# **D. The Role of Administrative Requirements**

Low levels of internal migration in India cannot be directly attributed to restrictive federal government policies. Unlike in China, where federal government policies constrain migration through measures such as the _hukou_ system, anyone in India is legally free to move from one location to another. Migrant workers in India are even protected from exploitation by federal laws. One such provision is the Inter State Migrant Workmen Act, 1979, which requires that migrants are paid timely wages equal to or higher than the minimum.<sup>8</sup> Other legal provisions that migrants can benefit from are the Minimum Wage Act, 1948; Contract Labor Act, 1970; Equal Remuneration Act, 1976; and Building and Other Construction Workers Act, 1996 (Sasikumar and Srivastava, 2003).

The literature suggests that internal migration in India could be constrained by the fact that moving across different spatial boundaries is costly. After accounting for physical distance, linguistic differences and other economic and social barriers in origin and destination regions,<sup>9</sup> Kone et al. (2016) find that state borders remain an important impediment. The authors estimate that migration between neighboring districts in the same state is around 50 percent larger than migration between districts that are on different sides of a state border.<sup>10</sup> This border effect is also emphasized in the Government of India’s recent Economic Survey; controlling for distance, labor migrant flows within states were four times the labor migrant flows across states. The role of state boundaries in India aligns with similar analysis from other large countries. Poncet (2006) finds that there is more intraprovince migration in comparison to interprovince migration in China. In an earlier study, Helliwel (1997) estimated that interprovincial migration in Canadian provinces is almost 100 times as likely as migration to Canadian provinces from the United States.<sup>11</sup> There are policies, implemented at the state level, which can act as inhibitors, either explicitly or implicitly, on the mobility of labor across state boundaries. Kone et al. (2016) use the recent creation of three new Indian states in 2000 to provide additional evidence that these state borders are not natural barriers. Instead, they argue that state borders impose administrative restrictions on internal mobility. They also outline three key inhibitors of interstate migration: inadequate portability of social welfare benefits as well as a significant home bias in access to education and public employment, which is, in part, attributable to reservations for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes.

The de facto identification document for most Indian households to access social welfare entitlements is the ration card issued by state governments. The basic purpose of this card is to enable access to the Public Distribution System (PDS), which provides subsidized food to poor households. In the absence of a national identity documentation system, the ration card, which covers a majority of the population, also serves as the proof of identity needed for access to a wide

> 8 The effectiveness and implementation of this provision, however, is questionable (Menon, 2011).

> 9 Through district-fixed effects

> 10 This gap varies by education level, age and reason for migration, but is always large and significant.

> 11 This evidence of border cost in the case of migration is based on the work of McCallum, who showed that Canadian provinces adjacent to the United States undertook much higher levels of trade with their neighboring provinces than with the United States.

15