How Migration, Development, and Gender Interconnect

Migration is rarely a simple journey from point A to point B. It is a deeply economic, social, and political act that reshapes households, fuels city growth, and quietly redraws the boundaries of what men and women can do with their lives. When we look at migration through the lens of development and gender together, a richer picture emerges, one where remittances build homes but also widen inequalities, and where women either move for opportunity or stay back to absorb its costs.

Migration as a driver of development 🔗

Migration is one of the most powerful, yet underappreciated, engines of development. Internal migration in India is nearly four times the size of international migration and is integral to the country’s structural change, even though it rarely features in official development strategies. Workers move from low-productivity agricultural regions to higher-productivity urban centres, sending back money, skills, and ideas that transform their places of origin.

The clearest economic signal is remittances. India remains the world’s largest recipient of inward remittances, with overseas Indians sending back tens of billions of dollars annually. These flows finance children’s education, healthcare expenses, home construction, and small business investments. Internal migrants, similarly, sustain entire rural economies in states like Bihar, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, and Jharkhand by sending earnings back from Delhi, Mumbai, Surat, and the Gulf.

When development becomes a private burden 🔗

Here lies the uncomfortable paradox. Remittances are personal funds, and governments have no effective way of directing their use for specific development purposes. While this autonomy empowers families, it also means that the responsibility for “development” quietly shifts from the state to the individual migrant.

When a construction worker in Mumbai pays for his sister’s college fees back in Madhepura, he is essentially privatising what should be a public good. When a nurse in Kerala sends money to build a primary health centre in her village, she is filling a gap the state has failed to address. Migration thus becomes a coping mechanism for weak public investment in rural areas. The migrant labours in difficult conditions far from home, and the government counts the resulting development indicators as policy success, even when the heavy lifting was done by households.

This shift also makes development unequal. Households without a migrant member fall behind, since they cannot tap into the same external income streams. Villages with strong migration networks see better schools and concrete houses, while neighbouring villages without such networks stagnate, creating new geographies of inequality within already poor regions.

Gender dynamics in migration 🔗

Migration is not gender-neutral. Who moves, who stays, and what each gains or loses is shaped by deep-rooted social norms around marriage, work, and family.

The marriage migration story 🔗

India’s migration statistics reveal a striking gender pattern. Census 2011 showed that women form almost 70 percent of the internal migrant community, yet only 2.7 percent of women in the 20-34 age group cited work as their reason for moving, compared to 38.5 percent of men. For roughly seven out of ten women, marriage is the reason migration is even recorded.

This pattern is not just statistical; it is structural. Patrilocal marriage norms expect women to leave their natal homes and move to their husband’s village or city. While Census enumerators classify this as migration, it rarely brings the autonomy, income, or skill upgrades that economic migration offers men. Marriage migration can deepen women’s dependence rather than reduce it.

Women who migrate for work 🔗

A growing share of women, however, is migrating independently for employment. They work as domestic helpers, garment factory workers, nurses, construction labourers, and increasingly as nurses and care workers abroad. This trend is sometimes called the feminisation of migration, driven by the rise of women-centric occupations and women migrating in an independent capacity, though these gains often come with heightened vulnerability and exposure to exploitation.

Female migrants frequently face the double burden of paid work and unpaid domestic responsibilities, wage gaps with male peers, lack of maternity benefits, sexual harassment, and inadequate legal protection. In a sample of Skill India participants, while 62 percent of unemployed women said they were willing to migrate for work, 70 percent reported they would feel unsafe working away from home. Safety, dignity, and mobility for women remain deeply intertwined.

The women who stay behind 🔗

Then there are the women who do not migrate but whose lives are reshaped by the migration of others. In regions like the Mahanadi delta in Odisha, where labour migration is largely male-dominated, women remain behind in vulnerable environments facing social and economic challenges that affect their empowerment and wellbeing.

“Left-behind” wives often take on agricultural work, child-rearing, eldercare, and financial decision-making single-handedly. This can be empowering when it expands their decision-making space, but it can also entrench drudgery if patriarchal control simply transfers from the husband to in-laws. Children’s outcomes, too, can suffer when one parent is permanently absent and the other is overworked.

Impact on urbanization and services 🔗

Migrant activity in India is overwhelmingly urban-focused. Cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Surat absorb millions of workers each year, with NITI Aayog noting that about 7.5 million people are added to urban areas every year, straining health, housing, and nutrition systems. This concentration creates economic dynamism, but it also produces sharp inequalities in who actually receives city services.

Unequal cities, unequal access 🔗

Migrants rarely enter cities as equals. They settle in informal settlements, work in precarious sectors, and lack basic entitlements. A qualitative study of migrant construction workers in Karnataka highlighted multiple barriers to healthcare, including unfamiliarity with the local language, lack of documents, employer pressure to keep working, and high out-of-pocket costs. The National Urban Health Mission was launched in 2013 specifically to target vulnerable urban populations, including migrant construction workers and temporary migrants, but coverage remains patchy.

Similarly, on education, children of seasonal migrants often drop out because they move between school calendars and languages. A recent qualitative study found that tribal communities in India experience low educational development due to frequent school dropouts by migrating children, while those left behind take part in household chores and economic activities that affect their school enrolment and attendance. Migration thus fractures continuous schooling, the very foundation of long-term mobility.

Gendered access to urban services 🔗

These service gaps fall hardest on women and girls. Female migrant workers in cities have less safe public transport, fewer accessible toilets, and limited maternal healthcare in their informal settlements. Adolescent girls in migrant families are often the first to be pulled out of school to care for younger siblings or take up domestic work. Where ration cards, Aadhaar-linked benefits, or school admissions are tied to permanent residence, migrant women lose access to entitlements they are legally owed.

The Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, Affordable Rental Housing Complexes, and One Nation One Ration Card scheme aim to extend portable benefits to migrants, but face implementation issues due to lack of awareness, bureaucratic hurdles, and insufficient coverage. For women, who already navigate higher information barriers and lower mobility, these gaps translate into measurable losses in health, nutrition, and educational attainment.

Bringing the linkages together 🔗

The three threads, migration, development, and gender, are not parallel stories but a single tangled one. Migration drives development, but increasingly by privatising the cost of progress onto migrant households. Gender shapes who can migrate, on what terms, and who absorbs the social costs of someone else’s movement. Urbanization concentrates both the rewards and the risks of migration, distributing them unequally between men and women, settled residents and migrants, the documented and the undocumented.

A more honest development conversation would recognise that remittances cannot substitute for sound public investment, that female migration deserves the same policy attention as male migration, and that “left-behind” women are not passive figures but central economic actors in rural India. It would also rethink urban planning to treat migrants not as temporary intrusions but as permanent contributors to city life, with equal claims on housing, schools, and clinics.

What do you think? If remittances are quietly replacing state spending on rural development, who is really paying the price of India’s growth story? And how would our cities look different if they were designed for the women and men who migrate to build them, rather than for the residents who already belong?

References

1. https://www.ibef.org/blogs/the-diaspora-effect-driving-bilateral-ties-and-remittances-to-india
2. https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/leveraging-migration-and-remittances-development
3. https://idronline.org/women-work-and-migration/
4. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00219096211049568
5. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666049021000803
6. https://www.niti.gov.in/does-india-need-new-strategies-improving-urban-health-and-nutrition
7. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7339387/
8. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12230227/
9. https://www.cdpp.co.in/articles/migration-and-economic-inequality-in-india-insights-into-sdg-10-7