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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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.
On March 31, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released its annual Gender Gap Report 2021. The Global Gender Gap report is an annual report released by the WEF. The gender gap is the difference between women and men as reflected in social, political, intellectual, cultural, or economic attainments or attitudes. The gap between men and women across health, education, politics, and economics widened for the first time since records began in 2006.
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]No need to remember all the data, only pick out few important ones to use in your answers.
The Global gender gap index aims to measure this gap in four key areas : health, education, economics, and politics. It surveys economies to measure gender disparity by collating and analyzing data that fall under four indices : economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment.
The 2021 Global Gender Gap Index benchmarks 156 countries on their progress towards gender parity. The index aims to serve as a compass to track progress on relative gaps between women and men in health, education, economy, and politics.
Although no country has achieved full gender parity, the top two countries (Iceland and Finland) have closed at least 85% of their gap, and the remaining seven countries (Lithuania, Namibia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Rwanda, and Ireland) have closed at least 80% of their gap. Geographically, the global top 10 continues to be dominated by Nordic countries, with —Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden—in the top five.
The top 10 is completed by one country from Asia Pacific (New Zealand 4th), two Sub-Saharan countries (Namibia, 6th and Rwanda, 7th, one country from Eastern Europe (the new entrant to the top 10, Lithuania, 8th), and another two Western European countries (Ireland, 9th, and Switzerland, 10th, another country in the top-10 for the first time).There is a relatively equitable distribution of available income, resources, and opportunities for men and women in these countries. The tremendous gender gaps are identified primarily in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.
Here, we can discuss the overall global gender gap scores across the index’s four main components : Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment.
The indicators of the four main components are
(1) Economic Participation and Opportunity:
o Labour force participation rate,
o wage equality for similar work,
o estimated earned income,
o Legislators, senior officials, and managers,
o Professional and technical workers.
(2) Educational Attainment:
o Literacy rate (%)
o Enrollment in primary education (%)
o Enrollment in secondary education (%)
o Enrollment in tertiary education (%).
(3) Health and Survival:
o Sex ratio at birth (%)
o Healthy life expectancy (years).
(4) Political Empowerment:
o Women in Parliament (%)
o Women in Ministerial positions (%)
o Years with a female head of State (last 50 years)
o The share of tenure years.
The objective is to shed light on which factors are driving the overall average decline in the global gender gap score. The analysis results show that this year’s decline is mainly caused by a reversal in performance on the Political Empowerment gap.
Global Trends and Outcomes:
– Globally, this year, i.e., 2021, the average distance completed to gender parity gap is 68% (This means that the remaining gender gap to close stands at 32%) a step back compared to 2020 (-0.6 percentage points). These figures are mainly driven by a decline in the performance of large countries. On its current trajectory, it will now take 135.6 years to close the gender gap worldwide.
– The gender gap in Political Empowerment remains the largest of the four gaps tracked, with only 22% closed to date, having further widened since the 2020 edition of the report by 2.4 percentage points. Across the 156 countries covered by the index, women represent only 26.1% of some 35,500 Parliament seats and 22.6% of over 3,400 Ministers worldwide. In 81 countries, there has never been a woman head of State as of January 15, 2021. At the current rate of progress, the World Economic Forum estimates that it will take 145.5 years to attain gender parity in politics.
– The gender gap in Economic Participation and Opportunity remains the second-largest of the four key gaps tracked by the index. According to this year’s index results, 58% of this gap has been closed so far. The gap has seen marginal improvement since the 2020 edition of the report, and as a result, we estimate that it will take another 267.6 years to close.
– Gender gaps in Educational Attainment and Health and Survival are nearly closed. In Educational Attainment, 95% of this gender gap has been closed globally, with 37 countries already attaining gender parity. However, the ‘last mile’ of progress is proceeding slowly. The index estimates that it will take another 14.2 years to close this gap on its current trajectory completely.
In Health and Survival, 96% of this gender gap has been closed, registering a marginal decline since last year (not due to COVID-19), and the time to close this gap remains undefined. For both education and health, while progress is higher than economy and politics in the global data, there are important future implications of disruptions due to the pandemic and continued variations in quality across income, geography, race, and ethnicity.
India-Specific Findings:
India had slipped 28 spots to rank 140 out of the 156 countries covered. The pandemic causing a disproportionate impact on women jeopardizes rolling back the little progress made in the last decades-forcing more women to drop off the workforce and leaving them vulnerable to domestic violence.
