A Flow of Population
Pushpa Pathak
INDIAN CITIES: THEIR INDUSTRIAL STRUCTURE, IMMIGRATION AND CAPITAL INVESTMENT, 1961-71 by Asok Mitra Abhinav Publications, 1981, 122 pp., 95.00
March-April 1981, volume 5, No 3/4

The industrial structure of cities, immigration and capital investments are most likely to be highly correlated. But, establishing a cause and effect relation­ship between variables like in-migration and employment would be as difficult as proving whether the egg comes first or the hen. In fact, it is not easy to deter­mine whether influx of potential workers or in-migration of adult males is raising the level of investment in the industrial sector of the cities or whether the higher level of investment in a particular sector of urban economy is attracting more and more people from other areas. One can say that it is a circular process and trying to find a linear—causal—relationship between the component factors of this process is perhaps conceptually not very sound. Moreover, an explanatory exa­mination of migration which takes only one of the dynamics—the pull force—of the process into consideration will always remain incomplete.

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