Paper short abstract:

The decaying state of agriculture and climate change means increased internal migration. Based on in-depth interviews with Dalit migrant laborers from Bihar, India, we find that migration trajectories and navigation of the urban labour market are centrally informed by caste networks in India.

Paper long abstract:

Nearly a billion residents of the world's cities live in slums -neighborhoods that lack adequate water, sanitation, and housing (UN, 2014).The implications of these trends for urban poverty and social mobility need to be understood as they have a direct bearing on the development measures. While migration decisions are complex, the decaying state of agriculture and climate change is certainly a factor that aggravates vulnerability in rural and urban areas. This combined with political and institutional constraints on people's mobility is made possible by a sedentary conception of citizenship and welfare that does not take into account the mobile character of the population. This narrative would be similar throughout the Global South. However, caste plays a pivotal in determining development outcomes in South Asia. The Agricultural Census of 2015-16 reported that Dalits own only about 9% of the total agricultural land. Recognizing the heightened exposure to emerging climate risks and having no land to fall back on, we find that in any event of distress, the only option for them is to move to a big city en masse and squat in the swamps, which forms the present-day slums of India. Based on in-depth interviews with Dalit migrant laborers from Bihar, we seek to understand the reasons of migrations from Bihar and the varied outcomes of migrations for dalits, OBCs and Upper castes.This preponderance of semi-disenfranchised Dalit population in urban informal settlements is a testimony of systemic violence and institutionalised vulnerability of labour.