This is an ongoing project.

Yoshifumi Usami and Yasodhara Das are working on the project titled “Migration from Rural Bihar: A Village Level Study”.

Migration from rural Bihar in search of work has increased manifold in the last few decades. Workers from Bihar have long travelled out of the State in search of work. A large number moved to West Bengal and Assam in the 1960s. In the 1970s, the direction of migration gradually turned towards the northwestern states of Punjab and Haryana, where migrant workers went to work as agricultural wage-workers.

Recent longitudinal surveys in Bihar show an increased volume of migration

from the State, a diversification of the tasks undertaken by migrant workers, and an increase in the duration of migration. According to the Census of India 2001, Bihar is second only to Uttar Pradesh in terms of the number of migrants leaving the State. The sheer scale of migration in contemporary Bihar is astounding: at any point of time, about one-half of all working men are absent from the State, working in rural and urban areas outside.

According to the National Sample Survey, in 2007-8, Bihar was the highest-ranked among States with respect to, first, the estimated number of short-term migrants among men in the age-group 15 to 64 years, secondly, the intensity of migration (50 males per 1000 males in the population), and, thirdly, the intensity of seasonal migration by men from a rural region (54 males per 1000 males in the population).

This study examines migration as a survival strategy for rural households in Bihar. It is concerned with the socio-economic conditions of migrant and non-migrant households, migrant work and working conditions at the migrants’ destinations, the impact of remittances on rural household incomes, and the reasons why some people choose to migrate while some do not.

These questions are examined in the light of National Sample Survey data and household data collected as part of PARI in Katkuian, a village in West Champaran district, Bihar.