How Covid-19 changed India’s labour migration landscape

Preference for cities not too far from home, growing importance of children’s education and dipping bargaining power for wages, the pandemic had a lasting impact on migration decisions and patterns

Anuja

Five years after India was put under one of the world’s strictest lockdown, there is an acute lack of empirical data capturing its long-term ramifications on India’s domestic labour migration. In the absence of numerical are observations by experts working with India’s vast internal migrant workforce who say that trends like return to pre-Covid migration levels or even surpassing it, preference for short distance migration, new trends in migration endpoints including source and destination, rising indebtedness and the worrying shift from wage structure to piece rate payments in some clusters are visible. 

In this explainer, we will piece together a picture of the long-term impacts of the pandemic on India’s labour migration landscape:

‘OVERWHELMING IMPACT’

The World Migration Report 2024 published by the IOM (International Organisation on Migration) said that the pandemic had a ‘severe impact’ on both internal and international migrants from India. “The pandemic has had an overwhelming effect on internal labour migration patterns and has reshaped work in both rural and urban areas,” it said. 

A recent working paper by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) said that the number of domestic migrants is estimated to have lowered by roughly 12% between 2011 and 2023. However, migration experts say that the slump, particularly in labour migration, that was witnessed after the migrant lockdown exodus has recovered in the last few years and could have now surpassed its pre-pandemic levels.

“Numbers are increasing – it will be more than pre-Covid numbers. Population, workforce and working age population has all increased in the last five years so of course the number of people migrating will be larger than pre-Covid. These are scientific facts, but actual data is not there,” said Ram Babu Bhagat, former professor and head of Department of Migration and Urban Studies at International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) in Mumbai.

Bhagat’s observation is in line with the findings of International Labour Organisation (ILO)’s India Employment Report, 2024 which predicts that the country's migration rate (percentage of migrants in the population) is likely to increase in the future. 

India’s current migration rate, according to a report by the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) published in 2022, is at 28.9%. ILO report says this figure could reach 40% in just the next five years.

“The migration levels in India are not adequately captured through official surveys. The rates of urbanization and migration are expected to considerably increase in the future… The bulk of this increase in urban growth will come from migration,” the wide-ranging report observed. 

THE FAMILY QUESTION

S. Irudaya Rajan, chairman of the Thiruvananthapuram based International Institute of Migration and Development (IIMAD), has closely studied India’s migration patterns for more than 30 years now. Based on his involvement in post-Covid migration surveys of Jharkhand and Kerala, Rajan said that despite the historical trend of high single male migrants, he has observed that more people are now migrating with their families.  

“I would say this is a Covid lesson, people want to be with their families in case of an emergency. We increasingly see a lot of couple migrants or people who bring their spouses and children along,” Rajan said. 

For instance, he explained, many children are accompanying their migrant parents to Kerala because education is in a high priority framework and schools cater towards children of other states. There are similar examples from states like Assam, as reported last month by The Migration Story.

Both Bhagat and Rajan also pointed out that a section of workers could be opting for shorter distance migration as opposed to longer distances to minimise the risks they face by being farther away from home.   

“Some of the poorer states are witnessing a high economic growth there, their cities and towns are growing. Opportunities are also coming up in the capitals of high out-migration states like Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand. It is possible that people are moving to shorter distances to the nearby towns. It is very plausible, but it is difficult to talk about exact data,” he added.

TIER 2 CITIES AS MIGRANT MAGNETS

India is witnessing a rapid urbanisation. Its towns and cities will be home to 600 million people, or 40% of the population by 2036 as opposed to 31% in 2011, according to an analysis by The World Bank last year. Migration has always been one of the driving forces of urbanisation. 

Rajan said that growing urbanisation and economic growth in tier 2 and tier 3 cities of India will help them in emerging as future migration destinations. Metro cities like Mumbai, New Delhi or Kolkata have maxed out and migrants will look for nearby cities that are on a high opportunity trajectory, he explained.

“Mumbai may not grow, but Pune will. Similarly, Chennai may not grow but Coimbatore will. Second tier cities will grow. But, a lot will depend on how migrant friendly such cities are, that is something we do not know right now,” he added. 

He made another interesting observation that the current high outmigration states like Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar and Rajasthan will in the future account for the bulk of international migrants. In fact, Uttar Pradesh, followed by Bihar, has already surpassed Kerala in sending the most migrant workers to the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states.

“There is a link between domestic and international migration. Similar trend was witnessed in Kerala some decades ago. These emerging states will have to prepare for this transition. Migrating with an Aadhar card is very different from migrating with a passport,” he added. 

One piece of data stands out in this context. Odisha, a high domestic out-migration state, sent more than 5,000 migrant workers abroad in one year (between April 1, 2024 to March 4, 2025) alone, according to data presented by its state government in its legislative assembly earlier this month. And, the district that topped the list is featured among the 17 districts with highest male out migration across state borders in India and is part of a popular domestic migration corridor – Ganjam. You can read The Migration Story’s reportage on Ganjam here, here and here. 

