Discuss the changes in the trends of labour migration within and outside India in the last four decades.

Labour migration over the last four decades tracks India's economic transformation from a closed agrarian economy to a liberalised, urbanising one.

Internal migration

• Acceleration: inter-state migration surged after 1991; the Economic Survey 2016-17 estimated about 9 million people moving between states annually — far above older Census-based figures.
• Changed nature: from settled, permanent relocation to circular and seasonal migration of footloose labour retaining village ties.
• New corridors: the classic Uttar Pradesh–Bihar flows to Delhi, Mumbai and Punjab are now joined by streams to Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala — which imports workers from West Bengal, Assam and Odisha even as its own workers go to the Gulf.
• Sectoral shift: from agriculture towards construction, brick kilns, textiles, domestic work and platform-based gig work.
• Feminisation: women increasingly migrate for employment — domestic work, garments, nursing — and not only on marriage.

External migration

• The 1970s–80s Gulf boom created temporary, contract-based semi-skilled migration to GCC states, led by Kerala.
• From the 1990s, skilled migration — IT professionals, doctors, students — flowed to the US, UK, Canada and Australia, shifting the debate from brain drain to brain circulation.
• India is now the world's largest remittance recipient (over 100 billion dollars annually), with source regions widening from Kerala to Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and new destinations emerging through government mobility pacts.

Migration has thus become larger, more circular, more feminised and more skilled — demanding portable welfare and safe-migration policy.