How colonial exploitation, federalism's failures, and the political economy of domicile have kept hundreds of millions of Indians trapped between two states that claim them but serve neither.

I am a migrant in Delhi. Have been, intermittently, for most of my adult life. Delhi is, in many ways, a city of migrants—built by them, sustained by them, dependent on them for everything from construction labour to domestic work to the midnight delivery of biryani. And yet, when I vote, I vote elsewhere. When I access healthcare, I navigate a system not designed for me. When COVID hit and the city locked down, it wasn't people like me—middle-class, with savings—who walked hundreds of kilometres home. It was the tens of millions whose invisibility is so complete that we still don't know how many of them died.

This essay is about that invisibility. It's about how India has spent 150 years sending its poor to build wealth elsewhere—from the sugar plantations of Mauritius to the construction sites of Dubai to the gig economy of Gurugram—while systematically failing to count them, protect them, or acknowledge their political existence.

The Great Indian Migration Wave

Economist Chinmay Tumbe, in his essential 2018 book India Moving: A History of Migration, coined the term "Great Indian Migration Wave" to describe what he argues is "one of the largest and longest migration streams for work in documented history." The wave has two phases: from the late 19th century to the 1930s, and then again since economic liberalisation in 1991. Both phases share striking characteristics: male-dominated (roughly 70%), semi-permanent, and remittance-yielding.

The geography is remarkably persistent. Eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar—what Tumbe calls the "source centres"—have been exporting labour since at least the Mughal era, when "Purbiya" (eastern) warriors from this region served as mercenaries in imperial armies. The British merely industrialised and globalised this flow.

After abolishing slavery in 1833, the British Empire faced a problem: who would work the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, the tea estates of Mauritius, the rubber farms of Southeast Asia? The answer was the Indian "coolie"—recruited through a system of indentured labour that historian Hugh Tinker called "a new system of slavery."

Between 1834 and 1917, over 1.6 million Indians were shipped to British colonies across the globe. The first ship, the Hesperus, sailed on 29 January 1838, carrying workers to British Guiana. By 1870, over 350,000 had arrived in Mauritius alone. Mortality rates were staggering: 17% on average during the voyage on some Caribbean routes, 12% annually among workers in Jamaica.

The Dickens Committee documented in 1838 that "Coolies induced to come to Calcutta by gross misrepresentation and deceit." Workers signed a "girmit"—a corruption of "agreement"—hence the term "Girmitiya" that their descendants still use to identify themselves.

The caste composition of this migration tells its own story. The workers came predominantly from middle and lower castes—Yadavs, Koeris, Kurmis (cultivators), Chamars (labourers). Upper castes—Brahmins, Rajputs, Bhumihars—largely avoided indenture. The conditions were too degrading, the work too polluting, the loss of caste status too certain. Migration, from the outset, was stratified by the social hierarchies it was intended to escape.

This colonial migration created diasporas that persist today. When Prime Minister Modi visited Trinidad and Tobago in 2024, he introduced Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar as "Bihar ki Beti"—daughter of Bihar—by highlighting her ancestral roots in the Buxar district. The Bhojpuri language, Holi celebrations, and Ram Leela traditions survived the Middle Passage to become core elements of Indo-Caribbean identity.

The Push Factors That Never Changed

What's remarkable—and damning—is how little the push factors have changed in 150 years. Research on Bihar's migration identifies the same drivers today as in the colonial period: poverty, unemployment, landlessness, absence of industrial development, and recurrent natural disasters. Surveys find that roughly 90% of migrants cite inadequate income, nearly 90% cite joblessness, and 44% of rural households remain landless.

What has changed is the direction and nature of flows. Post-independence, Bihari migrants fed the Green Revolution in Punjab and Haryana. When mechanisation saturated that demand in the 1980s, the flows redirected toward metropolitan cities—Delhi, Mumbai, Surat, Kolkata. The movement became less seasonal, more permanent. About half of Bihar's households now have a migrant family member. Migration isn't an aberration; it's a livelihood strategy woven into the social fabric.

Here's where Tumbe's insight becomes crucial: Bihar and Kerala have similar outmigration rates, but radically different development outcomes. Kerala's remittance-to-GDP ratio of approximately 30% would rank among the top five countries globally if it were measured as an independent nation. Bihar's remittances matter too, but the state remains among India's poorest. Migration can fund development or merely sustain poverty—the institutional environment determines which.