India’s poor performance on the Global Gender Gap report card hints at a serious wake-up call and learning lessons from the Nordic region for the Government and policy makers.
Within the 156 countries covered, women hold only 26 percent of Parliamentary seats and 22 percent of Ministerial positions. India, in some ways, reflects this widening gap, where the number of Ministers declined from 23.1 percent in 2019 to 9.1 percent in 2021. The number of women in Parliament stands low at 14.4 percent. In India, the gender gap has widened to 62.5 %, down from 66.8% the previous year.
It is mainly due to women’s inadequate representation in politics, technical and leadership roles, a decrease in women’s labor force participation rate, poor healthcare, lagging female to male literacy ratio, and income inequality.
The gap is the widest on the political empowerment dimension, with economic participation and opportunity being next in line. However, the gap on educational attainment and health and survival has been practically bridged.
India is the third-worst performer among South Asian countries, with Pakistan and Afghanistan trailing and Bangladesh being at the top. The report states that the country fared the worst in political empowerment, regressing from 23.9% to 9.1%.
Its ranking on the health and survival dimension is among the five worst performers. The economic participation and opportunity gap saw a decline of 3% compared to 2020, while India’s educational attainment front is in the 114th position.
India has deteriorated to 51st place from 18th place in 2020 on political empowerment. Still, it has slipped to 155th position from 150th position in 2020 on health and survival, 151st place in economic participation and opportunity from 149th place, and 114th place for educational attainment from 112th.
In 2020 reports, among the 153 countries studied, India is the only country where the economic gender gap of 64.6% is larger than the political gender gap of 58.9%. In 2021 report, among the 156 countries, the economic gender gap of India is 67.4%, 3.8% gender gap in education, 6.3% gap in health and survival, and 72.4% gender gap in political empowerment. In health and survival, the gender gap of the sex ratio at birth is above 9.1%, and healthy life expectancy is almost the same.
Discrimination against women has also been reflected in Health and Survival subindex statistics. With 93.7% of this gap closed to date, India ranks among the bottom five countries in this subindex. The wide sex ratio at birth gaps is due to the high incidence of gender-based sex-selective practices. Besides, more than one in four women has faced intimate violence in her lifetime.The gender gap in the literacy rate is above 20.1%.
Yet, gender gaps persist in literacy : one-third of women are illiterate (34.2%) than 17.6% of men. In political empowerment, globally, women in Parliament is at 128th position and gender gap of 83.2%, and 90% gap in a Ministerial position. The gap in wages equality for similar work is above 51.8%. On health and survival, four large countries Pakistan, India, Vietnam, and China, fare poorly, with millions of women there not getting the same access to health as men.
The pandemic has only slowed down in its tracks the progress India was making towards achieving gender parity. The country urgently needs to focus on “health and survival,” which points towards a skewed sex ratio because of the high incidence of gender-based sex-selective practices and women’s economic participation. Women’s labour force participation rate and the share of women in technical roles declined in 2020, reducing the estimated earned income of women, one-fifth of men.
Learning from the Nordic region, noteworthy participation of women in politics, institutions, and public life is the catalyst for transformational change. Women need to be equal participants in the labour force to pioneer the societal changes the world needs in this integral period of transition.
Every effort must be directed towards achieving gender parallelism by facilitating women in leadership and decision-making positions. Social protection programmes should be gender-responsive and account for the differential needs of women and girls. Research and scientific literature also provide unequivocal evidence that countries led by women are dealing with the pandemic more effectively than many others.
Gendered inequality, thereby, is a global concern. India should focus on targeted policies and earmarked public and private investments in care and equalized access. Women are not ready to wait for another century for equality. It’s time India accelerates its efforts and fight for an inclusive, equal, global recovery.
India will not fully develop unless both women and men are equally supported to reach their full potential. There are risks, violations, and vulnerabilities women face just because they are women. Most of these risks are directly linked to women’s economic, political, social, and cultural disadvantages in their daily lives. It becomes acute during crises and disasters.
With the prevalence of gender discrimination, and social norms and practices, women become exposed to the possibility of child marriage, teenage pregnancy, child domestic work, poor education and health, sexual abuse, exploitation, and violence. Many of these manifestations will not change unless women are valued more.