India Migration Report 2020 examines how migration surveys operate to collect, analyse and bring to life socio-economic issues in social science research.
With a focus on the strategies and the importance of information collected by Kerala Migration Surveys since 1998, the volume:
- Explores the effect of male migration on women left behind; attitudes of male migrants within households; the role of transnational migration and it effect on attitudes towards women;
- Investigates consumption of remittances and their utilization; asset accumulation and changing economic statuses of households; financial inclusion of migrants and migration strategies during times of crises like the Kerala floods of 2018;
- Highlights the twenty-year experience of the Kerala Migration Surveys, how its model has been adapted in various states and led to the proposed large-scale India Migration Survey; and
- Explores issues of migration politics and governance, as well as return migration strategies of other countries to provide a roadmap for India.
The volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers of development studies, economics, demography, sociology and social anthropology, and migration and diaspora studies.
About the Author: S. Irudaya Rajan is Professor at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India. With more than three decades of research experience in Kerala, he has coordinated eight major migration surveys (1998, 2003, 2007, 2008, 2011, 2014, 2016 and 2018) in Kerala (with Professor K.C. Zachariah), led the migration surveys in Goa (2008), Punjab (2011) and Tamil Nadu (2015), and provided technical support to the Gujarat Migration Survey (2010). He has published extensively in national and international journals on demographic, social, economic, political and psychological implications of international migration. Professor Rajan is currently engaged in several projects on international migration with the New York University, UAE Exchange Centre, India Centre for Migration of the Ministry of External Affairs and World Bank. He worked closely with the erstwhile Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs, government of India; Department of Non-Resident Keralite Affairs (NORKA), government of Kerala and Kerala State Planning Board. He is currently co-chairing the working group on NORKA for the thirteenth five-year plan (2017-2022) of Kerala State Planning Board, government of Kerala, and is initiating the Kerala Migration Survey 2021, funded by the Department of NORKA, government of Kerala. He is Editor of the two Routledge series, India Migration Report (annual) since 2010 and South Asia Migration Report (biennial), and is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Migration and Development. Currently, he is the Chair of the KNOMAD (The Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development, World Bank) working group on internal migration and urbanization. He is one of the expert committee members to advise the government of Kerala on COVID-19.
