ABSTRACT
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s announcement on 24 March 2020 of a three-week nationwide lockdown was intended to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. It aimed to create a massive phenomenon called “social distancing” in a densely populated country. When the middle class was busy settling in to “work from home”, millions of migrants from various cities in the country were taking long, arduous journeys towards “home”. Internal migration, both intra and inter-state, is massive and has quite complex dynamics. Migrants have become engines of our economic growth because they provide cheap labour to the destination economy and simultaneously keep the consumption growth in the places of their origin through remittances. Data on internal migration in India is principally drawn from two main sources – the decennial population Census and the quinquennial migration surveys carried out by the national sample survey office. Both these sources provide a wealth of data on migration.
