How Gender Shapes Internal Migration in India

Migration in India is never just about people moving from one place to another. It is deeply gendered, with men and women moving for very different reasons, facing very different risks, and reshaping families and communities in very different ways. Understanding this gendered character of internal migration is essential to making sense of who benefits, who is left behind, and what kind of policy response is needed.

The gendered face of internal migration 🔗

India is home to roughly 400 million internal migrants, and about two-thirds of them are migrants for marriage, the majority of whom are women. The latest Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) for July 2020 to June 2021 shows that the overall migration rate stood at 28.9%, but the gender gap inside this figure is striking. The female migration rate was 47.9% (48% rural, 47.8% urban), while the male migration rate was just 10.7% (5.9% rural and 22.5% urban).

The numbers tell only half the story. While women dominate migration in sheer volume, men dominate economic migration. For most women, moving means marriage; for most men, moving means work. This single difference shapes everything else, from access to education for children, to the kind of welfare schemes households can claim, to the bargaining power women have inside their new families.

Marriage as the dominant reason for female migration 🔗

Marriage is the single largest driver of women’s movement in India. According to PLFS 2020-21, marriage accounted for 86.8% of all female migration. Census-based estimates put the share even higher in some streams, with 97% of the 224 million people who migrated after marriage being women. The custom of patrilocal residence, where a woman moves to her husband’s village or city after the wedding, is the cultural engine behind these numbers.

Why patrilocality drives so much movement 🔗

Most marriages in India are arranged within caste but outside the village. This rule of village exogamy means that almost every rural marriage produces a female migrant. The flow is overwhelmingly rural-to-rural, and it is so routine that it is often not even recognised as “migration” in everyday conversation. Yet in administrative terms, it is the largest single migration stream the country produces every year.

Beyond marriage: new patterns for women 🔗

The picture is slowly changing. Younger, more educated women are increasingly migrating for higher studies and for work in garment factories, healthcare, domestic service, and IT-enabled industries. A study by the International Labour Organization on young women migrating from Jharkhand and Odisha to garment hubs in southern India documents this growing corridor of long-distance female labour migration. However, marriage still dwarfs every other reason, and even women who migrate for work often face the question of marriage immediately afterwards.

Family reunification and male economic migration 🔗

For men, migration is overwhelmingly an economic decision. Around 49.6% of male migrants move in search of employment, compared to a tiny fraction of women whose primary reason is recorded as work. Men leave their villages to take up jobs in construction, brick kilns, agriculture in other states, factories, transport, and the urban informal economy.

The rhythm of seasonal labour 🔗

A large share of male migration is seasonal or circular, not permanent. Workers move during the agricultural lean season, typically from May to September from flood-plain districts and from November onwards from drier regions, and return home for sowing or for festivals. A field study from Malda district in West Bengal found that a large number of labourers migrate out during the agricultural lean season to other states and cities across India, with the rhythm of departure and return tied closely to the farm calendar.

This circulation is not just about wages. The desire to maintain family connections and meet social obligations, like attending weddings, festivals and farm work back home, drives migrants’ willingness to return even when destination wages are higher. The result is a labour force that is, in the words of sociologist Jan Breman, “footloose”: rooted nowhere but circulating constantly.

Family reunification: a slower, secondary flow 🔗

When men migrate first and settle into stable work, wives and children often follow. PLFS data show that after marriage, the next biggest reason women record for moving is “migration of family members”, at about 10%. This category captures the women and children who join male earners in cities, especially in construction colonies, brick kilns, and informal urban settlements. It is migration that is invisible in policy debates, because the wife is recorded as a “dependent” even when she also works at the destination, often as unpaid help on the same worksite.

Impact on children and families 🔗

The gendered split between marriage migration for women and labour migration for men has serious consequences for children and for households left behind.

Children of seasonal migrants and the schooling crisis 🔗

When entire families travel with male workers to brick kilns, sugarcane fields and construction sites, children pay a heavy price. The Centre for the Advanced Study of India estimates that around six million school-aged children in India participate in family-based labour migration every year, with millions more affected indirectly. Schooling is interrupted, dropout rates rise, and many children end up working alongside their parents, especially at brick kilns where small hands shape and shift bricks.

The Right to Education Act of 2009 promises elementary schooling to every child, but in practice migrant children fall through the cracks. The seasonal hostel and seasonal residential camp models under Samagra Shiksha are meant to address this gap, but coverage remains thin and uneven. Studies have also documented poor nutrition outcomes for the children of migrant construction workers, with long gaps between meals at worksites contributing to malnutrition among migrant children.

