Which of the following is a cause of rural to urban migration in India ?

Question

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Correct — D, All the above. An inclusive-set option is right only when every item listed survives on its own, so the work is to hunt for one false item — and here there is none. High labour demand in cities is the textbook pull factor: construction, small manufacturing, transport and personal services in towns absorb unskilled labour at wages well above the prevailing rural agricultural wage, and that wage gap sits at the centre of both Everett Lee's 1966 push–pull framework and the Lewis two-sector model of surplus labour transfer. Few jobs in rural areas is the matching push factor: Indian agriculture carries chronic disguised unemployment — extra hands on the same holding whose marginal contribution to output is effectively zero — alongside a sharply seasonal work calendar, shrinking average operational holdings and a thin rural non-farm economy in most districts. Unbalanced rural-urban development is the structural cause that manufactures the other two: when schools, hospitals, electricity, metalled roads, credit and industry cluster in a few urban nodes, the return to living in a town rises while the return to staying in a village rises far more slowly, so the gap itself keeps generating movement decade after decade. The aggregate result is visible in the Census: India's urban share rose from 27.81 per cent in 2001 to 31.16 per cent in 2011, and 2001–11 was the first decade since Independence in which the absolute increase in urban population exceeded the absolute increase in rural population. Since (a), (b) and (c) are each separately documented causes and none of them is false, the only option that is not partially wrong is (d).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) True in itself — it is the classic pull half of the push–pull pair — but choosing it alone asserts that the other two statements are false. Rural distress moves people even in years when urban labour demand is flat, so urban demand cannot be the whole story, and a single true cause can never beat an option that already contains it.  (b) Also true, and arguably the parent of the other two: the town–village gap in wages, schooling, health care and infrastructure is exactly what makes moving rational. It is offered here as though it were an alternative to the push and pull factors rather than their source, so picking it alone silently denies both of them.  (c) True, and the most frequently cited push factor — disguised unemployment on family holdings, long idle stretches in the agricultural calendar, and the thinness of rural non-farm work. It tempts anyone who has learned migration purely as a distress phenomenon, but it describes only the origin end of what is by definition a two-ended process.

Concept: Migration is explained in the syllabus through the push–pull model, formalised by Everett S. Lee in 'A Theory of Migration' (1966): factors at the place of origin that push people out, factors at the destination that pull them in, intervening obstacles such as distance, cost and language, and personal factors such as age and education. Applied to India, the push is agrarian — small and fragmented holdings, disguised unemployment, seasonality, indebtedness — and the pull is urban wage work in construction, manufacturing, transport and services. The Census does not merely count migrants; it classifies each move into one of four streams (rural to rural, rural to urban, urban to urban, urban to rural) and records a reason for it (work or employment, business, education, marriage, moved after birth, moved with household). Rural-to-rural is the largest stream by sheer number because most female migration in India is on account of marriage, but it is the rural-to-urban stream that changes the urban share of the population and produces the phenomenon this question is about.

State PCS 2024 Q41 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q41 — Geography PYQ with Answer