Passages of Fortune?: Exploring Dynamics of International Migration from Punjab

This book examines international out-migration from North India, focusing on the state of Punjab. It is the first-ever empirical exploration of the causes, processes, patterns and consequences of international out-migration based on a robust sample of 10,000 households drawn from both rural and urban areas. The volume explores a range of issues such as current migration, return migration, remittances, reverse remittances, diaspora philanthropy, migration consultancy services, international marriages, campaigns for safe migration abroad and plans for emigration in future. It also addresses questions surrounding the use of paid labour by households to replace the work done by the emigrants and studies villages as the migration setting. Additionally, the book organically links to a well-spread-out and vibrant Punjabi diaspora, as well as providing viable baseline data on a range of indicators.

A key text on migration studies, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of development studies, economics, demography, sociology, social anthropology and diaspora studies.

Aswini Kumar Nanda is Professor at the Population Research Centre funded by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), Government of India at the Centre for Research in Rural and Industrial Development (CRRID), Chandigarh, a National Status Social Science Research Institute with the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), New Delhi, India. He has extensive experience working in the states of Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Punjab on health, population and migration issues. His work focuses on demographic change in the context of development. His recent publications include Migration, Mobility and Multiple Affiliations: Punjabis in a Transnational World (2015), with S. Irudaya Rajan and V. J. Varghese. He is currently Joint Secretary of the Indian Association for Population Studies (IASP). He is also a member of the International Union for Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) and Asian Population Association (APA).

Jacques Véron is a demographer and emeritus senior researcher at INED (French Institute for Demographic Studies). He has been Deputy Director of this institute and a member of the French delegation to the United Nations Population and Development Commission for more than 10 years. His research focuses on the relationship between population, environment and development. He is also working on Indian population dynamics. He co-edited Ages, Generations and the Social Contract. The Demographic Challenges Facing the Welfare State (2007) and Dictionary of Demography and Population Sciences (2011). He also published a book on the relationships between demography and ecology in 2013 and is now preparing an introduction to the population and environment debate. He is a member of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) and also of the Population Association of America (PAA).

S. Irudaya Rajan is Chairman, the International Institute of Migration and Development (IIMAD), India. Prior to this, he was Professor at the Centre for Development Studies, Kerala, India. With more than three decades of research experience in Kerala, he has coordinated eight major migration surveys in Kerala and conducted migration surveys in Goa and Tamil Nadu. He has published extensively on national and international journals on demographic, economic, social, psychological and political implications of migration and its impact on families, communities and society. He is currently engaged in several projects on international migration with New York University, UAE Exchange Centre and India Centre for Migration (ICM) of the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India. He also works closely with the Department of Non-Resident Keralite Affairs (NORKA), Government of Kerala and Kerala State Planning Board. He is editor of two series: India Migration Report (annual) since 2010 and South Asia Migration Report (biennial) and Founder-in-Chief of the journal Migration and Development. He is Chair of the KNOMAD thematic working group on internal migration and urbanisation managed by the World Bank. Recently, he was appointed as Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences, Kannur University, Kerala.