of value disseminators. They expose the Little Tradition of the village to the Great Tradition of the urban areas.
(5) Control on birth and Small Family Size:- Further, due to migration, there is a decline in the cohabitation frequency and hence, fertility rates decline. It has an impact on family size as well.
(6) Cultural Diversity:- Migration brings about a cultural change as well. Cosmopolitan cities like Mumbai and Bengaluru present a heady mix of cultures, and people celebrate the festivals of each other, share cultural symbols in form of dresses and eating habits.
- Dysfunctional Consequences:
(1) Brain Drain: There is also a view that migration negatively affects the emigrating region and favours the immigrating region, and that migration would widen the development disparity between the regions, because of the drain of the resourceful persons from the relatively underdeveloped region to the more developed region. This problem is especially acute for rural areas where educated and skilled youth move from villages to cities, and rural areas are left with little skilled and educated youth.
(2) Imbalanced sex ratios:– Migration has a demographic dimension too and has a direct impact on age, sex and occupational composition of the sending and receiving regions. Migration of the unmarried males of young working age results in imbalanced sex ratios.
(3) Women and Child’s Increased Work Participation:- Migration which results in the absence of the adult males for long periods of time may cause dislocation of the family, and, under such circumstances, women and children often have to take over more and different types of work and other more important roles in household decision making. Recent studies have also shown the exploitative impacts of migration. Excessive male migration leaves female population behind at homes and make them vulnerable to exploitation
(4) Multiple exploitations Migrant workers: Such Workers are also vulnerable to multiple exploitations, poor social security and poor access to facilities like health, education and other civic amenities. Change of political parties in the foreign territory creates unpleasant situations. For example, American president Donald Trump’s administration in 2016 issued restrictive orders for the expats which affected Indian Diaspora as well. Similarly, in Arab countries also, Indians face hardships due to various reasons.
(5) Conflicts between Migrant & Local Workers:- Migration also changes the political equations as well. Vote bank politics has led to issuing of voter-ID cards in India to lakhs of illegal migrants and this has created dissent among the local population.
(6) Ethnic and Cultural Conflicts:- There are ethnic dimensions as well. Migration leads to more ethnic and cultural diversity. This sometimes creates friction as well. Ethnic and racial conflicts are such examples and the northeastern part of India is particularly susceptible to such movements as economic opportunities are scarce which lead to an aggressive fight for scarce resources.