Environmental Factors and Internal Migration in India

This paper estimates the effect of air pollution, water pollution and water scarcity on internal migration in India using gravity model with 2SLS estimation. It contributes to the literature by first incorporating nationwide migrants and those three environmental factors into the analysis. The migration data is drawn from the Indian Census 2001 and 2011 and provides us with state-district pair-wise migration flows for certain time periods. With a wide range of data sources including Indian government platforms and satellite data, this study compiles a rich and comprehensive dataset. We find that the increase in air pollutant (PM2.5) at origin pushes out migrants, with larger influence on male than female. This paper also discovers, with more robust evidence, that the increase in groundwater level, a proxy for water scarcity level, at origin leads to less out-migrants and increase in groundwater at destination pulls more in-migrants for both genders. However, consistent evidence on water pollutants was not found.