Access to welfare and the portability problem 🔗

Migrant families are doubly disadvantaged when it comes to welfare. Most social protection schemes, including ration cards, health insurance and old-age pensions, are tied to the state of origin. A migrant family in Surat with a ration card from a village in Bihar usually cannot access subsidised food locally. The “One Nation One Ration Card” reform addresses food, but health, housing and child welfare entitlements remain stubbornly tied to domicile. A UNDP study during the COVID-19 pandemic found that only about one-fifth of migrant respondents were enrolled in government health insurance during the first wave, and that women’s incomes halved while their unpaid care work rose for 56% of respondents.

Women holding the household economy together 🔗

When men migrate alone, women in the village take on a triple burden: farm work, household work, and the management of family affairs that were earlier handled by men. Research on the families left behind in rural India finds that the education of children is adversely affected by the absence of parents, and that left-behind wives face heavier workloads and security concerns, even while gaining some short-term autonomy in decision-making. This shift is sometimes called the “feminisation of agriculture”, and it is a direct by-product of male labour migration.

For marriage migrants in the new household, the autonomy outcome depends heavily on context. A study published in the journal Demographic Research on marriage migration and women’s autonomy in India found that female migrants often work as low-skilled labourers and become the primary earners for their families in poorer households, even while remaining socially constrained by the norms of their husband’s community.

Policy implications: the case for gender-sensitive migration policy 🔗

India’s migration policy framework is still built around the figure of the male economic migrant. Marriage migrants, female labour migrants and the children who travel with their parents are largely invisible in policy design. Several reforms are needed to fix this.

Recognising women as migrants in their own right 🔗

National surveys ask migrants only for the primary reason for moving, which means a woman who migrated for marriage but now also works for wages is recorded purely as a marriage migrant. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs has called for a gender-sensitive migration policy that takes gender-specific risks into account, including a 24×7 women’s helpline and stronger protection mechanisms. Updating data systems to capture multiple reasons for migration, and to record women’s economic activity at destination, is a basic first step.

Portable entitlements and worksite services 🔗

A truly gender-sensitive policy must make welfare portable across state lines. This includes ration cards, maternal health benefits under schemes like Janani Suraksha Yojana, immunisation services for migrant children, and access to Anganwadi centres at destination. Civil society recommendations also stress integrating education and health services at worksites and seasonal hostels, protecting women from harassment and violence at the workplace, and providing identity documents that allow migrants to open bank accounts and enrol in welfare schemes.

Addressing distress migration at the source 🔗

Not all migration is voluntary. Much of the male seasonal flow is distress migration, driven by drought, debt, and the collapse of rural livelihoods. Strengthening MGNREGA, building local agro-industrial hubs, and investing in rural education and health can reduce the pressure to migrate under exploitative conditions in the first place. Policy that treats migration only as an urban problem misses the rural roots of the phenomenon entirely.

Childcare, schooling and the second generation 🔗

The single most effective gendered intervention may also be the simplest: childcare. Linking Anganwadi services and crèches with urban housing for migrant workers, expanding seasonal hostels for the children of seasonal migrants, and ensuring continuous school enrolment regardless of address would directly benefit migrant women, migrant children, and the long-term human capital of the country.

A gendered story with national consequences 🔗

Gender shapes who moves, why they move, what they gain and what they lose. Women move overwhelmingly for marriage, men move overwhelmingly for work, and the children of both groups carry the consequences in their schooling, nutrition and life chances. Internal migration is not a gender-neutral story of labour markets and wage differentials. It is a deeply social process, woven into kinship rules, patrilocal customs, agricultural cycles and the informal economy. Policy that ignores this gendered architecture will keep missing the people who need protection the most.

What do you think? Should marriage migration be reclassified in our official statistics so that the economic and social contributions of marriage migrants become visible? And what would change in your home state if migrant women had fully portable access to healthcare, ration and child welfare entitlements?

References

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7821976/
2. https://yojnaias.com/the-blurry-picture-of-internal-female-migration-and-the-problems-of-migrant-women-workers/
3. https://csr.education/development-in-india/migration-trends-india-2023-statistics/
4. https://www.indiaspend.com/97-of-indians-migrating-for-marriage-are-female-36602
5. https://www.ilo.org/publications/gendering-internal-labour-migration-corridors-migrant-women-workers
6. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0190740920311671
7. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2024.1422602/full
8. https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/iit/meganreed
9. https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/peoplemove/right-education-migrating-children-india
10. https://www.undp.org/india/press-releases/new-study-calls-gender-sensitive-policies-indian-women-migrant-workers
11. https://prsindia.org/policy/report-summaries/issues-relating-to-migrant-workers-including-appropriate-legislative-framework-and-skill-development-initiatives-for-prospective-emigrants
12. https://icmc.net/future-of-work/report/10-india/
13. https://www.global-solutions-initiative.org/publication/promoting-economic-and-social-inclusion-of-migrant-workers/