The importance of family considerations in mobility decisions of rural to urban migrants in India was investigated by analyzing evidence on urban rural ties. The empirical basis was a survey of migrant heads of households in Delhi conducted from October 1975 to April 1976. Only 14% of the migrants in the sample were accompanied by family members when they moved to Delhi, and at the time of the survey 44% of the sample were living on their own as nonfamilial households. 82% of the migrants reported having family members living in the area. In 1/3 of these cases the rural household contained the wife of the migrant. Over 3/4 of the sample visited their origin regularly, and 2/3 were sending money. Migration decisions are discussed in the context of the mutlicentered family, and urban rural family links are classified into several distinct types, and the importance of visits and remittances to origin for each of these types are investigated. An econometric analysis of conjugal separation is presented, and the determinants of remittances are investigated. The salient methodological innovations are a 7-part typology of urban rural familial links and the use of logit analysis in the identification of the important determinants of conjugal separation. Nearly 4/5 of the migrants visited their place of origin. The proportion reporting visits was higher for migrants who had family members at place of origin, but as many as 60% of the migrants not having family links maintained contact with rural residents through visits. If migrants recognized mutual kinship rights and obligations dictated by the social system, they maintained close functional ties with their kin. Only 56% of unmarried migrants living as nonfamilial units reported visits to origin compared to 92% of those living with their nuclear unit. For migrants who reported presence of family members at origin, there was no significant difference between landowners and nonlandowners in the proportion who reported visits. Married migrants who had left their wives in the rural area were more likely to visit origin during the agricultural busy periods. A majority of the migrants maintained economic links with the rural area, and in early all these cases financial flows were from the urban to the rural area. Remittances tended to be related positively to urban earnings and needs of the rural household and negatively to obligations in the urban household. There was no evidence of ties weakening over time, but migrants who planned to settle in the city remitted less. To an extent conjugal separation was temporary and reflected husbands and wives making the journey at different times. Migrants were also inhibited from bringing their wives to the city if they owned land at origin or had migrated to obtain cash for specific needs. A part of the explanation also lies in varying regional cultural and environmental characteristics.
Biswajit Banerjee (Sun,) studied this question.