THE GENDER GAP 

Mohammad Gulzar, based in Jharkhand, runs Amarkosh Foundation, which helps migrant workers with employment opportunities and helps address challenges faced at the workplace.

“The wages of women were less in the pre-pandemic level and post owing to the bias that women aren’t as capable as men. In Goa, when I used to work, women were paid around ₹150 less than what men workers earned and the trend continues. If men earn ₹500 daily, then women get ₹350. Before the lockdown it was ₹450 and ₹300 respectively,” he said.

A 2022 study published in the medical journal The Lancet showed that while most surveyed men witnessed a full recovery in their incomes to pre-pandemic levels after remigration but it wasn’t the case with women who earned 65% of their pre-pandemic income.

The study noted that 90% of men and 96% of females were in their villages until July 2020. Nearly 53% men and 46% women re-migrated by January 2021.

Studies reveal that while overall employment has returned to pre-pandemic levels, female inclusion in the workforce was lower, further widening the gender gap. 

But there has been a rise of young women migrant workers going to various places in Visakhapatnam on the Andhra coast to work in the prawn and fish processing centres, said Liby Johnson, Coordinator at nonprofit Gram Vikas, who pointed at an overall rise in the number of women migrating.

LINGERING IMPACT

Hours after the first lockdown was announced, migrant workers began returning home with many undertaking on foot journeys alongside their families. The immediate short-term impact included hunger, non-payment by employers, cash shortage, physical and psychological distress among others. 

The longterm impact is still being felt by many.

Covid-19 pandemic in its aftermath posed a large-scale financial distress for migrant workers and their families. It ‘substantially affected’ the livelihoods and consumption of migrant households and could likely push them into acute poverty, malnutrition and debt traps, a 2021 report titled ‘Road map for developing a policy framework for the inclusion of internal migrant workers in India’ by the ILO said. 

“These factors could eventually push more people to undertake distress migration in highly exploitative conditions, unless timely interventions are made through the collective efforts…” it remarked.

India witnessed a large-scale reverse migration where more than one crore migrant workers returned to their home (states) during the lockdown. In the medium term, the pandemic led to loss of jobs, decrease in wages, surge in rural labour availability and a marked trend where women migrants temporarily stayed back in their home state/district.

70% of respondents of a survey published by National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development or NABARD in November, 2023 said they ‘struggled with income deficit’ and had to either use their past savings (48%) or borrow (22%) to tide over the tough time.

“Several migrant workers who had returned to their work destination experienced a lack of employment opportunities as several industries had shut down, this forced workers to take loans for providing food, medical emergencies and support their child’s education,” said campaigner Sanjay Sahni, a former migrant worker himself. He said many workers, whose monthly earnings were in the Rs 10,000-12,000 range, ended up taking loans of up to Rs 150,000. Sahni, based in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, runs Samaj Parivartan Shakti Sangathan, MNREGA watch, & Pravaasi Majdoor Sangathan to help migrant workers.

Sahni’s observations are corroborated by ILO’s 2023 report, according to which 40% of male workers had to switch sectors. Many migrant workers were forced to borrow money from their friends, relatives and others during the lockdown. 

Migration experts like Divya Varma, co-founder of the Bengaluru based Work Fair and Free, said that in the review of long-term impacts of the pandemic, she has witnessed a ‘worrying trend’ about migrant workers reporting a shift from wage payments to piece rate payments. 

“Lot of migrant workers work in informal arrangements. We have really seen that what used to be wage payment, a lot of it now has moved to piece rate payment. It points to increasing informality – there is still a contractor/employer- worker relationship. We have seen skilled workers taking up piece rate work and it is quite exploitative,” she said. 

“It initially started with businesses not doing well because of Covid and it quickly turned into a norm,” she added. 

Essentially, this means if a worker was hired earlier on a monthly or a daily wage for say a construction sector job, is now told that if they deliver on a fixed amount of work, they will be paid a fixed amount – irrespective of how much time/physical labour it takes. Piece rate work is common in sectors like home-based workers.

Varma has seen this shift in Ahmedabad’s construction sector and Surat’s power looms but says she ‘won’t be surprised’ if it is a broader trend. Surat mostly has migrants from Odisha’s Ganjam district while Ahmedabad’s construction sector sees migrants from tribal districts of Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh, and from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in higher skilled jobs, according to Varma. 

She also added that rise of indebtedness is a sharp trend among migrant families, evident from high number of suicides among daily wage workers. “Savings depleted due to the pandemic and there is now a mounting financial pressure which has long term impacts on them,” she added. 

One out of four person who died by suicide in 2021 was a daily wage earner, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. This figure has increased post-pandemic – 32,563 daily wage earners died by suicide in 2019, 37,666 in 2020 and 42,004 in 2021.

Additional reporting by Mansi Bhaktwani

Anuja is an independent journalist based in Delhi and writes on the intersection of policy and politics.