Precarious Households in Motion: Gender, Migration, and Informal Work in Urban India

• In Event: 20825 - Assessing the Causes and Consequences of Internal Migration

Abstract

This paper examines the intersections of informal work, translocal migration, and household dynamics in urban India through an ethnographic study conducted in the urban villages of Gurgaon. Informal work, long conceptualized within a broad spectrum of social science debates, remains the dominant mode of employment in the Global South, shaped by intersecting social institutions such as gender, caste, and religion. While scholarship has largely focused on individual workers or firms, this study foregrounds the urban poor household as a key site of economic negotiation, relational labor, and structural constraint navigation. Migrant households, embedded in both rural and urban economies, engage in dynamic livelihood strategies that challenge the rigid distinctions between formality and informality. Through in-depth life trajectory shadowing and household-level analysis, the study highlights how informal workers, despite precarity, exercise agency within intersecting hierarchies of labor stratification. The research underscores the methodological significance of tracing urban poor households over time, offering a processual perspective on how informal economies are sustained and transformed through migration, social relations, and everyday survival strategies. Situated at the intersections of economic sociology, urban sociology, and migration studies, this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of informal work as both structurally embedded and continuously negotiated within shifting socio-economic landscapes.

Author

• Priyanjali Ranabir Mitra, University of Chicago