People rarely stay still. A young graduate from Patna books a train to Bengaluru for an IT job, a sugarcane cutter from Beed travels to a mill in Kolhapur every winter, a nurse from Kerala flies to the Gulf, and a family from a flood-hit district shifts to a nearby town for safety. All of these movements fall under one umbrella term: migration. Understanding what migration really means, how it is measured, and what pushes or pulls people across borders is the starting point for almost every conversation about population, labour markets, and development today.
Table of Contents
- What is migration? Defining a moving target
- How India defines and measures migration
- Types of migration: a quick taxonomy
- By geography
- By duration
- By choice
- Key drivers of migration: the push and pull framework
- Push factors: what makes people leave
- Pull factors: what draws people in
- Personal and intervening factors
- Migration and the Sustainable Development Goals
- SDG Target 10.7 and human mobility
- How migration cuts across other SDGs
- Reducing inequality through mobility
- Why getting the basics right matters
What is migration? Defining a moving target
At its simplest, migration is the movement of people from one place of residence to another. But the moment policymakers, demographers, or statisticians try to count migrants, the simplicity disappears. There is no universally agreed definition of “migration” or “migrant”, which is why different agencies use slightly different rules depending on what they want to measure.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM), the UN’s migration agency, offers the most widely cited working definition. According to the IOM, a migrant is any person who is moving or has moved across an international border or within a State away from their habitual place of residence, regardless of legal status, whether the movement is voluntary or involuntary, what the causes are, or how long the stay lasts. This deliberately broad framing allows the IOM to cover everyone from a software engineer on a work visa to a person displaced by conflict.
The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) takes a narrower approach because it needs comparable global statistics. It defines a long-term international migrant as a person who lives outside their country of origin for at least 12 months. Anything shorter is usually classed as short-term or seasonal movement. This 12-month rule is what most “international migrant stock” estimates rely on.
How India defines and measures migration
India’s own statistical system has its own definitions, and they have evolved over time. The Census of India traditionally counts a person as a migrant if their place of enumeration is different from their place of birth or their “place of last usual residence”, where last usual residence usually means a stay of six months or more in that previous location.
The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), now part of the National Statistical Office, uses the concept of Usual Place of Residence (UPR). Under India’s NSS, a person is considered a migrant if their last UPR differs from the current place of enumeration. The NSSO’s 64th round (2007-08) was the last dedicated migration survey for many years and introduced a specific category for short-term mobility. In that round, short-term migrants were defined as those who had stayed away from the village or town for one month or more but less than six months during the last 365 days for employment or in search of employment.
This older threshold was widely criticised for missing many circular workers who travel for shorter spells. The upcoming National Migration Survey 2026 updates the rule. A person will now be classified as a short-term migrant if they have stayed away from their usual residence for 15 days to six months within the last year for employment or job search, replacing the earlier one-to-six-month threshold. The new survey will also shift from household-level to individual-level tracking, capturing income changes, living conditions, and future migration plans.
The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2020-21 provides the most recent national snapshot. It estimated that 28.9% of India’s population were migrants, with female migration far higher than male migration in rural areas mostly due to marriage, while most male migration was employment-driven.
Types of migration: a quick taxonomy
Once definitions are clear, migration can be sliced in several useful ways. Each cut tells a different story about why people move.
By geography
Internal migration happens within the same country, for example a worker moving from Jharkhand to Surat. International migration involves crossing a national border, for example an engineer relocating from Hyderabad to Toronto. Within internal migration, rural-urban migration is the most studied flow in India, although rural-rural and urban-urban movements together make up a very large share of total mobility, especially for women moving at marriage.
By duration
Permanent migration involves a near-final change of residence, often linked to marriage, government transfers, or settled employment. Long-term migration, in the UN sense, refers to stays of 12 months or more. Short-term migration covers stays from a few weeks to a few months. Seasonal or circular migration is a repeated, predictable pattern, like construction workers who spend the dry months in cities and return for the harvest, or sugarcane cutters who migrate every cutting season.
By choice
Migration can be voluntary, where the person chooses to move for work, study, or family, or forced, where they have little real option, as with people displaced by floods, conflict, or development projects. The line between the two is often blurred. A landless labourer who “chooses” to leave a drought-hit village is technically voluntary, but the choice is shaped by distress.
Key drivers of migration: the push and pull framework
The most widely used explanation for why people move is Everett Lee’s push-pull framework. Push factors are negative conditions at the place of origin that drive people away. Pull factors are positive conditions at the destination that attract them. In practice, the two work together, mediated by personal factors like age, education, networks, and the cost of moving.
Push factors: what makes people leave
In the Indian context, the dominant push factors are economic. In most developing countries, low agricultural income, agricultural unemployment and underemployment are the major factors pushing migrants towards areas with greater job opportunities. Farms have grown smaller across generations of inheritance, monsoon dependence makes incomes volatile, and non-farm work in villages is scarce. States like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, and parts of Madhya Pradesh consistently send out large numbers of workers for this reason.
