The Big March: Migratory Flows after the Partition of India

Prashant Bharadwaj, Asim Khwaja and Atif Mian
Additional contact information
Prashant Bharadwaj: Yale U

Working Paper Series from Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government

Abstract: The partition of India in 1947 along ostensibly religious lines into India, Pakistan, and what eventually became Bangladesh resulted in one of the largest and most rapid migrations in human history. We compile district level census data from archives to quantify the scale of migratory flows across the sub-continent. We estimate total migratory inflows of 14.5 million and outflows of 17.9 million, implying 3.4 million "missing" people. We also uncover a substantial degree of regional variability. Flows were much larger along the western border, higher in cities and areas close to the border, and dependent heavily on the size of the "minority" religious group. The migratory flows also display a "relative replacement effect" with in-migrants moving to places that saw greater out-migration.

Date: 2008-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-dev, nep-his and nep-mig
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
https://research.hks.harvard.edu/publications/work ... ?PubId=5841&type=WPN

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecl:harjfk:rwp08-029

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().