A Critical Analysis of Marital Status and Streams of Migration in India

Regional incongruities performed a monumental role in migration courses in numerous respects. Migration is a spatial equilibrium mechanism between the supply and demand of labour. People permanently or temporarily switch their geographical locations to increase their productivity. Marital status acts as a significant decision-making factor in the streams of migration. Never-married men conduce to be a more substantial movement than ever-married women. Women have to change their place of residence through marriage, so younger females' migration rates are generally much higher than younger males in the age group 20-29. This paper is a micro-level analysis of different streams of migration by the marital status of the migrants in India by using the D10 table of Census of India,2011. The study investigates the migration pattern in all four streams (R-R, R-U, U-R, and U-U) by marital status and sex across the states and Union Territories (UTs) of India in 2011, using K-means cluster analysis. The k-means++ approach is used to make the cluster of states and UTs into distinct spatial regions by their share of migration by marital status and sex and to present the Sum and average of aggregates of the share of migrations in the clusters. It has been found that Maharashtra makes a cluster in each migration stream except the Rural-Rural by Ever Married Males and Females, in which Uttar Pradesh makes a cluster alone. States of Northern (Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and others) and North-Eastern regions (Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, and others)and most of the UTs, except Delhi, form the cluster of the largest number of states with lower aggregates of migration. The study also investigates the complex relationship between these distinct patterns of clusters in each stream, further decomposed into Ever Married, Never Married and Total by sex.