Migrant Women and Their Identity: Exploring Issues of Work Among Health Professionals in Surat City

This paper attempts to understand the emerging migration patterns in India and various issues underlying it. Migrants are getting attracted to new destinations because of globalization, urbanization and changes in socio–economic conditions. Confinement of migration in lower socio–economic class can be depicted from emerging migration patterns. Several states in our country are relying on interstate migration as a solution to cope with domestic shortages of waged labourers. The movement of waged labourers across internal border is nothing new. However, this paper will focus on women migrants especially from Kerala under a special category of waged work. It will focus on the dislocation of women from recognizable habitat towards alien location with foreign culture and people. Thus, this paper will try to address the nuances of certain issues in gender studies which will further look into the ability of women to work outside, challenges faced by her during transformation in identities by analyzing socio–economic  and cultural dimensions. 

The paper examines the relationship between gender, profession and migration. Further, it discusses briefly about migration trends and its outcomes. Special attention is paid to identify the factors forcing women from Kerala, particularly Christians, into labour market in health sector. Secondly, kind of regional identification for this occupation, thirdly, accountability for the employment of Malayalee women in the context of other attributes (i.e. qualification, efficiency). Two distinct types of methodologies will be employed in collecting information for this study. The first will be collecting secondary data on the issue of migration of nurses from Kerala State and data from census, secondary literature will be taken to understand migration trends. Further, this data will be further enhanced by adding set of data collected from two major public hospitals, two major private hospitals and one small hospital by developing structured schedule.