Counting the Uncountable

India's migration statistics are a masterclass in what the state chooses not to see. The 2011 Census—our last complete count—recorded 456 million internal migrants, or 38% of the population. Between 2001 and 2011, the migrant population increased by 45%, while the population grew by only 18%. By any measure, mobility was accelerating.

But these numbers dramatically undercount the people who matter most. Census and National Sample Survey methodologies are biased toward permanent migration—people who moved and stayed. They systematically miss circular migration: the construction worker who spends eight months in Delhi and four in his village, the sugarcane cutter who follows harvests across state lines, the domestic worker whose "home" is wherever her employer lives.

The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2020-21 estimated that migration accounted for 28.9% of the population, lower than the Census figure from a decade earlier. Did migration actually decline? Or did house-based sampling simply miss mobile workers in transit, living in worksites, or sleeping in informal settlements?

The Economic Advisory Council to the PM's 2024 report, "400 Million Dreams!", sought to bridge this gap by using novel data sources: Indian Railways unreserved ticket sales (affordable travel for blue-collar workers), telecom roaming data (tracking seasonal movements), and district-level banking flows (remittance patterns). Their estimate is 400 million migrants, representing 28.88% of the population. The decline they identified could reflect improved local opportunities—or COVID-19's devastation of migrant livelihoods.

The Ministry of Statistics has finally acknowledged the problem. A National Migration Survey is planned for 2026—the first dedicated migration survey since 2007-08. The draft questionnaire and concept note invited public feedback through November 2025. After COVID exposed how little we knew about who was moving where, the state is finally trying to count.

One Nation, One Ration Card, Limited Traction

The policy response to this invisible crisis has been characteristically Indian: announce a scheme, declare success, ignore the evidence of failure.

The One Nation One Ration Card (ONORC) scheme, launched in August 2019 and covering all states by mid-2022, was intended to address welfare portability. Using Aadhaar-linked biometric authentication, migrants could claim subsidised food grains at any Fair Price Shop in the country. Their family members at home could claim the balance. The technology was elegant; the coverage statistics were impressive—77 crore beneficiaries, 96.8% of the National Food Security Act population.

Then Tumbe and his co-author, Rahul Kumar Jha, examined the data.

Their 2024 paper, "One Nation, One Ration, Limited Interstate Traction," documents a striking failure. Interstate portability—the core promise for migrant workers—shows less than 500,000 monthly transactions. Intrastate portability, by contrast, exceeds 20 million monthly transactions. The scheme designed for migrants is barely used by them.

The geographic concentration is even more revealing. Delhi alone accounts for 67% of all interstate ONORC transactions. Add Haryana, Maharashtra, and Gujarat, and you've captured 90% of all interstate use. South Indian states that receive substantial migrant inflows report only a few hundred transactions each. Maharashtra hosts Mumbai and Pune, magnets for migrant labour from across the country, yet sees far less ONORC uptake than Haryana.

"Finger nahi kaam kiya"—"the finger didn't work"—has become shorthand among migrants for biometric authentication failures that deny them their entitled rations.

The barriers are both demand-side and supply-side. Migrants are unaware of the scheme—the Dalberg survey found a general lack of awareness among beneficiaries about how ONORC works. When they attempt to use it, biometric authentication frequently fails, particularly for manual labourers whose fingerprints are worn down from physical work. On the supply side, Fair Price Shop dealers are reluctant to serve interstate migrants—stocking challenges, unfamiliar procedures, and no incentive to help. Technology infrastructure failures include inadequate internet connectivity, electricity outages, and malfunctioning equipment.

Delhi's relative success offers a clue: the city implemented aggressive measures during COVID to support stranded migrant workers, and those systems persisted. Where state capacity was mobilised, portability worked. Where it wasn't, the scheme exists only on paper.

The Political Economy of Invisibility

Why does India invest so little in its migrants? The answer lies in a fundamental feature of Indian democracy: you vote where your ration card lives, not where you work.

A construction worker from Bihar, building apartments in Gurugram, has no voting rights in Haryana. The receiving state benefits from his labour—the construction happens, the economy grows, the taxes flow—but bears no electoral accountability for his welfare. His vote is registered in a Bihar village he visits twice a year. Bihar's politicians have incentives to discuss migrant welfare, but limited capacity to deliver services across state borders. The worker exists in a political vacuum.

This isn't just about voting. Every element of India's welfare architecture is tied to domicile. Public distribution system access (ONORC notwithstanding), school enrollment for children, access to public healthcare, eligibility for urban homeless shelters, protections under labour law—all depend on being "from" somewhere. The Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act of 1979 theoretically protects interstate migrants, but enforcement is negligible. Contractors have no incentive to register workers; states have no incentive to monitor.

