Labour Mobility in Historical Perspective from East U.P, South U.P and North Bihar: Contours of Changes and Continuity

Mobility is a fundamental trait of human beings, from the memory immemorial. However, its duration and location and the characteristics of mover keeps on changing. In this paper, we have tried to understand the present nature of mobility over two decades, i.e. 1996–2016 for two regions of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, which remained to be a poverty concentrated zone in India. In this paper, we have contextualised current pattern of mobility in context to the past patterns of mobility, since mobility is very closely related with the resources and social capital of an individual to which she/he belongs and the source and destination locations. The short run mobility and circular migration has increased among men and new and richer locations to move have been opened during this time period. People from this region have started to migrate to Gulf countries which was earlier only limited to migrating to domestic destinations, that too particularly to Mumbai, Delhi, Gujarat, etc. While long run circular migration has seen new destinations, short run local migration to the same district have increased many folds. Survey observation suggests that the expansion of real estate and service sector have created low skills job catering to flexible job requirements of low skill agriculture workers and small farmers of the same district. However, having stated the change in the pattern of mobility, not everything has changed. The mobility pattern across the socio-economic group remains the same. To be more clear, poor, less educated moving to nearer destinations and better off moving to far off destinations is evident. And returns of those moving to far off places are higher than those moving to nearer destinations. Similarly, those moving to far off place do so for longer durations and those moving to nearer destinations are moving for shorter durations. Further, this paper has looked at the change in road and transportation and banking and financial services as an enabler of frequent mobility and mobility to far off places. Survey results suggest large improvement in terms of road quality and reach of road to the villages. Due to better road networks mostly private transportation like taxi and auto have reached to these villages taking many workers every day/week or month to their respective work locations. These villages now have taxi and auto stand, banking facilities such as ATM, internet and post offices, enabling frequent mobility at one end, and enabling mobility to far off places for longer duration at the other. Since it has eased to reach homes quickly in case of any emergency or to send money as and when needed. So in nutshell, far off destination to move is opened, short run circular migration has increased. However, the characteristics of those migrating to various places for different locations remains the same. Road, transportation, ICT and financial services have played a very important role in changing the nature of mobility from this region of India.