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.
Types of Internal Migration in India
3 Scales and 4 Directions
By distance covered (the three types):
- Intra-district migration: Moving within the same district — the most common and least disruptive form
- Intra-state migration: Moving to a different district but within the same state — still within the same language, often within the same welfare system
- Inter-state migration: Moving to a different state altogether — the most economically significant form, and the one that creates the most welfare portability problems
By origin and destination (the four streams):
- Rural-to-urban: The most discussed and most studied — a villager moving to a city for work. Comprises 25.2% of all internal migration in India
- Urban-to-urban: Moving from one city to another — 22.9% of all migration
- Urban-to-rural: Moving from city back to village — 17.5%, often return or retirement migration
- Rural-to-rural: Moving from one village to another — 4.4%, often seasonal agricultural labour
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.
Internal Migration in India
- 1991 Census: 232.1 million internal migrants
- 2001 Census: 314.6 million internal migrants
- 2011 Census: 453.7 million internal migrants — 37% of total population
- Migration in India (2020–21) survey: ~400 million migrants — approximately 29% of population
- Share of migrants in rural India: rose from 26.1% (1991) to 32.5% (2011)
- Share of migrants in urban India: rose from 32.3% (1991) to 48.4% (2011)
- Intra-state migration share: ~85% of all migration
- India’s urbanisation rate (2021): 35% — vs 63% in China, 43% in lower-middle-income countries globally
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.
What Is Seasonal Migration?
Seasonal migration is the temporary movement of people from one place to another in response to seasonal changes in employment availability. Think of a family in rural Odisha that sends its working-age members to construction sites in Surat between October and April — the agricultural off-season at home — and brings them back for the kharif sowing and harvest. The family’s income depends on both: the agricultural production at home and the wage income from the city.
This kind of migration is “distress-driven” more often than not — meaning people move because staying home during the off-season produces no income, not because the city is offering something especially attractive. The distress origin does not make the movement less rational; in the absence of alternatives, it is the most rational economic decision available. But it does mean that migrants arrive at their destinations in a vulnerable position, with no savings buffer, no local contacts beyond their community network, and no fallback if work dries up.
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:
Making Migration Safer and More Productive:
1. Fix the data problem first.
Without a reliable, current count of seasonal and circular migrants, no policy can be well-targeted. The 2021 Census, still delayed, must include specific questions on short-term and circular migration. The e-Shram portal needs to identify migrants as a distinct category. Telecom and banking data can supplement official surveys to track migration trends in real time.
2. Reduce the cost of migration.
Economists have pointed out that the costs of migration — transport, documentation, information-gathering — are disproportionately high relative to migrant incomes, reducing the mobility of workers who might otherwise move. State-level migrant assistance centres, migrant information portals, and subsidised transport corridors to high-demand destinations can reduce these costs.
3. Food security portability — One Nation One Ration Card.
The ONORC scheme, allowing migrants to access PDS food entitlements anywhere in India using an Aadhaar-linked card, is the most directly relevant welfare portability measure for migrants. It has been rolled out nationally. But uptake remains low due to limited awareness and the practical difficulty of simultaneously maintaining food access for the family left behind. Better awareness campaigns, simplified access points, and dual-family provisions are needed.
4. Social security that travels with the worker.
Health insurance (PMJAY), accident compensation, and pension contributions should be linked to the worker’s identity (via Aadhaar and e-Shram) rather than their state of residence. A worker who moves from Bihar to Maharashtra should not lose their health coverage on crossing the border.
5. Enforce written contracts and wages.
The Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act of 1979 requires contractors to register migrant workers and ensure minimum wages and other protections. It has been chronically under-enforced. The new Labour Codes that consolidate existing labour laws must be effectively implemented, with specific provisions for migrants and dedicated enforcement capacity.
6. Adequate housing near job clusters.
Migrant workers in cities often live in conditions that are both unsafe and far from their workplaces. Affordable Rental Housing Complexes (ARHCs) near industrial areas and construction corridors need to be implemented at scale.
7. Strengthen welfare provision at the source.
If migration is to become less distress-driven and more opportunity-driven, source regions must become more viable. MGNREGS, agricultural income support, skill development, and rural infrastructure investment in the highest-migration districts reduce the desperation that forces people to migrate in the most vulnerable conditions.
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.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.