Merit and permission: gender, education and migration in western India

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a gendered infrastructural perspective on internal education migration in India. It demonstrates the power of merit to spur female agency, rekindle failed aspirations and establish migration flows despite family reluctance. The paper analyzes interviews conducted with 29 young women who had migrated locally to attend a premier pharmacy college. The young women were academic high achievers who had to move away from home to pursue desirable higher education. For most, families were hesitant to permit the move. The young women had to undertake interlinked gender work and academic work to achieve merit and permission for migration. Theoretically, the paper models the concept of migration infrastructure for internal education migration and further, analyzes how infrastructures are gendered. It describes how infrastructures of merit – including discourses, practices, institutions, regulations and networks that authoritatively sort students – also move them in varied but specific ways. While the state in India defines and regulates merit, it also discriminates in favor of the privileged and the disadvantaged and spatializes development. Alongside, families negotiate the risks associated with female academic mobility. To achieve migration, the young women had to navigate both.

KEYWORDS:

• Women
• education
• merit
• internal migration
• India

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks to Willy Sier, Xiang Biao, and Iain Walker for their comments on an early draft of the paper. Thanks also to Zachary Howlett, Tejaswini Niranjana, S. Irudaya Rajan, Fran Martin, Renu Singh, Hao Zheng, Munzerin Qureshi, Vijay Bhavsar, Sunny Gupta, Mariem Raina, Avinash Ediga, and Nilanjana Sen.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term ‘migrant’ in the quota is contested by Kashmiri Hindus since it does not acknowledge the violent displacement they experienced.

2 See here for tribal districts https://tribal.gujarat.gov.in/tribal-district-and-taluka.

3 In comparison, all male hostellers continued migration except one who went back home to be groomed to take over the family business.

Additional information

Funding

The research was funded by a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship (2019–2022).