Migration: City and Rural Areas Essay

Migration of people from villages and small cities to Big cities have given them opportunity to find jobs and earn their living which was not possible to do in the small cities or villages, as the big companies and factories are mostly situated in the capital cities or big cities. But the migration has its own problems, which can hinder the development of the capital and large cities. In below paragraphs, we will discuss some of the plethora of problems created by the migration in the large and capital cities of India.

Initially the most common problem faced by big cities is extreme housing scarcity. Due to large number of people flocking into the cities the demand for the houses have gone up beyond the limit (set by its resources and system) of the cities. Mega cities look like “over blown villages without urban culture and urban functional characteristics.” Due to shortage of houses poor people are forced to live in slums or streets (Gimba and G.

Kumshe, 2011), as they cannot afford the rising prices in the houses. This case is clearly visible in the city of Mumbai, where 62% of population lives in slums due to acute housing shortage (B. Jain, 2010). To get rid of this problem, administration should make “Garden cities” around the big cities in order to accommodate the migrated people and also to solve the problem of housing scarcity in the big cities (A. Blakeman, 2012). This solution does not have any drawbacks because the idea of garden cities can eliminate the problem of housing shortage to a huge extent since accumulating the positives of both large cities and rural areas makes these cities very effective and established.

The second most common problem of migration is rise in unemployment in the large cities, which further leads to the increase in poor standard of living, and also poor hygienic conditions in the cities. Employment, by far, remains the biggest cause of migration for the people in rural areas (P.K. Singh, 2010). They create pressure on the job market, as they are willing to work on the lower wages, they dent the prospects of the locals in the city (P.K. Singh, 2010), leading to rise in unemployment and slums in the city. Governments should shift its factories and also establish vocational training centres to provide training to the youth for self-employment, which will offer job opportunities to the people living in rural areas so that they do not migrate to the metropolitan cities (Gimba and G.Kumshe, 2011). Despite of having so much rewards of this solution there is one limitation of this solution i.e. jobs in the metropolitan cities might start to decline, as jobs provided by government factories will shift to the rural areas.

So, after examining the problems of Migration of people from rural areas to urban areas and also giving some propositions to these problems and assessing these solutions, we can see that despite the some drawback of one of the solutions they might contribute a lot in improving the problems of metropolitan and capital cities and remove the huge socio-economic burden from the large and capital cities caused due to migration.

References: –

– Alexandra Blakeman. (2012). Will Garden Cities solve our housing crisis?. Available: http://blog.housingspecification.com/will-garden-cities-solve-our-housing-crisis/. Last accessed 28th Nov 2012. – Bhavika Jain. (2010). 62% of Mumbai lives in slums: Census. Available: http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/Mumbai/62-of-Mumbai-lives-in-slums-Census/Article1-614027.aspx. Last accessed 28th Nov 2012. – Pravin Kumar Singh. (2010). Migration in India – a cause of socio-ethnic friction. Available: http://www.policyproposalsforindia.com/article.php?article_id=201&languageid=1. Last accessed 26th Nov 2012. – Zainab Gimba, Mustapha G. Kumshe. (2011). CAUSES AND EFFECTS OF RURAL-URBAN MIGRATION IN BORNO STATE: A CASE STUDY OF MAIDUGURI METROPOLIS. Available: http://www.ajbms.org/articlepdf/ajbms_2011_1130.pdf. Last accessed 28th Nov 2012.