West Bengal 4th in outbound migration for employment

KOLKATA: Bengal ranks fourth among states from where people migrate for work and employment, the Census 2011 data reveals.
Between 2001 and 2011, nearly 5.8 lakh people migrated from Bengal looking for work, which is only after Uttar Pradesh (37.3 lakh), Bihar (22.6 lakh) and Rajasthan (6.6 lakh). Interestingly, this outbound migration pattern was both rural-urban: only 5,143 more people left rural Bengal than urban Bengal looking for work.
Bengal has a 9-crore pop-ulation. And an estimated 2.2 lakh people, the Census 2011 data says, had migrated to Bengal from other states for work and employment.
Maharashtra and Delhi (NCT region) are the most preferred destinations for work for people from Bengal. As many as 45.3% of those who migrated to Maharashtra and 34% of those who migrated to Delhi’s NCT region went for work.
Work also brought a significant number from Bengal to Gujarat (36% of 89,040 people) and in slightly lesser numbers to Haryana, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. “This also has to do with a significant number of outbound migration among unskilled labourers from Bengal’s districts. If one goes to Mumbai and Delhi, this is very evident,” said political analyst Biswanath Chakraborty.
Bengal, incidentally, sent the fourth-highest number of migrants to Jammu & Kashmir, after Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. While 51.1% of the total migration from Bengal to J&K was for marriage, around 1,334 people travelled there for work and 112 to set up businesses.
Economist Abhirup Sarkar, also a state planning board member, said: “The work-related migration to J&K is a seasonal migration, and these people choose not to stay there for long.”
Researchers have attributed seasonal migration trends in between the kharif and rabi harvest season (between July and November) and the pre-kharif window of three months after January.
Outbound migration from Bengal was a mere 0.5% of the 45.6 crore people who have migrated within the country. In this, Bengal ranks after Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka. Foreign migrants (to India) are around 55 lakh, the Census 2011 figures indicate. Marriage, however, remains a pre-dominant factor in this outbound migration from Bengal. Work and education come next.
The 2011 Census data doesn’t dig deeper into district-wise migration figures. A 2018 paper by co-researchers Manoj Debnath and DK Nayak suggested, among others, outbound migration was most from Burdwan (undivided then), Nadia, Hooghly followed by Murshidabad.
Nayak, a Shillong-based North East Hill University professor, said: “Seasonal migration was an important aspect of our findings.” Debnath and Nayak had based their findings on the 2001 Census data.
A more recent study in this regard — Deltas, Vulnerability and Climate Change: Migration and Adaptation (DECMA) — in 51 blocks of South and North 24 Parganas reveals that 64% people migrate for work because of economic reasons, which included unsustainable agriculture.
Professor Tuhin Ghosh, who is the India country head for DECMA, says in the zones surveyed, agricultural was not economically viable. Ghosh, also a Jadavpur University professor, added, “These were more linked with environmental impact in these zones, which was hitting agricultural output.”