Towards contextualised, disaggregated and intersectional understandings of migration in India

New patterns of mobility are continuously shaping and being shaped by macro processes of liberalisation and capitalism on the one hand and local processes embedded in culture, class, ethnicity and race on the other hand. India is no exception and new transregional alliances as well as actors and institutions are shaping the ‘power geometry’ (Massey, 1993) of migration by determining who migrates, why, where and under what circumstances. There has been an increase in certain forms of migrant labour such as construction work, care work and industrial labour or, what Sassen (2001) calls the ‘real work’ of modern societies. But these new configurations of mobility, particularly those of poorer social groups are inadequately addressed in migration theory and policy in India. Part of the reason for this is that theories have not been revisited based on emerging empirical evidence. Another reason is the scalar politics of migration that invisibilises the poor and their experiences of migrant labour markets. In other words the state and its institutions in India have different approaches to different categories of migrants according to their socio-spatial positioning; the uneducated poor, whose journeys are mainly local or into peripheral spaces, have not received the same attention as the educated classes who move longer distances into formal jobs and urban centres. It can be speculated that the underlying causes for these differences are closely linked to caste, tribe, religion and gender-based power relations. A third reason is the tendency of the public and policy discourse on migration into low-paid work to draw on cross-sectional analysis at a single point in time rather than taking into account longitudinal dynamics over the life-course of migrants. There is a need to challenge these perceptions with new evidence on the specificities of migration through contextualised and intersectional analyses. With this objective in mind, this commentary discusses emerging evidence about the experience of migrant construction workers. Such migration is of huge current significance all over the world and also in India. Construction work and brick kiln work together employ millions of adults worldwide and, according to WIEGO (2016) at least 30 million in India. The significance of this work derives from the fact that it is abundantly available in larger towns and cities and barriers to entry are low; formal education is not needed. I start with the conceptual underpinnings that are often employed in the Indian discourse on migration for construction work and how these convey a lopsided view of migration. One example is the concept of ‘footloose labour’ (Breman, 1996), a term