India's cities are built and kept running by people who are often invisible to them: the migrant workers who lay the bricks, sew the clothes, drive the vehicles, clean the homes and harvest the crops. They move — from village to city, poorer state to richer one, season to season — in their hundreds of millions. Yet most work without contracts, security or protection, a reality laid bare during the 2020 lockdown. This guide looks at who India's migrant workers are, what the exodus taught, and the schemes meant to give them a safety net.
Who they are
Internal migration in India is vast. Census 2011 counted hundreds of millions of internal migrants, a large share of whom move for work. Migrant workers dominate construction, manufacturing, domestic work, transport, hospitality and agriculture — much of the labour that a modern economy runs on. Most are part of the informal or unorganised economy: no written contract, no job security, no provident fund or paid leave, and wages that can be withheld or cut at will. They are essential and, too often, unprotected.
The 2020 exodus: a system exposed
The defining moment came in 2020. When the sudden COVID-19 lockdown halted economic activity, millions of migrant workers lost their jobs and incomes overnight. With no local safety net — they could not access rations away from home, their housing was tied to work that had vanished, and savings were thin — vast numbers set out on long, desperate journeys home, many on foot. The images shocked the country and revealed an uncomfortable truth: the workers the economy depended on were invisible to its welfare systems. That reckoning drove new efforts to register and protect them.
Making the invisible visible: e-Shram
The most significant response has been the e-Shram portal, launched in 2021 to build a national database of unorganised workers. It has now registered over 30 crore workers, each assigned a Universal Account Number, and aims to link them to welfare, insurance and social-security schemes. The logic is simple but powerful: the state cannot protect workers it cannot see. Registration is the first step toward portable, reliable benefits — though the harder work is ensuring those benefits actually flow.
Portable benefits: One Nation One Ration Card
One of the clearest fixes to emerge is One Nation One Ration Card (ONORC), which makes a family's subsidised-food entitlement portable across the country. A worker from Bihar working in Delhi can draw their ration there, rather than losing access by moving. It directly addresses a gap the exodus exposed, and points to the broader principle migrant welfare needs: benefits that travel with the worker, not ones tied to a home village they have left.
What migrant workers still need
Registration and portable rations are progress, but gaps remain:
- Decent, affordable housing — many live in slums, worksites or on the street; schemes like affordable rental housing under PMAY and shelters for the homeless matter here.
- Social security — accident and health insurance, pensions, and enforcement of wage protections.
- Portable identity and services — healthcare, children's schooling and benefits that work wherever they are.
- A voice — informal workers rarely have unions or bargaining power.
What you can do
- Support migrant-worker and labour-rights NGOs that provide legal aid, shelter, healthcare and help accessing schemes.
- Treat the workers around you with dignity and fairness — pay fairly and on time.
- Back rural livelihoods like MGNREGA that reduce distress migration.
- Companies can use CSR to support worker welfare and skilling.
Migrant workers are not a problem to be managed but citizens and contributors to be protected. Building a system where the people who power India's growth can also share in its security is unfinished business from 2020 — and a measure of the country's development. To support organisations working with migrant workers, find verified NGOs on NGOLists.
Further reading on NGOLists
- MGNREGA Explained: Job Cards, Wage Rates and Worker Rights in 2026
- PM Awas Yojana (PMAY): Eligibility, Subsidy and How to Apply in 2026
- Winter Shelter Crisis: Protecting India's Homeless from the Cold
- Independence Day: How Far Has India Come on Social Development?
- How CSR Funds Actually Reach Beneficiaries: A Transparency Explainer