Regional Patterns and Determinants of Commuting Between Rural and Urban India
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Regional Patterns and Determinants of Commuting Between Rural and Urban India Vasavi Bhatt1 · S. Chandrasekhar1 · Ajay Sharma2
© Indian Society of Labour Economics 2020
Abstract Despite an increase in the number of workers commuting between rural and urban areas, much of the literature on worker mobility continues to be migration centric. This paper establishes the importance of rural–urban commuting in India. As per estimates from Periodic Labour Force Survey 2018–2019, an estimated 18.8 million individuals living in rural are working in urban India and the share of earnings from urban in total non-farm rural earnings is 19.3%. Among all rural workers, 7.3% are rural–urban commuters while only 2.1% of urban workers are urban–rural commuters. We document large variations at the sub-national level. Our results from a multinomial model to understand the factors associated with commuting highlight the importance of lagged regional unemployment rate. A high rural unemployment rate acts as a push factor, and a low urban unemployment rate acts as a pull factor for rural–urban commuting. The urbanness of occupations in a region is also an important correlate of commuting. The paper concludes by highlighting the need to prioritize questions in India’s labour force survey that would help understand the nature of labour mobility and strength of rural–urban linkages. Keywords Labour mobility · Commuting · Rural–urban linkages · Classification of jobs · India JEL Classification J21 · J61 · R12 · R23
* S. Chandrasekhar [email protected] Vasavi Bhatt [email protected] Ajay Sharma [email protected] 1
Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Gen A K VaidyaMarg, Goregaon (East), Mumbai 400065, India
2
Indian Institute of Management, Indore, India
13
Vol.:(0123456789) ISLE
The Indian Journal of Labour Economics
1 Introduction Three key factors, viz. distribution of economic activity and availability of jobs over space, distance between residence and job location, and the wage differential between source and destination, together determine the decision of workers to either migrate or commute. In addition to these factors, access to transportation, time and monetary cost of transport are important correlates of the decision to commute to work. While the theoretical models on place of residence and job location are fairly standard,1 the empirical literature on commuting, in context of developing countries is fairly limited, especially between rural and urban areas. In fact, to this date, much of the literature on worker mobility continues to be migration centric. This is despite the fact that there has been an increase in the number of workers commuting between rural and urban areas. It is also true that the number of daily commuters is as large if not larger than either seasonal or permanent migrants in any year (Chandrasekhar et al. 2017). Additionally with the dependence on non-farm employment and earnings among rural households, commuting has become far more important channel to be understood and facil
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