In rich countries 81% of people live in urban areas. In the rest of the world half the population still lives in the countryside
village in Hebei province, a group of friends are tucking into duck, broccoli and dumplings, flavoured with raw garlic and lubricated withliquor. It is the Chinese new year, and migrant workers have come home to see their families. Nationwide, some 3bn journeys were undertaken during the holiday season this year, making it the biggest mass migration ever; though next year’s will doubtless be even bigger.
By moving from unproductive paddyfields to better jobs in factories and shops, they have made themselves and China richer. Somewhere between a fifth and a third of the country’s colossal economic growth between the late 1970s and the current decade is due to this great migration. The farmers are sharecroppers. They are always hungry at the start of the season, so the landlord advances them grain. Asked how much they currently owe him, they do not know: none of them can read or do sums. Asked how much they typically receive at the end of the year, they say “nothing”. The landlord always calculates that they have received their full share of the crop. He does not want them to have spare food or cash; if they did, they might quit.
B.R. Ambedkar a contemporary of Gandhi’s who championed dalits, called the Indian village “a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism”. Many migrants agree. “In my village, cutting someone’s tree down by mistake could lead to murder,” recalls Tawwaj Ali, a factory worker in Ahmedabad. “No one knows who you are in the city,” he adds, “so there’s less conflict.
Another problem is violence. Rape is common and poorly policed. So although many Indian women migrate to marry, few migrate to work . And because most migrant workers are men, the places where they cluster have wildly unbalanced sex ratios, making them even more dangerous for women. In “Good Economics for Hard Times”, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, two of the winners of this year’s Nobel prize for economics, argue that most people who would benefit from moving stay put, for three reasons. They value the familiar; they overestimate the risks of moving; and they do not know anyone or have anywhere to stay in the place they could go.
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