Migration and Urbanisation in India: Effects on Urban Spaces

Walk through any big Indian city today and you will meet people from villages hundreds of kilometres away, working as construction labourers, delivery riders, domestic help, or software engineers. This constant inflow of people from rural India into towns and cities is not incidental. It is one of the biggest forces reshaping the country’s social and physical landscape, and it sits at the heart of what anthropologists call urban space: a place that is built as much by the people who move into it as by the buildings that house them.

How urban India grew between two censuses 🔗

Between the 2001 and 2011 Census counts, India’s level of urbanisation rose from 27.81 percent to 31.16 percent, while the share of people living in rural areas fell from 72.19 percent to 68.84 percent. This is a meaningful shift in a country of over a billion people, and rural to urban migration is one of the biggest reasons behind it, alongside natural population growth within cities and the reclassification of villages as towns. Researchers who have examined the settlement-level data confirm this figure, noting that census towns alone accounted for a notable share of this urban growth, showing how much of India’s urbanisation happens quietly, through villages crossing a statistical threshold rather than through dramatic city expansion alone.

What actually counts as “urban” in India 🔗

The Census of India has used the same definition of an urban area since 1961. A settlement qualifies as urban if it has a municipality, corporation, or cantonment board, or if it meets three conditions together: a minimum population of 5,000, at least 75 percent of the male working population engaged in non-agricultural occupations, and a population density of at least 400 persons per square kilometre. This second category is called a census town, and it is reassessed after every census using data from the previous one. In other words, a large, densely packed village that has moved away from farming can turn into a “town” overnight, at least on paper, without a single new building coming up.

Why villages empty out and cities fill up 🔗

Economists and geographers usually explain migration through push and pull factors. Push factors are the conditions that make people want to leave, while pull factors are what draws them somewhere else. These operate on three levels: economic, socio-political, and ecological. On the push side, unemployment, rural poverty, unsustainable livelihoods, political instability, climate change, and crop failure all drive people out of their villages. On the pull side, better job opportunities, higher income, industrial growth, specialised education, and access to urban services attract them to cities.

What the evidence from India actually shows 🔗

A field study of migrants who moved from the Himalayan foothills of Uttarakhand to Dehradun offers a useful, grounded picture of how these factors actually play out. Surveying a hundred migrant families, researchers found that education, employment opportunities, and the income that came with them were the reasons migrants cited most often, while environmental decline was rarely mentioned as a personal motivation, even though it was frequently confirmed as a real problem back in the villages people left. For most families in that study, the move to the city genuinely improved their standard of living. This matters, because it shows migration is not always a story of desperation. For a meaningful share of migrants, it is a calculated bet on better prospects, one that often pays off.

Two very different migration journeys 🔗

Not all rural-urban migration looks the same. One common pattern is short-term, seasonal, and transient: young men move to cities for temporary, contractual work, often in the informal sector, and then return home for the agricultural season or festivals. This creates a circular rhythm of movement rather than a permanent shift. The second pattern is longer and more settled. It is usually made possible by education and employable skills, and it results in families putting down roots in the city over time.

An ethnographic study from Patna captures how this second kind of migration works in practice. It found that it is often not just the rural poor who are moving to cities, but also rural middle-class families, pushed by the inadequacy of agricultural incomes and weak state services in their villages, and pulled by the promise of a stronger foothold for the next generation. As one anthropological account of urban migration in Bihar puts it, the field has traditionally focused on the struggles of marginalised people and the contest over public space in South Asian cities, even as newer patterns of middle-class settlement are reshaping that picture.

The underside of rapid growth: slums and ghettoisation 🔗

Unplanned urbanisation has a visible cost. As migrants arrive faster than cities can house them, informal settlements grow at the periphery, often without secure land tenure. These colonies frequently lack basic amenities: clean drinking water, reliable electricity, and proper sewage disposal. The people living there are often segregated by community or region of origin, a pattern sometimes called ghettoisation, and this concentration can intensify social inequality, crime, and prejudice against migrant communities seen as “outsiders.”

The scale of the problem is significant. Roughly 17 percent of India’s urban population currently lives in slum settlements, according to research from the Observer Research Foundation, and this share keeps climbing as migration outpaces housing supply. The government’s response, the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Urban) launched in 2015, has delivered over a crore homes so far, but the backlog keeps growing because new migrants continue arriving faster than housing can be built. This is the double bind of Indian urbanisation: the same cities that offer opportunity often fail to offer dignity to the very people building and running them.

Migration in the language of global development goals 🔗

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals treat migration not as a problem to be stopped, but as a process to be managed well. SDG 10, which focuses on reducing inequality, includes a specific target asking countries to facilitate orderly, safe, regular, and responsible migration through planned and well-managed migration policies. This reframes migration as something that governments should plan for and support, rather than something that simply happens to cities.

SDG 11 goes further, calling for cities that are inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. Its first target specifically asks for access to adequate, safe, and affordable housing, along with the upgrading of slums. For India, this means building enough affordable housing and reliable transport, while also protecting ecological resources, encouraging inclusive economic growth, and involving communities in decisions about how their neighbourhoods develop. Migration and urbanisation, in this framing, are not side effects of development. They are central to it, and getting them right is central to whether India’s cities work for everyone who lives in them, not just the people who arrived first.

How anthropologists read the Indian city 🔗

Anthropology approaches urban space differently from economics or urban planning. Rather than treating a city as a fixed backdrop, it treats urban space as a spatial and material process, something that is constantly produced and reshaped by the social relations of the people living within it. In a city as heterogeneous as any major Indian metropolis, this means studying how migrants build new identities, adapt old customs to new surroundings, and negotiate their place among people from very different regions, languages, and castes.

One important finding from this body of work is that a large amount of rural-urban migration happens because of poverty rather than because of genuinely anticipated opportunity. This distinction matters. When migration is driven mainly by desperation rather than choice, it tends to intensify social inequality rather than reduce it, and it can create what researchers describe as a double burden of suffering, hardship left behind in the village, and fresh hardship encountered in the city. A recent study on social exclusion in India’s urban spaces found that marginalised groups face compounding disadvantages across housing, employment, and public life, shaped heavily by their social identity even after they have physically arrived in the city. The urban space, in this reading, is not neutral ground. It reproduces many of the same hierarchies migrants hoped to leave behind, even as it offers them a genuine chance at something better.

What do you think? Do you think India’s cities are currently designed to absorb new migrants fairly, or do they mostly benefit those who arrive with existing resources and networks? And where you live, have you noticed how migration has shaped the neighbourhood around you?

References

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10327898/
2. https://ies.gov.in/arthapedia/concept/urban
3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6445429/
4. https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/aman.12972
5. https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/sustainable-development-goal-11-and-india
6. https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/data/sdg-indicator-1072-migration-policies
7. https://doi.org/10.1177/23944811241235137