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Paper short abstract:

Based on study done on 1000 youth migrants in India, the paper proposes an alternative lens to understand youth migration and suggests source-site interventions to include these migrants in the social security framework.

Paper long abstract:

India has close to 37% of population as internal migrants, constituting more than 10% of the labour force. While on one hand it is clear from various studies that these migrants, particularly moving from the rural to urban destinations lack any democratic rights to the city and are often invisibilised in the policy making process, on the other hand attempts of many civil society organisations of collectivising migrants to give them a voice have also not been very successful. The paper tries to interrogate this contradiction.

In our study of youth migrants (16-26 years) we find that the younger generation of migrants are making migration decisions in very different ways than their predecessors. The interesting thing about the youth migrants is that they are the second-generation migrants, who have earlier experienced migration as child migrants with their families. Hence rather than economic distress, their migration is driven by ‘materialistic aspirations’. Also, the imagination of source-destination migration corridors no longer holds. The youth migrants have been using the social media platforms to create and expand their migration networks, which enables them to change their destination at their will, thus making the destination sites very fluidic.

With this backdrop, the paper proposes an alternative lens to understand youth migration and suggests source-site interventions to include these migrants in the social security framework.