Migrant Remittances: Size and Channels of Money Transfer among Oriya Workers in Surat City

1. Migrant Remittances: Size and Channels of Money Transfer among Oriya Workers in Surat City By Gagan Bihari Sahu & Biswaroop Das Centre for Social Studies, Surat � 395 007

2. What is remittance? Funds sent back home to families by migrants. Livelihood systems in parts of the countryside indeed depend frequently on such remittances.

3. What does the literature say? A large volume of literature exists on issues pertaining to amount of remittances through cross-border migration, money transfer systems and impact of such remittances at the native end. Most of these remittances are realized through informal channels without involvement of formal agencies like banks, credit unions and thrift institutions. Micro-level studies in developing countries like Pakistan, Philippines etc., have shown only around half of the remittances are transferred through formal channels.

4. Some remitters avoid formal channels simply because they are �unbanked� or lack of access to transaction accounts in mainstream financial institutions. Elsewhere, it is argued that as formal channels remain inaccessible for a variety of economic, institutional and social reasons, most of them depend and relay on the informal money transfer systems. Most current research focuses on transfers through cross-border migration or from developed to developing countries. There is however, a dearth empirical studies dealing with domestic money remittance.

5. Issues Since a large number of rural poor tend to migrate to destinations closer to home or urban centers within the same country, even if the amounts of domestic transfers is smaller than international transfers, domestic remittances are more numerous and flow to many more households. The money transfer networks within the developing countries are often more limited than international networks due to an underdeveloped payments infrastructure and/or lack of transfer providers. These point to an important question as to how does the remittance market function? In case of India, the debate over the channels of money transfer and the impact thereof on the poor migrants continues at a general level without much data to support it.

6. Objectives Factors determining the remittance behaviour; Channels and modalities associated with money remittances; Reasons of migrants discontinuing or never using formal channels for transferring money; Costs of transferring money among agencies providing such services; Risks and difficulties faced by private service providers in providing money transfer services.

7. Database Oriya Migrants from Surat City Sample size = 100 (random sampling) These migrants work in 27 different occupations. However, we have grouped them on the basis of their nature of jobs as: (i) Wage labourer (daily wage basis & piece rate basis) (ii) Employee in a private sector (iii) Self-employed

8. Table 1: Average Size of Money Remitted per Month by Oriya Migrants in Surat by Their Nature of Employment

9. Table 2: Average Size of Remittances Sent per Month by Living Arrangements among the Migrant Workers

10. Table 3: Definitions, Measurements, Descriptive Statistics and Expected Signs of Variables used in the OLS Equation