Beyond income, several other conditions push people out. Poor schools and the absence of good hospitals make families relocate so their children can study and their elders can get treatment. Floods, droughts, and cyclones repeatedly displace households along the Brahmaputra, in coastal Odisha, and across the Sundarbans. Caste-based discrimination, communal tension, and political conflict have driven migrations out of Jammu and Kashmir, parts of the North East, and elsewhere. A study of migration from Bihar to the Gulf found that the dominant causes were lack of jobs, low wages, poor financial condition, debt on the family, social insecurity, and social discrimination.
Pull factors: what draws people in
Pull factors mirror the pushes. Cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, and the industrial belts of Gujarat offer something villages cannot match: a dense, varied labour market. Higher wages are the headline attraction, but the bundle includes regular work through the year, exposure to new skills, access to colleges and coaching centres, better hospitals, and a degree of anonymity that can itself be liberating for women, Dalits, and other groups facing discrimination at home.
Education is an underrated pull factor. The concentration of universities, professional colleges, and competitive coaching ecosystems in Delhi, Kota, Pune, and Bengaluru pulls in lakhs of students every year. Many of them never go back. Marriage migration, where women move to their husband’s village or town, remains the single largest reason for internal migration in India, and although it is socially driven, it overlaps with economic pulls when the destination household offers more security.
Personal and intervening factors
Push and pull alone do not decide who actually moves. A young, unmarried man with relatives in Surat is far more likely to migrate than an older widow with no contacts. Networks reduce risk by providing a first job, a place to sleep, and information. Costs of travel and documentation, language barriers, and the loss of caste or community support all act as intervening obstacles. This is why migration corridors are so sticky: once a chain forms between, say, a cluster of villages in Western Odisha and the brick kilns of Andhra Pradesh, it tends to repeat year after year.
Migration and the Sustainable Development Goals
For decades, migration was treated mostly as a problem to be managed. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development changed that framing. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development recognizes for the first time the contribution of migration to sustainable development, treating it as a cross-cutting issue relevant to most of the 17 Goals.
SDG Target 10.7 and human mobility
The most explicit reference sits under Goal 10, Reduced Inequalities. Target 10.7 calls on countries to facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people, including through the implementation of planned and well-managed migration policies. The language matters. “Orderly and safe” pushes back against trafficking and dangerous irregular routes. “Regular and responsible” pushes for legal channels and rights protection. “Mobility” recognises that movement itself is a development asset, not just a side effect.
Four indicators track progress on this target. Indicator 10.7.1 looks at recruitment costs paid by migrant workers, 10.7.2 measures whether countries have well-managed migration policies, 10.7.3 tracks the number of people who die or disappear in the process of migration, and 10.7.4 covers refugee populations.
How migration cuts across other SDGs
The connections run both ways. Remittances sent home by Indian workers in the Gulf, North America, and Southeast Asia support household consumption, school fees, and small business investment, directly feeding into Goals on poverty, education, and decent work. At the same time, migrants in informal jobs often lack social security, are exposed to occupational hazards, and face barriers in accessing healthcare and schooling for their children, which pulls those same Goals in the opposite direction.
Reducing inequality through mobility
The IOM frames migration as a highly visible reflection of global inequalities, whether in terms of wages, labour market opportunities, or lifestyles. Many people move on the belief that a better life can be had elsewhere. But the ability to move is itself unequal. Citizenship, financial means, language skills, and digital access decide who can migrate safely and who is forced into risky channels. Well-designed migration policies, portable welfare entitlements like ration portability through One Nation One Ration Card, and protection of labour rights are some of the levers that can make mobility a force for narrowing inequality rather than widening it.
Why getting the basics right matters
Definitions and frameworks may sound technical, but they shape real lives. If short-term migrants are not counted, governments underestimate the demand for affordable urban housing, portable health insurance, and social security for informal workers. If push factors are treated only as individual misfortune rather than structural failure, policy responses focus on managing migrants in cities instead of investing in rural livelihoods. And if migration is viewed only through a security lens, the development potential captured in the SDGs slips out of reach.
Migration is not a problem to be solved or a virtue to be celebrated. It is a strategy people use to navigate uneven geographies of opportunity. The clearer our definitions, the better our data, and the more honest our analysis of drivers, the better we can design policies that let people move with dignity and choice.
What do you think? If you or someone in your family has migrated for work, education, or marriage, which push and pull factors do you think mattered most in that decision? And do you believe India’s current migration policies do enough to make mobility “safe, orderly and regular” in the spirit of SDG 10.7?
References
- https://www.iom.int/fundamentals-migration
- https://www.un.org/en/fight-racism/vulnerable-groups/migrants
- https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/national-migration-survey-2026-27
- https://www.mospi.gov.in/sites/default/files/publication_reports/533_final.pdf
- https://vajiramandravi.com/current-affairs/national-migration-survey-2026/
- https://vajiramandravi.com/upsc-exam/migration-in-india/
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S101836472300321X
- https://www.migrationdataportal.org/themes/sustainable-development-goals-sdgs-0
- https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/data/sdg-indicator-1072-migration-policies
- https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/papers/10.18356/27081990-146
- https://www.iom.int/reducing-global-inequalities
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