COVID-19 exposed this architectural failure with brutal clarity. When cities locked down, millions of workers found themselves without income, without food, without shelter, and without any claim on the state to which they had contributed their labour. The images of families walking hundreds of kilometres on highways—carrying children, possessions, hope—were not aberrations. They were the logical consequence of a system designed to render migration invisible.

Sons of the Soil

The tensions this system produces periodically flare into political conflict. In February-March 2023, viral videos claimed attacks on Hindi-speaking migrant workers in Tamil Nadu, triggering panic and a partial exodus. Tamil Nadu police investigated and found that most videos were fake, old, or from other states entirely. FIRs were filed against BJP spokespeople and journalists for spreading misinformation. The newspaper Dainik Bhaskar retracted initial claims of fifteen deaths.

The episode was largely manufactured—but the underlying tensions it exploited are real. Anti-migrant sentiment exists in Tamil Nadu, as it does in Maharashtra (Shiv Sena's original political project), Karnataka, and elsewhere.

"Sons of the soil" politics treats internal migration as a threat rather than an opportunity, outsiders as competitors rather than contributors. These sentiments don't require actual violence to shape policy: they create an environment where migrants know they are not welcome, where state institutions are not designed to serve them, where their presence is tolerated rather than valued.

The Caste Geography Persists

Return to the Bhojpur belt—the same districts that supplied colonial plantations now supply Delhi's construction sites and Gujarat's factories. The upper castes still don't migrate for manual labour. The families sending sons to work as delivery boys in metro cities are the same families whose ancestors signed the girmit.

Tumbe's framing captures this precisely: migration can be "a tool for escaping repressive social configurations for some, while for others it can serve to cement or even amplify existing patterns of inequalities based on religion, caste, and gender." Some migrants escape caste oppression in their villages and find relative anonymity in cities.

Others find that occupational segregation recreates caste hierarchies in new settings—the sanitation worker from a Dalit background, the construction labourer from an OBC community, the domestic worker navigating employer households that practice untouchability in everything but name.

The spread of migration is uneven; the rewards are distributed unequally. A Malayali nurse in a Gulf hospital experiences migration differently from a Bihari labourer on a Doha construction site. Both are counted as emigrants; their life outcomes diverge radically.

What Would It Take?

The solutions are not mysterious. They require political will that the current architecture actively discourages.

First, portable voter registration. If migrants could vote where they work, receiving states would have electoral incentives to provide services. This would require a constitutional amendment and face massive resistance from states that benefit from migrant labour without accountability.

Second, genuinely portable welfare. ONORC proves that technology isn't enough. You need state capacity at the destination, awareness among beneficiaries, incentives for frontline providers, and data systems capable of tracking individuals' locations. None of this happens automatically.

Third, enforcement of existing protections. The Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act mandates registration, decent housing, travel allowances, and other provisions. Almost none of it is implemented. A contractor economy benefits from keeping workers invisible and disposable.

Fourth, counting. The 2026 National Migration Survey is a start. But we need continuous tracking, not decennial snapshots that miss the people in perpetual motion.

Fifth, politics. Migrants need to become a constituency that matters—not only in their places of origin but also in their destination cities. This requires organisation, which requires resources, which involves someone deciding that migrant lives are worth investing in.

150 Years On

In 1838, the Hesperus carried workers who had been promised wages and passage home in five years. Most never returned. Their descendants became Trinidadians, Mauritians, Fijians—carrying Bhojpuri songs and Holi colours into new worlds.

In 2020, millions of workers walked home on highways because the cities they built had no place for them. Some died along the way. We don't know how many because we weren't counting.

The Great Indian Migration Wave continues. It has shaped every phase of modern Indian history—colonial extraction, the nationalist movement, post-independence development, and the liberalisation boom. It has built our cities, harvested our food, and staffed our homes. And still, after 150 years, we refuse to see it.

I am a migrant in Delhi. But I have choices that most migrants don't. I can afford to be invisible when I choose and visible when I need to be. The question for India is whether the other 400 million can say the same.

Further reading:

1. Chinmay Tumbe, India Moving: A History of Migration (Penguin Viking, 2018)

2. Chinmay Tumbe and Rahul Kumar Jha, "One Nation, One Ration, Limited Interstate Traction" (SAGE Journals, 2024)

3. Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830-1920 (Oxford, 1974)

4. EAC-PM Report: "400 Million Dreams!" (2024)