COURTESY HT JULY 24

Abhishek Jha and Vijdan Mohammad Kawoosa letters@hindustantimes.com
NEW DELHI: India’s migration patterns are skewed on more than one count.

Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have a disproportionately high number of out-migrants, while migrants constitute more than one-third of the population in metros like Delhi and Mumbai.

According to the 2011 census, 20.9 million people had out-migrated from just Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to other states in India. There is another side to this skewed migration story in India. The number of interstate migrants in Delhi and Mumbai in 2011 was 9.9 million, or a third of the total population of 29.2 million in these cities.

According to the recently released migration data for the 2011 census, interstate migration is pretty skewed in India. However, problems regarding data underlines the need to fine-tune collection of migration data in the country.