Tushar K. Nandi and Saibal Kar are Assistant Professors at Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. In this interview they say that short-term migration can increase intergenerational occupational mobility. There has to be policies from the government to enhance the skills of internal migrants. The different types of skills the short term migrants acquire from different jobs can be utilised to break intergenerational occupational trap.
R.B. Bhagat is Professor at International Institute of Population Sciences (IIPS). In the interview he says that there is a need to include short term migrants in NSS data set and question on out-migration can be included in Census. Government should recognise migrants as a category in its policies.
Kavi Kumar is Professor at Madras School of Economics (MSE). In the interview he says weather variability can induce short-term migration mostly in the poor people. As this can increase in the coming years, livelihood opportunities should be created in the urban and semi-urban areas. Lack of data about these weather variability and migrants should be generated.
Mohd Tarique is Assistant Professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai Campus. In the interview he talks about the Beggary Law, the factors that lead to begging. The government schemes are not available to beggars as they don’t have identity cards and the laws make them offenders.
Ajith Kumar is the Director of Centre for Socio-Economic and Environmental Studies. He has a post graduate degree in Statistics and a Phd in Economics. In this interview he talks about the language barrier that a migrant has to face in Kerala. The migrant inflow has caused an increase in the working age group population. The wage rates in Kerala are higher than the wages from MGNREGA. Kerala government should provide more facilities to the in migrants.
Binitha Thampi is Assistant Professor of Development Studies in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. She holds a PhD in Development Studies from the Institute for Social and Economic Change in Bangalore, India. Her research interests include gender and development; ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) and digital communities; feminist demography and policy critique; decentralized planning and governance; and poverty, social exclusion, and marginalization. In this interview she talks about the migrants coming to Kerala from other states and why it is increasing at a fast pace and what are the factors that are driving them to come to Kerala. Also what are the factors that is causing out-migration(skilled migration) from Kerala.
Praveena Kodoth is Associate Professor Centre for Development Studies. Her areas of interest are Social Policy, Higher Education, State Politics and Policy.In this interview she talks about how emigration from Kerala has impacted and whether or not it leads to a brain drain.
Irudaya Rajan is Associate Professor at Centre for Development Studies. His areas of interest are Population and Development, Economics of Aging, Gender and Development, International Migration: Economic benefits and Social costs, Database Issues: Population Census. In this interview discusses how Emigration situation in Kerala has changed over time and how it has become more diverse in nature.
Umi Daniel is currently working as Head Migration Thematic unit at Aide et Action South Asia. His areas of interests are tribal empowerment, people’s right to food, micro level planning, rights and entitlement of migrant labourers and trade justice campaign. In this interview Umi Daniel discuss how growing rural deprivation, inequality further worsened by the drought situation in country is giving rise to large-scale distress migration of poor people who land up in cities and urban location to eke out better wage and livelihood.
Ashwani Kumar is Project Director, Professor and Chairperson at Department of Centre for Public Policy, Habitat and Human Development, School of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. His areas of interest are internal migration, elections and migration, rights of migrants with a special focus on India. In this interview, Prof. Ashwani Kumar discusses the problems and challenges faced by domestic migrants in exercising their voting rights. He has further talked about how there is a data disconnect and gap in capturing the exact number of migrants and the patterns of migration. He has further shared some of the international experiences as to how some countries have come up with different solutions so that domestic migrants can exercise their right to vote.
Dr Priya Deshingkar is Research Director of the Migrating out of Poverty Research Consortium and Senior Research Fellow in the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. Her research focuses on internal migration and poverty with a focus on precarious occupations, debt migration, labour rights and agency. In this interview, Dr Deshingkar discusses the way forward for migration research and policy, and highlights lacunae in contemporary understandings of migration and mobility.
Sharit K. Bhowmik is currently working with the RCUES, Mumbai. As Kaveri Gill writes, he is “not only a respected expert on the urban poor and the informal sector, but is the best kind of academic, that is, one who steps out of his ivory tower to engage in the real world and seeks to influence policy for the better.” Prof. Bhowmik has been extensively involved in advocacy for street vendor’s rights, and in this interview shared with SHRAM his experiences with the processes of lobbying for legislation, the state of street vendors’ organizing in India, how we can rethink public space, and the need for now more than ever, to identify vending not as a matter of urban space and planning alone, but a question of rights and livelihoods.
