'Immigrants from neighbouring districts filled up city'

For every well-educated skilled immigrant coming into Bangalore city, about three unskilled andôor illiterate/semi-literate immigrant comes into the city. This puts paid to the argument that Bangalore’s population has increased rapidly over the last decade because of the immigration of IT/ITeS workers into the city.

According to K N M Raju, a professor at Institute of Social and Economic Change (ISEC), while the latest raw Census data points out that Bangalore urban district has seen its population spike up by 46 per cent over the last decade, the highest number of immigrants are from the neighbouring districts, in addition to the immigrants from across the country who are chiefly from northern states.

 

This, Raju claimed, is proved by the fact that the neighbouring districts have seen their populations contract or have seen very low growth in their populations while Bangalore urban district’s population rose by such huge numbers.

Interestingly, the districts that have historically seen maximum migration to the city during this decade saw very little migration.

“It was many of the irrigation projects in districts like Yadgir that kept people at home as they had enough farm work,” added Raju.

Bellary district in north Karnataka, which has achieved national fame for the illegal mining saw very little emigration. The mining sector kept the people well employed, and throughout the year, and discouraged them from emigrating in search of jobs.

These were some of the observations made at a discussion on the census of Karnataka today. The demographers also observed that much of the population growth of Bangalore was happening well-beyond the city centre as people are finding it too costly to live near the city centre and are starting to move out towards the peripheral areas of the city. The city centres are getting depopulated with commercial interests pushing people away into more affordable housing.