Background: India's urban transition is increasingly dispersed across small and intermediate settlements, yet scholarship and policy frequently privilege metropolitan migration.

Objective: This review synthesizes evidence on how rural–urban and circular mobility intersect with labour-market transformation, housing, social inclusion, land-use change and governance in India's secondary cities. Methods: A structured, transparent search and critical evidence synthesis was undertaken using retrievable journal-publisher records, indexed bibliographic pages and official statistical reports available up to October 2026. Sixteen directly relevant peer-reviewed articles were selected for the focused evidence matrix, government reports were used for context. The review is PRISMA-informed, but it is not represented as an exhaustive registered database review because full Scopus and Web of Science export histories, deduplication logs and independent dual screening were unavailable.

Results: Findings highlight heterogeneous migration pathways, high non-monetary costs of seasonal mobility, context-specific roles for small cities in employment and social mobility, informal, gendered and tenure-based exclusion, and urban growth arising from in situ transformation as well as in-migration. Some evidence is metropolitan and cannot be assumed transferable to smaller cities. Implications: Place-sensitive planning, migrant-inclusive services, portable entitlements, stronger municipal capacity and longitudinal city-level evidence are priorities.

Conclusion: Migration is one constituent of a broader socio-spatial urban transition rather than a sufficient explanation for urban growth. Future systematic reviews should test these relationships against a reproducibly enumerated database corpus.