The Changing Nature of Rurality: Reframing the Discourse on Migration and Commuting
The focus of this chapter is on rural employment diversification and rural-urban commuting. An estimated 13% of rural workers enaged in nonagricultural activites and an equal proportion of urban workers commute for work in India. The majority of commuting
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The Changing Nature of Rurality: Reframing the Discourse on Migration and Commuting S. Chandrasekhar and Abhiroop Mukhopadhyay Introduction Where do urban boundaries end and rural areas begin? For administrative purposes, we know the answer. However, in many parts of India, the distinction between rural and urban is increasingly getting blurred when viewed from space. Satellite imagery suggests no break in terms of builtup area when one reaches the city limits. At the same time, improvements in transport and communication infrastructure have increased the ease of movement of goods and people between rural and urban areas. All this has led to people questioning the dichotomous lens of an area being rural or urban. Instead, one prefers to focus on the catchphrase “rurban” and have a discussion centered on the degree of rurality. There is evidence to suggest that there has been a diversification of sources of income in rural India. As Gupta (2015) argues, “the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker is slowly getting erased” (p. 38). The extent of rurality of different regions can be examined by many yardsticks, including the slope of the income gradient, the change
S. Chandrasekhar (*) Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai, India A. Mukhopadhyay Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi, India © The Author(s) 2017 D.N. Reddy, K. Sarap (eds.), Rural Labour Mobility in Times of Structural Transformation, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-5628-4_9
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in the distribution of economic activity as distance from the city increases, or the source of income of rural households. Kundu et al. (2002) examined how key indicators like literacy, per capita incomes, and consumption expenditure decline as the distance of the village from the city increases. They find that per capita incomes decline steeply “in the immediate vicinity of the urban centre” with the slope becoming less steep after 15 km. In an analysis similar in spirit to that by Kundu et al. (2002), Sharma (2014) finds that the share of non-agricultural activities is higher in villages close to the city. The occupation profile of villages depends on linkages with its nearby areas, implying that while they might live in a village their work profile extends to beyond farming. While large tracts of India continue to be classified as rural because of the threefold definition,1 in particular the condition that 75% of the male population needs to be engaged in non-agricultural activities, an examination of the principal source of income of the households in rural India portrays a varied picture. Data from the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) survey on Situation Assessment of Agricultural Households (January–December 2013) suggest that while less than two thirds of agricultural households report cultivation as the principal source of income, 22% of agricultural households report wage/salaried employment as their source of income (Table 9.1). A large proportion of agricultural households also report un
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