The exodus from agriculture and the countryside is a worldwide phenomenon. In South Asia capitalism made slow but steady inroads into the peasant economy from the late nineteenth century onwards, giving rise to a process of dispossession in which people with little or no means of production who are unable to find sufficient employment have come to constitute a huge reserve army of labour. For most rural households agriculture is no longer the mainstay of their work and income. Households stuck in poverty cannot afford to become and remain unemployed. Road construction and motorized transport have opened up the countryside and a reduction in the cost of travelling long distances has speeded up work-driven migration on a larger scale than ever before. But any attempt by these newly mobile masses to settle down where they have gone for work is frustrated by the informalization of both rural and urban employment. Those who belong to these floating armies remain outsiders at the sites to which they have been recruited on a temporary basis, where they are treated as transients by those who make occasional use of their labour power. Informality and circulation together allow us to define these people as perpetual footloose. It means that instead of finding proper jobs they are contracted on a hire-fire basis that does not allow them to establish a permanent foothold where they have arrived. Thus, migrant labour has remained thoroughly casualized and is subjected to continual circulation rather than to permanent resettlement elsewhere.