01 migration

“Migration is an expression of the human aspiration for dignity, safety and a better future. It is part of the social fabric, part of our very make-up as a human family.” a variety of facets of Mumbai’s populace. Zachariah’s (1968) Bombay migration research examined several aspects of migrants in terms of trends and characteristics based on special migration tabulations from the 1961 census.

- Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General (2007-2016), United Nations, at the 2013 High-level Dialogue on International Migration and Development.

With movements occurring both within countries and across borders worldwide, migration is a genuinely global problem.

More than 1 billion people, or one-seventh of the world’s population, are migrants.

Mumbai is India’s largest city by demography and generates 33% of the nation’s income taxes, 60% of its customs duties, 20% of its federal excise taxes, and 40% of its foreign commerce (Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai 2009).

For many Indians who have a great fascination with Bollywood, it is also the city of their dreams.

The name change from Bombay to Mumbai in 1995 symbolises the evolving political structure and philosophy in Mumbai. Over time, Mumbai’s economy and population have grown at an unbridled rate.

The population and migration issue has been central to planning and governance throughout the development of the metropolis.

The study discovered that, in terms of demographic, social, and economic features, the longer migrants have been exposed to city life, the more they resemble non-migrants and the less they resemble people from their home countries.

According to the 2011 Census, 12.47 million people live in Mumbai city (MCGM), which spans a region of 603 square kilometres. 20,692 people per square kilometre, or an extremely high population density, characterises the entire city.

The population (and density) of Island City has remained fairly constant over the past few decades, hovering about 20 to 21 thousand people per square kilometre, whereas the density of the suburbs has increased from 11,119 people per square kilometre in 1981 to 20,924 people in 2011.

Numerous research on Mumbai’s population’s traits, migratory pattern, and behaviour have been conducted over the past few decades.

The research by Lakdawala (1963), arguably one of the more thorough ones on Mumbai in the early 1960s, sought to comprehend

The suburbs of Mumbai MCGM are administratively defined as suburban districts even though they are very much a part of the city and are not suburbs in the traditional sense. There are 24 wards in Mumbai, some of which are the size of a million-person metropolis.

Mumbai (MCGM) reached the millionperson mark in 1911, according to the history of population increase. The Census Commissioner J.H. Hutton ascribed the large fall in Mumbai’s population between 1921 and 1931 to the influence of the economic slump on the migration of migrants back to their homeland (Hutton 1986:16).

Mumbai, on the other hand, had rapid growth during the decade of independence (1941–51), averaging over 5% per year, and then continued to do so until 1981, averaging over 3% annually.

The growth rate then slowed to below 2 percent between 1981 and 1991 and 1991 to 2001 before crashing to less than 0.5 percent from 2001 and 2011.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Mumbai underwent a substantial economic transformation. The shutdown of the textile mills and the protracted textile worker strikes that followed have had a significant impact on this transformation. In the MMR, there was afterwards a significant movement of the engineering, chemical, and pharmaceutical sectors. Mumbai saw such a pronounced deindustrialization in the 1980s and 1990s that it became a service metropolis (Bombay Metropolitan Region Development Authority 1995; MCGM 2009; 51). This appears to have been reflected in the city’s diminishing population growth, which fell to far below 2% annually during the 1980s and 1990s.

Although there was some continuity with previously observable trends - a roughly unchanging population size in the island city, a stagnation that has now lasted for four decades - and ongoing growth in the suburban areas to the north - the dramatic decline in the rate of population growth in the core during the past decade appears to signal a new era in the history of the Mumbai mega-urban region.

However, the remarkable fall in population growth in the suburbs of the core region from around 2.3 percent per year in the decade 1991–2001 to 0.8 percent per year during the decade 2001–2011 was the notable development during this time period. The centre of population growth has completely left the main area.

Industrial restructuring and a shift in the population

Mumbai became India’s largest commercial and industrial hub as a result of its port infrastructure and large-scale industries like its cotton textile mills, which began operating around 1850.

Beginning in the early 20th century, Mumbai developed itself as a significant industrial hub, with the textile sector controlling its economy.

In Central Mumbai, the industry grew outside of the then-populated neighbourhoods. With the expansion of the chemical and pharmaceutical sectors, as well as a sizable number of businesses producing consumer goods and engineering goods, Mumbai’s industrial base was diversified throughout the post-Independence era.

Numerous reasons, including those listed below, contributed to Mumbai’s deindustrialization:

(Nijman, 2000; Soman, 2001; D’Monte, 2002; Whitehead, 2008; Sharma, 2010)

1. The government’s industrial policy, which promoted the construction and growth of enterprises in underdeveloped areas and the relocation of polluting industries to peripheral areas as a result of environmental and pollution control regulations

2. Favouritism in the government’s taxation and other policies toward the organised sector,

3. Relatively high input costs for things like power, water, and transportation;

4. The 1980s labour movement’s militancy; and

5. Exorbitant property values in the city.

While these particular reasons undoubtedly had an impact on Mumbai’s deindustrialization, it’s possible that this process was unavoidable even though it could have been slowed down.

