The Role and Impact of Migration on Women in India

Migration is often imagined as a man leaving his village in search of work, but the reality in India is strikingly different. Women form the majority of internal migrants in the country, yet their movement, labour, and economic contribution are routinely undercounted. Whether it is a young bride moving to her husband’s village, a domestic worker travelling from Jharkhand to Delhi, or a nurse relocating to Bengaluru, female migration shapes households, labour markets, and entire regional economies. Understanding who moves, why they move, and what happens after they arrive is essential to making sense of women’s place in the Indian economy.

Who is the Indian female migrant? 🔗

According to Census 2011, around 70 per cent of India’s roughly 45 crore internal migrants are women. Of the 31.2 crore female migrants, nearly 21.7 crore – close to 70 per cent – cited marriage as their primary reason for moving. This pattern has held steady across decades, with marriage-led migration dominating female mobility in both the 1981-91 and 1991-2001 periods as well.

Yet this single statistic hides a more complex story. Beyond marriage, over 10 crore women in India had migrated for reasons other than marriage, including work, business, and education. Many more begin earning after they migrate, even though the official “reason” for their move remains family or marriage. This mismatch between recorded reasons and actual work outcomes is at the heart of why female migration is often economically invisible.

The undercount problem 🔗

The Census records only the primary reason for moving. So a woman who relocates after marriage and then takes up paid work as a domestic helper, garment stitcher, or agricultural labourer is still counted as a “marriage migrant.” The PRS Legislative Research analysis points out that many women take up employment after migrating, which is not reflected in the number of women moving for work-related reasons. The Economic Survey 2016-17 further estimated that Census data underestimates temporary and seasonal migrant labour movement, where women are heavily represented but rarely counted as independent workers.

Migrant women in low-income households 🔗

For poorer households, a woman’s earnings after migration are often the difference between bare subsistence and modest stability. In low-income migrant families, women contribute through a mix of formal and informal labour – domestic service, construction, brick-kiln work, agricultural daily wages, home-based piece work, and street vending. The Institute for Development Studies notes that migrant women are not even counted properly in migration data because they are treated as trailing a husband or father, even when they are actively earning.

Domestic work is one of the clearest examples. NSS data shows that the number of female domestic workers rose from 1.2 million in 1983 to 2 million by 1999, while male domestic workers stayed almost flat at 0.3 million. This feminisation of domestic service is largely driven by women migrating from poorer states such as Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and West Bengal to metropolitan cities. Their incomes typically go straight into household budgets – paying for food, children’s schooling, healthcare, and remittances to parents back home.

The invisible backbone of urban economies 🔗

Female migrants in low-income households also subsidise the urban middle class. Cooks, cleaners, nannies, and care workers free up other women to take up salaried jobs. The contribution is enormous but rarely valued. Female workers in the informal sector receive lower wages compared to their counterparts in formal employment, and informal arrangements offer almost no job security or social protection. Yet, for many migrant women, the informal economy is the only entry point available.

Employment patterns after migration 🔗

One of the most studied paradoxes of female migration in India is the gap between mobility and employment. Even though crores of women move every decade, their labour force participation remains low. Only about 18.6 per cent of women were in the labour force in 2018-19, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey, and rural women’s participation has actually declined over the past two decades.

For migrant women specifically, post-migration outcomes are often worse than for non-migrants of the same age. Research using NSSO migration rounds shows that in metropolitan areas, the proportion of non-working female migrants has increased across 1999-2000, 2007-08, and 2020-21. The proportion of working women declines when migrant women are compared with migrant men, pointing to what researchers describe as a “defeminisation” of the migrant workforce in formal economic terms.

Why marginal employment or non-employment after moving? 🔗

Several reasons explain this. First, women who migrate for marriage typically move into their husband’s household, where family expectations may discourage outside work. Second, the kinds of jobs available to low-skilled migrant women – domestic work, construction, home-based piece-rate work – are unstable, poorly paid, and often unrecorded. Third, urban environments are not always welcoming: childcare is expensive, public transport is unsafe at odd hours, and workplace harassment is common. Fourth, even educated migrant women face mismatches between their qualifications and the local labour market, leading to discouraged worker effects.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed these vulnerabilities sharply. A panel study of return migrants from Bihar, Chhattisgarh, and Jharkhand found that female migrants faced significantly greater barriers to labour market re-entry than male migrants, with earnings recovering much more slowly for women even a year after the lockdown.

