Migration and City Competitiveness: A Comparative Analysis with Surat as a Special Case

This article provides a brief sketch of the size, composition and spatial pattern of migration in Surat city based on discussions in the existing literature, anecdotal evidences and interactions with the Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC) officials during field trips. It sheds light on migration ‘specificity’ of Surat compared with migration flows in other major cities. The article builds a competitiveness index to rank the four cities in our project: Surat, Pune, Kochi and Ludhiana using the principal component analysis (PCA) technique and interprets the role of migration in building a city’s competitiveness. While migration adds strains on urban resources (e.g., growth of slums) and makes it more ‘vulnerable’, it enriches a city’s supply chains by easing labour market tightness and making it more ‘competitive’ economically. It finds a positive link between migration and a city’s competitiveness in general. Competitiveness is here taken to be a composite of several socio-economic variables, over and above what is generally meant by ‘economic’ competitiveness. Based on the commonalities of the variables that explain the principal components (PC) most (have significant loadings in the component), the PCs are redefined as ‘Absorption Spillover’ and ‘Strength of Pull’. It finds that though Surat is placed in the 2nd rank in terms of overall competitiveness, its competitiveness is primarily driven by ‘Strength of Pull’ rather than ‘Absorption Spillover’. The policy implication is that urban adaptive mechanisms should be redesigned on this dimension to achieve a balanced, inclusive and sustainable competitiveness.