In Central Mumbai, where a number of textile factories have “fallen ill,” the collapse of manufacturing is particularly pronounced.

Right now, a few haphazard attempts at gentrification have led to huge towers growing next to the slums. In fact, bowling alleys, shopping arcades, and other upscale constructions have entered the centre of the textile district.

Trends and Patterns of Migration

Moving from one location in the world to another is known as human migration. Human migration patterns, which affect the cultural landscapes of both the places people depart and the places they settle, are a reflection of the circumstances of a changing world.

Today’s migration is mostly influenced by economic trends. People are constantly looking for improved job prospects.

International migration has become a reality that affects practically every area of the globe today, and it is a global process that is growing. Many people relocate to other countries in search of better economic possibilities than on their own.

There are various systems that could be used to categorise international migrants, who are divided into nine groups: temporary workers, irregular, illegal, or undocumented immigrants, more skilled and business migrants, refugees, people fleeing persecution, people migrating for forced reasons, family members returning home, and long-term, low-skilled migrants.

The pattern of internal migration can be broken down into two categories: intra-state movement, which refers to movement inside the state, and inter-state movement, which refers to migration over state borders and establishment in a different state.

In India, there are basically two categories of internal migration: Long-term migration that results in the relocation of a person or family.

Back and forth travel between a source and a destination is a short-term migration.

According to the 2011 Census, people who moved from one rural area to another made up more than half of all internal migrants (53.84%), while migration from rural to urban and urban to urban made up around 20% of each.

Political, demographic, socioeconomic, and environmental factors are among the “macrofactors” that have a significant impact on migration. These are the main causes of forced migration, whether it be domestic or international, and they are largely outside the control of the individual.

Over the years, migration has helped Mumbai flourish, although the trend and pattern of migration has changed significantly. People born outside of Mumbai made up the majority of Mumbai’s population in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the beginning of the 20th century, the percentage of migrants based on place of birth was as high as 80%, but it gradually decreased to 43% by 2001.

On the other side, throughout the same time period, the proportion of migrants from Gujarat and Goa consistently decreased, from 16.9% to 9.6% and from 3% to 0.6%, respectively.

An increase in interstate migration, primarily from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, was accompanied by a decline in intrastate migration.

Additionally, migration has been migrating to Mumbai’s outskirts.

Migration is frequently associated with the expansion of slums in Mumbai. The Mumbai Metropolitan Region has a sizable slum population, which is mainly centred in the Core, or the MCGM area. Mumbai is home to more than 2000 slum communities that are tucked in between commercial centres and middle- and upper-class neighbourhoods (Sharma, 2010).

As a result, Mumbai’s social fabric emerged for not having rich and poor districts segregated but rather coexisting, in contrast to many European and American cities. That said, the rich continue to grow richer while the poor struggle to survive.

The biggest shift over the past fifty years was the sharp rise in the proportion of immigrants from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, which went from 0.2% and 3.5% respectively in 1961 to 24.5% and 24.5% in 2001, respectively.

Slums and Housing

According to the 2001 Census in Mumbai City (MCGM), the slum population made up 54 percent of the total population. In 2011 (unpublished data acquired by the first author), that percentage dropped to 52.5 percent (6.5 million). There are numerous slum pockets scattered around the city, but they are more numerous in the western and eastern suburbs under the control of Mumbai MCGM along the railroad tracks.

Slums have expanded due to migration, but they have also expanded naturally.

Nearly two-fifths of the city’s adult population (ages 15 to 49) in 2005–06 was made up of migrants, including roughly 45% of men and 53% of women (International Institute for Population Sciences, 2009:90).

Housing for their employees was once offered by cotton textile and factory owners, railroads, and the Bombay Improvement

Trust near the workplaces (Bhowmik, 2011) . These apartment buildings were referred to as chawl.

However, since the early 1980s, the migrant workers have been compelled to find their own housing due to the decrease in the formal sector and the quickly expanding informal sector.

Although migrants gave the city cheap labour, they were unable to purchase housing because of its exorbitant costs relative to their income levels. These conditions push them to encroach the city’s land, then become slums.

One of the main causes of the city of Mumbai’s (MCGM) population gradually moving to the outer and inner zones was the city’s housing shortage. However, the majority of the population of Mumbai still resides in slums despite an increase in the percentage of the people living in the periphery (MCGM).

The future of Mumbai and its development planning has been the subject of intense discussion during the past ten years. Politicians, elites, and those in the inner sanctum of power all find great appeal in the notion that Mumbai should turn into Shanghai or Singapore.

This is a problem that affects the slum inhabitants’ sustainability, security, and ability to support themselves in addition to their access to shelter. The bulk of the migrating population is living in appalling conditions, and needs better premises to survive.

In Mumbai, however, urban planning procedures have often been disregarded over the years. Mumbai’s primary difficulty is to offer cheap accommodation to the majority of its residents who earn very little money and live in uninviting slums.