Regional disparities in work participation 🔗

India’s female labour landscape is not uniform. The work participation of migrant women varies dramatically by region, driven by local culture, economic structure, and the kinds of opportunities available. Sikkim has the narrowest gender gap in labour force participation, while Assam has the widest, and rural female participation is highest in north-eastern and southern states.

The southern and western corridors 🔗

States like Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu attract the largest numbers of female migrants with technical and graduate degrees. These states have well-developed manufacturing, IT, and service sectors that absorb both skilled and semi-skilled female labour. Cities like Bengaluru, Chennai, and Pune have become destinations for educated women migrating independently for jobs in IT, healthcare, and education.

The northern and eastern story 🔗

In contrast, states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh send out a large share of migrants but show much lower female work participation. A district-level analysis using NFHS-5 and Census data found that Madhya Pradesh had the highest variation across districts, with some districts showing high women’s work participation and others showing strikingly low rates within the same state. Cultural restrictions on women working outside the home, poor connectivity, and limited non-agricultural employment opportunities all play a role.

Kerala’s paradox 🔗

Kerala presents a unique case. Despite having the highest female literacy in the country, Kerala shows low women’s work participation, partly because of high wage expectations, skill-job mismatches, and large inflows of remittances from male migrants in the Gulf that reduce the household pressure for women to work. This shows that mobility, education, and work participation do not always move in the same direction.

Socio-economic consequences of migration for women 🔗

Migration reshapes women’s lives in ways that go beyond just income. The consequences cut both ways – there are real gains, but also serious costs.

Gains: agency, exposure, and bargaining power 🔗

For many women, moving to a city or a new region brings exposure to new ideas, better healthcare, schooling for children, and the possibility of earning their own income. Research suggests that access to higher-paying formal sector jobs available in urban areas increases women’s career aspirations while delaying marriage and childbearing, which is in turn associated with better outcomes for women and their families. Even small cash earnings can shift household bargaining power, allowing women some control over spending on children’s education and nutrition.

Costs: precarity, isolation, and double burden 🔗

On the other side, migration often isolates women from their natal kin and traditional support networks. They face precarious housing, limited access to public services, language barriers in inter-state moves, and high vulnerability to harassment and trafficking. The “double burden” of paid work and unpaid domestic care is intensified – there are no grandmothers nearby to help with childcare, and partners often expect domestic duties to continue unchanged.

Migrant women are also routinely excluded from policy and welfare schemes because they are not formally registered as workers in either their source or destination states. Schemes tied to ration cards, maternity benefits, and health services often do not travel with them. The portability of welfare entitlements remains one of the biggest unresolved policy gaps for India’s migrant women.

The intergenerational angle 🔗

Migration also affects the next generation. Daughters of working migrant women are more likely to attend school, delay marriage, and aspire to paid work themselves. But the children of poorer migrant women – especially those left behind in source villages – face disrupted schooling, weaker nutrition, and emotional separation from mothers who can only visit a few times a year. The trade-offs are stark and deeply personal.

What this means for policy and practice 🔗

The standard policy lens treats migration as a male phenomenon driven by labour markets and treats women as passive movers. The data clearly says otherwise. Recognising migrant women as workers – with their own economic agency, their own contribution to household income, and their own claims on public services – would change how schemes are designed, how labour laws are enforced, and how cities are planned.

Better data collection that captures post-migration employment, portable welfare entitlements, safe housing for single women migrants, affordable urban childcare, and stronger enforcement of minimum wages in informal sectors like domestic work and construction would all make a tangible difference. So would recognising marriage migration not as a “non-economic” move but as a process that often involves significant labour reorganisation within the household.

What do you think? Should marriage-related migration be counted as economic migration if a woman ends up working at her destination? And how can welfare schemes be redesigned so that they actually travel with a migrant woman rather than staying tied to her place of birth?

References

1. https://compass.rauias.com/indian-society/migration-trends/
2. https://censusindia.gov.in/census.website/data/stories/women-and-migration-in-india
3. https://prsindia.org/theprsblog/migration-in-india-and-the-impact-of-the-lockdown-on-migrants
4. https://idronline.org/womens-work-informal-sector/
5. https://www.isec.ac.in/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/WP-246-Sandhya.pdf
6. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43621-025-01398-0
7. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9444279/
8. https://www.geojournal.net/uploads/archives/6-2-33-513.pdf
9. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589537022003613
10. https://ceda.ashoka.edu.in/how-does-labour-force-participation-vary-across-indian-states/
11. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11838883/