Lived Experiences and Challenges of Women International Migrants from Darjeeling District: An Empirical Study

The expansion of global markets and the concomitant socio-economic transformations in recent decades have integrated women as active agents in the discourse of migration in contemporary era. The pervasive assumption that the international migrant is a young, economically motivated male is overshadowed with the increased participation of women migrants in both national and the international level (Pedraza, 1991). The integration of women as anactive agents in the migration history is a resultant effect of the globalization process (Upreti, 2015), fledgling industrialization, expansion of job opportunities in business, health, education and service economy for women migrants in developed countries (Yamanaka and Piper, 2005) thus popularizing the notion of feminization of migration.