foreign cookers and they fly abroad how did dosage become synonymous to South Indian Cuisine and why do people leave their homes and migrate to a different city which are the different language and culture all together in today's episode of Beyond Frameworks we talked with research who has researched on migration for over a decade we talk everything migration and how magos dosat and pressure cookers have a connection in them foreign pressure cookers tell us about migration let me start with mangoes all of us love mangoes in India very proud about where they're grown each one of us have a very strong connection and the mangoes I love the best come out of the Alfonso mangoes apus which comes from a place called the konkan region in India what's lesser known about the konkan region though is the mass migration that's been happening since the late 19th century all the way today did you know for example the sex ratio of ratnagri has shown a consistent female surpluses because the men are away they're working in Bombay or Mumbai they're working in the Gulf they're working in different parts of the country and what's really fascinating is that they don't actually settle down most of them they actually go back to ratnaki this is what I call as the Great Indian migration wave over 20 percent of Indian districts have exhibited persistent voluntary Mass circular migration for more than 130 years and the konkan region which produces mangoes is the classic symbol of that and that is why the joke of the conquered region is that it's not only famous for mangoes but also quite literally man goes coming out to those Stars which is another dish which is hugely popular all over India the story really that has to be explained is how did this become popular why is it that South Indian food is now eaten across the country and the district that we associate South Indian food across the country is a district called Udupi which is just south of the konkan region and just like in ratnagiri it's the men who have migrated all over India worked in different restaurants created this urti South Indian brand but very rarely settled down in those places they come back and then their sons go out and take their jobs Udupi is also a district which is part of the Great Indian migration wave you have other districts ganjam in odisha azamgarh in up Saran and Bihar I can go on and tell you about different districts across India but you get the point by now that India when you say migration in India it is a very long running story you have communities which grow up expecting to migrate if you grow up in Kerala today for instance you are expected to move out at some point of time in your life it's seen as a right of passage compared to if you're born in madhya Pradesh where migration is not generally seen to be the norm the societies are structured in a very different way migration also leads to remittances you get a completely you know new definition of the economy Kerala for instance is hugely dependent on migrants money that comes from the Gulf just like bihar's economy is usually dependent on money that comes from Kerala or Gujarat or Maharashtra India therefore is hugely interconnected and many of the stories like mangoes or those stars are intimately linked with the travels of migrants across the subcontinent the my pressure cooker story is very interesting because that really relates to international migration they're about 30 million Indians now outside and as I've written my book India moving just suggest that two items which most Indians pack before going abroad one the mug and to the pressure cooker and the idea of the pressure cooker being such a strong indian symbol tells you about an object which is at the heart of so many International migrants who go from India who love not just cooking but also the noise associated with it and especially when you go abroad when it's very quiet that noise often reminds you of the hustle and bustle of Indian life so dosas mangoes and pressure cookers in their own ways tell us so much about both internal and international migration there are many types of migrations in India and to really understand migration India you have to ask the question why do people move the first most fundamental basic reason for moving in India actually and most people don't connect with this is actually marriage most migrants in India are actually women and they move upon marriage so if you move from one Village to another you move from a village to a city upon marriage you are technically a migrant and that is why as per the senses of India over 300 million people million women are migrants this migration has been happening throughout history as far as we can remember which means maybe even more than 2 000 years this is the longest running migration system of India which we don't usually see as migration we then come to migration for work in India predominantly dominated by men predominantly in areas known as what I describe as the Great Indian migration wave places which are dense like Kerala or Bihar places which in some cases are battered by climatic shocks like Coastal Orissa you have a cyclone every 10 15 years very fragile ecosystems which lead out migration these migrations are intensifying because with climate change we are seeing more vulnerability of livelihood and ecosystems across the subcontinent which means one big shift that's happening from what was happening earlier is that more communities are now prone to out migration because of climatic shocks you then have also international migration not just for marriage or work but for a variety of reasons and for example students and education going to study is such an important part now of the overall Quantum of migration both within the country and outside this is of course the volume of it has changed dramatically in the last 20 years just think of the crisis today in Ukraine we're saying they have 15 to 20 000 students Indian students studying in Ukraine would you have seen that in the 1970s or 80s simply not so our migration patterns in the last 30 years have Diversified to newer destinations within the subcontinent outside the country and it's not all bad because a lot of these migrations create new links think of our I.T industry in Bangalore which is almost completely created through migratory links connecting USA and India or think of the health ecosystem of India which again was a lot of it set up by returning nris or non-resident Indians or think of the 80 billion dollars worth of remittances that India gets from outside as a result of which migration and the fast evolving patterns of migration of the last 20 years whether it's for climate change for international or internal education more women who are participating in migration streams these are the newest trends in migration in terms of geographies some have been there throughout for example Bihar and Kerala two ends of the spectrum some are emerging for example West Bengal has emerged as one of the major origin states of out migration in the last 20 years but I would say the biggest change that's happened in the last 20 years is what I call as the north to south migration that is within India as South India progresses faster than North the northern Indian Northern Indian Hinterland in economic terms what was earlier a linguistic