Migration, Transnational Flows and Development in India: A Regional Perspective

A substantial body of development research and policymaking today focusses on the potential benefits of international migration for developing countries, particularly on the resources that are sent by migrants to their families or communities at home. This ‘development mantra’ (Kapur 2004) views migration as an opportunity rather than a negative outcome of poverty and underdevelopment, as migrants from the South working in the North augment their skills and resources and become conduits through which human and financial capital is reinvested in their countries of origin (Clemens et al. 2014). The emergence of migrants as ‘heroes of development’ (Khadria 2008) and remittances as a ‘development tool’ (Bakker 2015) is linked to the influence of neoliberal ideology in the international development policy arena, which has entailed a rollback of development aid from both nation states and international institutions. The current discussion on migration and development was initiated by the 2003 World Bank report on Global Development Finance (2003), which claimed that the inflow of financial resources from developed to developing countries in the form of migrant remittances and philanthropy – at USD 90 billion a year globally – was nearly twice the total flow of official development assistance. Subsequently, international development agencies have repeatedly highlighted the significance of migrant remittances as a key source of capital and investment for developing countries (e.g. the UNDP’s Human Development Report 2009 [UNDP 2009]). Recent figures put the volume of international remittance transfers to developing countries at USD 300 billion in 2010 – an increase of about 270 per cent in the past decade (Guha 2011a: 2). In addition to household-level remittances, diaspora philanthropy is recognised as an important category of migrant transfers (Geithner et al. 2004; Merz et al. 2007).3 In India, the discussion on migration and development has focussed mainly on two issues – ‘brain drain’ (Khadria 1999) and the macroeconomic impact of remittances (Nayyar 1994) – but in this chapter, we show that the effects of migration and remittances to India are much more varied and complex than these discussions suggest. The current interest in migration and development has produced a large amount of literature detailing the types, volumes, channels, destinations, impact of remittances and other kinds of resource transfers. Most of these studies aim to determine whether and how resources sent by migrants to their home countries contribute (or not) to ‘development’. However, this work suffers from several theoretical and methodological problems. First, due to paucity of data, it is practically impossible to adequately assess the ‘impact’ of migration on development either by measuring the net losses and gains of migration (Maimbo and Ratha 2005) or by modelling the macroeconomic effects of remittances (Guha 2011b). The inadequacy of official data is compounded by the large proportion of remittances that flow through informal channels (Pieke et al. 2007). Further, most studies remain straitjacketed by conventional notions of both migration and development and simplistic models of their interconnections (De Haas 2010).4 Second, migration research often views mobility as a one-way process that mechanically connects ‘sending’ and ‘receiving’ countries (Raghuram 2009), while studies of remittances also concentrate on unidirectional flows of resources. Moreover, remittance research is often carried out in isolation from migration studies, as if these two kinds of flows (of people and resources) were not interlinked processes. Third, the migration and development literature often constructs migrants primarily as economic actors, focusing narrowly on financial transactions to the neglect of other dimensions, such as ‘social remittances’ (Levitt 1998), that is, intangible flows of knowledge, ideas, ideologies, cultural products and organisational practices (Levitt and Rajaram 2012, 2013). Similarly, much more attention has been paid to the economic impacts of remittances than to the potential socio-cultural, ideological and political reverberations of diasporic connections with the homeland (Mohan 2008). The dominant view of migration and remittances as economic processes with primarily economic outcomes fails to take into account the cultural meanings, political motivations or social implications of resource transfers. Fourth, there is the problem of scale. Despite a growing recognition that transnational networks connect migrants with their home regions or towns at various scales, the development literature has focussed mainly on the relationship between nationally defined diasporas and their home countries, and on the macroeconomic impacts of remittances – an approach that has been criticised as ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002). On the other hand, we have a number of micro-level qualitative or ethnographic studies that examine how remittance flows connect particular villages or communities with migrant members (Carling 2014). While this literature provides a useful corrective to the national scale bias, many of these studies ignore the larger political-economic context that shapes patterns of migration and remittances. Few scholars have neither attempted to capture at once the multiple scales of transnational mobilities and flows or the interconnections between different types of flows, nor has much attention been given to the intermediate scale of the region. In short, to fully unravel the intricacies of the multiple potential connections between ‘migration’ and ‘development’, we need to track transnational flows in all their complexity. Before discussing how this might be done, in the following section we provide a brief account of what we currently know about flows of migrant resources to India