INDIA: International migration of labor.

India is the world's second most populous country, and the world's seventh largest country in area. India’s geographical position has ensured contact with the Persian Gulf region and South East Asian countries for trade in goods and movement of people, a contact which goes back to several centuries.  The migration of workers on a significant scale was, however, to come much later. It began in the colonial era and continues now to independent India.

Since Independence, two distinct types of labour migration have been taking place from India. 
 

• The first is characterized by a movement of persons with technical skills and professional expertise to the industrialized countries like the United States, Britain and Canada which began to proliferate in the early 1950s. The success of India migrants overseas has been good for India’s reputation, this segment of migrants has woven a web of cross-national networks, thereby facilitating the flow of tacit information, commercial and business ideas, and technologies into India. The Indian diaspora has also had important trade enhancing and investment effects. On the other hand, the loss of significant numbers of the highly skilled has undoubtedly had negative effects as well, perhaps most manifest in reducing the supply of professionals with the managerial and technical capabilities to run institutions and organizations, Meanwhile, the replenishment of talent in universities and research institutes in India began to decline as fewer returned.

• The second type of migration pertains to the flow of labour to the oil exporting countries of the Middle East which acquired substantial dimensions after the dramatic oil price increases of 1973-74 and 1979, which caused a rapid growth in the stock of India citizens residing abroad, the degree to which their earning power has increased and policy changes including liberalization of the foreign exchange regime and gold imports , and of course India’s much better growth prospects. 

The nature of this recent wave of migration is strikingly different, as an overwhelming proportion of these migrants are in the category of unskilled workers and semi-skilled workers skilled in manual or clerical occupations.

(http://www.indialabourarchives.org) ; (http://casi.ssc.upenn.edu/iit/dvkapur)