Days after a court in Bihar ordered the Muzaffarpur police to register a case against Raj Thackeray, the head of the far-right Maharashtra Navnirman Sena party, for threatening to drive workers from the north Indian state out of Mumbai, Mr. Thackeray reiterated a popular perception that migrants from poorer parts of India are pouring into Maharashtra, raising crime levels.
“Every day 48 trains come to Maharashtra from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand,†he told the Times Now news channel over the weekend. “Who are these people? Where do they go? Then you will blame police for not being able to control the crime in the state.â€
As it turns out, the statistics from Maharashtra's capital d on't bear out Mr. Thackeray's contention. According to the Mumbai police Web site, crime in the city of 12.4 million people fell 8 percent between January and the end of August compared with the same period last year. The city police registered 19,547 major crimes like murders, burglaries and thefts in that period, down from 21,247 cases in the first eight months of last year.
Not only is crime dropping, so is the rate at which people from other regions are moving to Mumbai, a city that once prided itself on being a magnet for migrant energy. In fact, the provisional figures for the 2011 census show that the total population of the island-city district of South Mumbai actually dropped 5.75 percent over a decade. Though the population of the northern suburbs increased 8 percent in the same period, this is the lowest rate of growth recorded in Mumbai since the 1930s, said D.P. Singh, chairman of the Center for Research Methodology at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, who closely tracks the city's demographic patterns.
Since 1961, natural increase â€" births to people already living in the city â€" has been the largest factor in Mumbai's population growth, census figures show. In the decade until 2001, migrants accounted for only 39 percent of the city's growth. Of the people who chose to migrate to the city in that period, a significant percentage â€" 37.6 â€" came from other parts of Maharashtra, Mr. Singh said.
Among the reasons for the city's population decrease, Mr. Singh said, was that Mumbai residents were increasingly moving farther away to new property developments in Thane in the north and the Navi Mumbai area in the northeastern district of Raigad. He attributed this shift to Mumbai's prohibitively expensive property prices. “Old as well new settlers are choosing Thane compared to Mumbai,†Mr. Singh said. But he also pointed out that employment is becoming more difficult to find in the city, another factor that has been inhibiting migrants.
This trend of declining migration from rural India to cities isn't limited to Mumbai. In a recent paper in Economic and Political Weekly, Amitabh Kundu and Lopamudra Ray Saraswati of Jawaharlal Nehru University note that this is a nationwide phenomenon. The reason for the change, Mr. Kundu said in an e-mail interview, is “exclusionary urbanization.†As the researchers explain in their paper, “Urban centers have become less hospitable to and less accommodating for the poor.†This has meant, they said, that “poor and unskilled male labourers are finding it difficult to gain footholds in urban centers.â€
Naresh Fernandes is a freelance journalist who lives in Mumbai. He is a Poiesis fellow at New York University's Institute for Public Knowledge. He is the author of “Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The Story of Bombay's Jazz Age.“
