Economy & Society

453 Million People on the Move: Understanding India’s Internal Migration — Who They Are, Why They Move, and Why the System Keeps Failing Them

India’s internal migrants — 453 million people as of the last Census — are the backbone of its urban economy. They build its roads, run its restaurants, clean its homes, and recycle its waste. Yet they remain the most under-counted, under-protected, and under-served population in the country. We explain who they are, how they move, and what India must fix.

Every monsoon season, something happens in the villages of Odisha, Jharkhand, Bihar, and eastern Uttar Pradesh that the government’s data systems are poorly equipped to track. Men — and increasingly families — pack their belongings into cloth bundles, board trains that are chronically overcrowded, and travel hundreds of kilometres to cities and construction sites where seasonal work is available. They work for five, six, or eight months. Then, when the work dries up or when the agricultural calendar pulls them back for sowing, they return. They arrive. They work. They disappear from the data.

This circular, seasonal, informal movement is the dominant form of internal migration in India — and it is the movement that India’s policy systems have the hardest time seeing, counting, and serving.

The COVID-19 pandemic made the invisibility catastrophic: when cities shut down in March 2020, an estimated 50 to 120 million workers had no income, no welfare access, and no transport home. They walked. And the country watched, in real time, the consequences of decades of indifference to a population it had always needed but never quite acknowledged.

First: What Do We Mean by “Internal Migration”?

Internal migration simply means movement of people within a country’s borders. Unlike international migration — which crosses national boundaries — internal migration requires no passport, no visa, and no formal permission. But it brings almost all the same challenges: a new place, new language, loss of welfare entitlements, and no existing social network to fall back on.

One additional distinction matters enormously for policy: the difference between permanent migration and circular or seasonal migration. A permanent migrant moves once and stays at the destination. A circular migrant moves repeatedly between source and destination — working in the city for months, returning home, coming back. Most Indian labour migration is circular, not permanent — which is exactly why it is so hard to count and so hard to serve.

India’s Census provides the most comprehensive data on internal migration, though it has important limitations. The two ways the Census defines migrants tell us something about those limitations:

• Migrant by place of birth: A person counted at a Census location different from where they were born
• Migrant by last residence: A person who has lived continuously at their current location for at least six months, having come from somewhere else

Both definitions miss seasonal migrants — people who move for one to six months at a time, which is the majority of India’s labour migration.

Who Actually Migrates — and Why

Internal migration in India is not random. It is patterned along lines of gender, age, caste, religion, region, and economic class — and understanding those patterns is essential to designing policies that actually help.

Gender:

Migration in India has distinct gendered dimensions. The single largest reason for female migration in India is marriage — when a woman marries and moves to her husband’s household, she is technically a migrant by Census definition. This means a significant share of India’s counted migration is actually marriage-driven female mobility, not labour migration.

Male migration, by contrast, is predominantly work-driven. Young men from rural areas in low-income states move to construction sites, factories, and service sectors in wealthier states. The “general trend for migration for work or employment reflects that such migrants are mostly youth,” as Patgiri notes — linking labour migration directly to India’s demographic transition and the large youth cohort now entering the workforce.

Women who do migrate for work face specific and compounded vulnerabilities: lower wages than male counterparts, higher risk of exploitation and trafficking, limited access to childcare and reproductive healthcare at the destination, and social stigma around women travelling alone. Female migrants in domestic work — one of the largest employment categories for migrant women — operate with almost no legal protections and no formal contract.

Caste, Tribe, and Religion:

Migration in India is also segmented along social identity lines. Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe workers are disproportionately represented in distress migration — they are more likely to migrate out of economic necessity than by choice, more likely to work in hazardous informal sector jobs at the destination, and least likely to access the social networks that connect migrants to better opportunities. Caste hierarchies at destination cities do not dissolve when workers cross state borders — they often reproduce in the form of occupational segregation, where workers from specific communities are channelled into specific types of work regardless of their skills.

The Seasonal and Circular Migrants:

The 64th round of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), conducted in 2007–08, made a specific attempt to capture seasonal short-term migrants — those who had migrated for a period of at least one month but no more than six months for employment. This was a methodological breakthrough: the first serious government attempt to count the people who make up the majority of India’s labour migration.

Seasonal migrants in India’s cities work across a remarkably wide range of sectors: construction and infrastructure, small factories and workshops, hotels and restaurants, domestic help, head-loading (manual cargo carrying), scrap recycling, and vegetable vending.

They are the people who pour the concrete for new buildings, carry the luggage at railway stations, and cook the food in the dhabas that feed the city’s workforce. They are also among the most likely to be living in overcrowded, inadequate housing: often in migrant dormitories, under-bridge settlements, or in the same construction sites where they work.

The Informal Economy:

The structural changes in India’s economy following liberalisation in 1991 contributed to the growth of a large informal economy — unregulated, unprotected, and highly flexible. The informal sector became the primary employer of migrant labour, for a reason that is not complicated: informal employers want workers they can hire and fire at will, without contractual obligations or labour law compliance. Migrants, especially seasonal migrants without local roots, local political connections, or local documentation are ideal informal workers precisely because they are so easy to dismiss.

Migrant workers “find it hard to enter into formal jobs because of limited bargaining power and constrained networks,” . Without formal contracts, they have no recourse when wages are withheld. Without labour union membership, they have no collective voice. Without local registration, they cannot access government schemes. They are productive for the economy and invisible to the welfare system: a combination that has persisted for decades because it is convenient for employers, cities, and state governments alike.

The COVID Crisis: Reverse Migration and What It Revealed

The nationwide lockdown announced on March 24, 2020, with four hours’ notice, immediately made visible everything India had been ignoring about its migrant workers. Factories shut. Construction stopped. Restaurants closed. Within days, an estimated 50 to 120 million workers found themselves stranded in cities where they had no income, no food entitlement (because their ration cards were registered in home states they had not lived in for months), and no way home (because transport was suspended).

The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2020–21, which incorporated new migration-specific questions in response to the crisis, confirmed what was visible on the roads: a massive movement of people from urban to rural areas, far exceeding what any normal reverse migration would look like. The data revealed not just the scale of distress but the complete absence of any social safety net capable of catching people in a crisis of this kind.

The primary concern in the aftermath was reabsorption: where would the returning workers go, what would they do, and how would they survive? Many had left behind accumulated wages that employers refused to pay on exit. Many arrived home to find MGNREGS work unavailable or underfunded. The risk of falling deeper into poverty  was very real for a significant share of the returnees.

What Needs to Change:

Migration, at its best, is a rational strategy by which households move labour from places where it earns little to places where it earns more; and in doing so, reduce poverty, transfer remittances to source regions, and fuel the urban construction and service sectors that drive national growth. India’s internal migrants do all of this, at an extraordinary scale, largely without formal support, legal protection, or data visibility.

The COVID crisis was a stress test that the system failed. The returning workers who walked home in 2020 were not anomalies or exceptions — they were the visible face of a structural condition that has existed for decades. Most of them came back. The conditions that sent them walking have not fundamentally changed.

Making migration safer and more productive does not require new discoveries. It requires implementing what is already known — portable welfare, enforceable contracts, reliable data, and functional housing. The only thing missing, for most of India’s migration policy history, has been the political will to prioritise a population that does not vote in the cities where it works, and does not make noise in the villages it comes from.