The Governance Gap in the Periphery: Depopulation, Peripheralization, and the Collapse of Local Governance in North India's Himalayan Ghost Villages.

Existing scholarly work on migration governance predominantly focuses on urban contexts of migrants' arrival and integration. This paper attempts to shift the empirical and theoretical lens to the non-urban peripheral spaces of sustained out-migration by exploring the mountainous Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, located in North India, as a case study. Uttarakhand is facing a sustained demographic crisis defined by large-scale out-migration, especially the able-bodied youth population. This continuous hollowing out has resulted in the formation of 'Ghost Villages', villages that are totally abandoned. According to the Uttarakhand Migration Commission, 1889 villages were officially recorded as abandoned as of 2018. This crisis is a systemic political failure rooted in the state's structural neglect of the hilly region. The drivers of out-migration constitute a severe 'peripheral push', including a lack of local employment opportunities, low agricultural productivity, increasing climatic stresses, and acute deficits in basic infrastructure, such as functional health and education facilities, which are forcing people from hilly villages to migrate to nearby towns and other cities. This study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining theoretical analysis with empirical data. Apart from the primary survey data, the study also utilises secondary data, primarily from government and private sources, including official reports from the Uttarakhand Rural Development and Migration Commission and the India Census data. The paper conceptualises the phenomenon through an interdisciplinary lens and explores how demographic change structurally alters power dynamics, posing challenges for local governance and development. This research presents three central arguments regarding the intersection of migration, governance, and peripheral spaces. Firstly, the initial political promise of Uttarakhand's statehood to halt out-migration from the hilly region has failed, resulting in the structural neglect of the hill districts. The sustained out-migration created a serious governance gap by weakening local democratic bodies, specifically the Gram Panchayats, and rendering them incapable of effectively demanding development works or representing the voices of hilly people. The state's attempt to curb migration is undercut by policy incoherence. As farmlands are abandoned, land use regulations facilitate the conversion of agricultural land for large-scale development projects, such as five-star hotels and resorts, government projects, and large hydropower projects. These approaches contradict goals to curb the mass exodus and actively reinforce the peripheralization of the hilly region within the state itself by neglecting long-term development and demographic stability. The paper concludes that out-migration from the hilly region of Uttarakhand constitutes a critical governance and policy failure, and the mass out-migration can be seen as a passive form of contestation against state neglect. It contributes to the migration governance literature by, firstly, providing an empirical framework for analysing internal peripheralization and, secondly, theorising how demographic absence fundamentally restructures local economies, political agency, and the negotiation of authority in non-urban, marginalised spaces.