Globalization has increased urban migration by skilled, young, unmarried women from various classes. How…

Question

Globalization has increased urban migration by skilled, young, unmarried women from various classes. How has this trend impacted upon their personal freedom and relationship with family?

Ghissu Editorial · Accepted Answer

Urban migration under globalisation has widened young women's economic autonomy and choice in marriage and lifestyle, and turned family relations from command towards negotiation, though class and safety limit it. In PLFS 2020-21, 86.8% of women migrants still moved for marriage, making independent migrants a new vanguard.

**Introduction**

Globalisation's IT, finance and electronics jobs have drawn skilled, young, unmarried women to cities, breaking a pattern in which 86.8% of women migrants moved for marriage (PLFS 2020-21).

**Impact on Personal Freedom**

SKETCH: forcefield | Forces on a Migrant Woman's Freedom
center: Personal freedom
driving: Own income, Urban anonymity, Peer networks
restraining: Safety fears, Housing bias, Moral policing

1. **Economic autonomy**: Her own salary gives a woman control over spending and saving, the "resources" step in Naila Kabeer's model of empowerment.
2. **Choice in life**: Distance from kin lets women delay marriage and choose partners, a right upheld under Article 21 in Shafin Jahan v. Asokan (2018).
3. **Class shapes the gain**: A Bengaluru engineer and a dormitory worker near Sriperumbudur, where a 2021 protest at a Foxconn hostel exposed crowded, poorly run housing, live very different freedoms.

**Impact on Relationship with Family**

1. **Daughter as provider**: Salaries and remittances raise her voice at home, renegotiating Deniz Kandiyoti's "patriarchal bargain".
2. **Friction over choices**: Disputes over a partner's caste or faith persist; Shakti Vahini v. Union of India (2018) barred khap interference in adult marriages.
3. **Control at a distance**: Daily calls and location sharing stretch supervision across cities, while pride in a daughter's career builds new closeness.

**Way Forward**

1. **Housing and safety**: Scale Sakhi Niwas hostels under Mission Shakti, use the Nirbhaya Fund for safe transport and enforce the POSH Act, 2013.
2. **Fair renting and dialogue**: Bar refusal of tenants on marital status under state tenancy laws and involve parents through workplace programmes.

**Conclusion**

Migration has widened young women's freedom and turned family ties from command towards negotiation. Safe, affordable cities will make this trend a path to women-led development under SDG 5.

Globalization has increased urban migration by skilled, young, unmarried women from various classes. How has this trend impacted upon their personal freedom and relationship with family?

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