barrier for example the bihari person would choose Gujarat or Maharashtra rather than Tamil Nadu purely because of ease and familiarity of language today the wage differentials have opened up so much that that same bihari worker does not mind learning Tamil and working in Tamil Nadu because the wage differentials have opened up that much more and that is why in the next 30 Years the not to South migration is going to be probably the biggest wave of migration which is new which has not happened and which will also put a huge stress on political relations across States what you also see very new is this almost complete consensus across political parties in India of seeing the migrant as some sort of a villain virtually every political part of India wants to have a quota a state level law which says you know 75 80 reservation for locals these are anti-constitutional laws Indian constitution guarantees free movement of Labor so these are some emerging Trends in what we would call as patterns of migration in India if you look at the world of Indian business we intuitively know that there are few communities which have historically been associated with it partly because caste particular cast orders which have been assigned business as a role but also because their particular States and provinces of India historically which have generated what we call as traditional business communities that still have a huge dominance in the world or particular sectors or for that meant a big business in India we're only talking about five or six communities we're talking about the marwadis the gujaratis the sindhis the punjabis you can say cut cheese and one Community which is lesser known today the chettiars which are South what's fascinating is that most of them if you see the word marwar Gujarat Sindh ascribe to regions in the western part of the country why is it that a few of these communities have gone all over India all over the world and dominated certain sectors at different points of time this is a fascinating question which historians sociologists researchers still struggle to Grapple with but what we do know is that these communities physically migrated in the span of about 300 years to every nook and corner of the subcontinent think of the marwadi's from Assam to South India think of the gujaratis and coimbatore one aspect of this community that comes out is not just risk-taking which is very important for entrepreneurship but adaptability also very good calculations to move when you see opportunities decline think of the marwadies in Calcutta many people associate the business houses of Calcutta with the marvadis and yet the largest contingent of marvelous today is found in Maharashtra not just Mumbai but the entire District bells of Northern Maharashtra you can see what happened in the last 40 years very quick to see the locus of economic geography move towards western and southern India the community themselves have migrated the the newer generation folk have gone to take on New Opportunities outside Calcutta so these communities are very flexible very quick having said that there are also new communities communities which are traditionally outside the fold of business costs which are storming the world of Indian business think of the saurashtra patels and the Diamonds think of the gounders in tirupur Cotton textiles or variety of castes and communities in India now are increasingly entering business but just like the marwadis or the sindhis or the punjabis they are also used in the community or caste networks to raise themselves through it and that's why we say Indian business is still linked heavily with caste Community even though the range of that has Diversified immensely in the last 20 or 30 years and migration is a very crucial component of that as communities physically move from one place to another to widen their networks the national lockdown was announced March 24 2020 what India with was an unprecedented reverse migration Exodus as the epics like the ramayan and Mahabharata were being played out on the televisions screens which also have exiled as a very important part of their themes what we actually saw on the streets were people walking back home in complete human misery this was tragic this was not really necessary but it also exposed the tremendous circularity of migration India where people have one foot in the village and one foot in the city as I have called this the Great Indian migration wave this affects more than 200 million people in India and the migration crisis of 2020 for the first time visibilized and invisible class of Migrant workers is this reverse migration sustained have people come back what do we really know about this a we do know that two years into this pandemic a lot of the people simply don't have enough economic opportunities back in the Villages and hence have made it back to the cities we also know that many cities which did not treat their migrants well those migrants have been forced to diversify and choose new destinations destinations which can arguably give them a better shot at life three a lot of people have said maybe reverse Exodus was good because now people will focus on Source regions and maybe people will not have to migrate on that I'll just say that migration is a personal choice we have to leave the choice to people as to where they want to be you can provide as many economic opportunities in various parts of India but migration as a historical process is in a way inevitable in India in fact what we've often seen is that as con places states have become richer migration often actually increases it doesn't decrease because aspirations change so we should not see migration as something bad it is inevitable as a part of Economic Development and while this reverse Exodus was a one-time phenomenon in my view it has led to people both migrants and employees to fundamentally reconnect reconsider their employment contracts and ensure that the workplaces are hopefully no longer as vulnerable as they were earlier a lot of good governance policies have happened after the lockdown for example the one nation one Russian guard intrastate portable Social Security we need much more of these policies to make migrant workers feel at home but the long-term Arc of migration in India is not reverse but the Exorcist which is already happening for more than 100 years which is from villages to cities we've seen hundreds of millions of people in China move from farms to factories this is an inevitable part of Economic Development everywhere in the world and in a way we need more of it I would end by pointing out that ambedkar had a very clear view on this saying that the city is the place of Liberation and he exhorted people to move away from Village Life to City Life Gandhi on the other hand celebrated Village republics and this is a tension we keep seeing in India the ambedkarite view of moving to cities versus the gandhin view of staying in villages which view Will trump my sense is that the historical answer is very simple people will be still moving to cities even in the future even though the pandemic might have recalibrated some of these decisions for some migrant workers who unfortunately caught out in a big way when the lockdown happened in 2020. 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