Nepal–India Circular Migration

Detailed chapter description

The India–Nepal border is international in law but unusually permeable in everyday social life. In the Mithila–Madhesh and Anga-facing borderlands, households have long treated the line not only as a frontier of two states but also as a corridor linking labour markets, marriage fields, pilgrimages, schools, hospitals, bazaars and transport nodes. Chapter 101 therefore uses circular migration in a deliberately broad sense: repeated movement in which a person or household remains materially and socially connected to more than one locality, and in which return is built into the migration strategy even when individual spells become long. The 1950 Treaty of Peace and Friendship did not create these cross-border ties from nothing. It institutionalised an older geography shaped by the nineteenth-century boundary, shared languages, kinship and commercial routes. Article 7 is especially important because it committed the two governments, on a reciprocal basis, to grant nationals of the other country privileges concerning residence, ownership of property, participation in trade and commerce, movement and related matters. In practice the relationship has always been more complex than treaty text alone: national laws differ, documentation requirements vary by activity, and mobility becomes more regulated when it intersects with formal employment, banking, vehicles, customs or travel to third countries. The Sugauli settlement of 1816 fixed a political boundary across a landscape whose markets, pilgrimage routes, caste networks and marriage relations did not end at the new line. In the eastern and central Tarai, movement between today’s Nepal and Bihar continued through local fairs, seasonal farm work, cattle and grain trade, religious journeys and household visits. This historical background matters because later migration did not begin with an isolated economic ‘push’ from Nepal or a single ‘pull’ from India. It developed inside a borderland in which people already possessed route knowledge, linguistic competence and kin contacts on both sides. The resulting mobility could be extremely local—a few kilometres to a market or field—or extend from the border to Patna, Kolkata, Delhi and other Indian destinations. The political boundary therefore reorganised jurisdiction more decisively than it reorganised everyday social geography.