The Migrant's Missing Citizenship: Portability and India's Internal Movement

The images from March and April 2020 are unlikely to leave Indian public memory soon: tens of thousands of migrant workers walking hundreds of kilometres along national highways, carrying children and belongings, after India's abrupt nationwide lockdown stranded them in cities with no income, no transport and, crucially, no access to the food rations they were entitled to back home. The scenes were treated at the time as a humanitarian emergency produced by an unprecedented shock. They were better understood as a long-standing structural failure suddenly made visible, since the same workers had been invisible to state welfare systems every ordinary day of their working lives in the city, lockdown or not.

An economy built on people the state cannot see

Estimates of India's internal migrant population vary considerably depending on definition and methodology, ranging from roughly one hundred million by Census-based extrapolations to considerably higher figures from labour economists who count seasonal and circular migration that the Census undercounts by design, since it struggles to capture people who move for months at a time without permanently relocating. What is not in dispute is that internal migration is central to how the Indian economy functions, supplying construction sites, textile mills, brick kilns and domestic service across the country with labour drawn overwhelmingly from poorer states such as Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha and Jharkhand to richer destinations such as Delhi, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Kerala.

Yet India's welfare architecture, from the Public Distribution System to voter rolls to school admissions to state-specific health insurance schemes, is organised around residence, verified through documents such as ration cards and residence certificates issued by the very state a migrant has left. A worker who moves from a village in Bihar to a construction site in Bengaluru typically cannot draw subsidised grain on a Bihar ration card in Karnataka, cannot vote without returning home or navigating a cumbersome remote-voting process that barely exists in practice, and often cannot enrol children in local schools without documentation the family no longer carries. The migrant is, in a real bureaucratic sense, a citizen of nowhere for the duration of the move.

What One Nation One Ration Card actually fixed

The most significant policy response has been One Nation One Ration Card, a scheme using Aadhaar-linked biometric authentication to let beneficiaries under the National Food Security Act draw their subsidised grain entitlement from any fair price shop in the country, not only the one where they originally registered. Rolled out nationally by mid-2021 after being accelerated by the pandemic's visibility, the scheme represents a genuine technical achievement, integrating ration databases across states with very different administrative capacities and digitisation levels. Government data has claimed hundreds of millions of portable transactions since rollout, and independent field studies, including work by economists tracking migrant workers in Delhi and Kerala, have found real uptake among migrant households who previously went without their entitlement for months at a time while working away from home.

The scheme's limitations are equally instructive. It solves portability for one entitlement, food grain, while leaving the rest of the welfare architecture untouched. Health coverage under state-specific schemes, LPG subsidy continuity, maternal benefit programmes, and access to local government school seats remain tied to domicile in ways that One Nation One Ration Card does not address. Biometric authentication failures, patchy internet connectivity at destination fair price shops, and inconsistent quota allocation between source and destination states have also produced documented denials, particularly for migrants in informal, poorly documented employment who are least equipped to contest a rejected transaction.

The vote that migration disenfranchises

Voting rights present a starker gap. India's Election Commission has piloted remote voting technology, including a demonstration of a multi-constituency remote electronic voting machine in January 2023, but the pilot drew swift political objection from several parties concerned about verification integrity and was shelved for further consultation, with no clear timeline for revival. In the meantime thousands of migrant workers, most of whom cannot afford to travel home during election periods that rarely align with festival breaks, remain functionally disenfranchised despite being registered voters on paper. This is not a marginal problem in a democracy that prizes universal suffrage as a foundational achievement, and it deserves considerably more political urgency than it currently receives, largely because migrant workers are geographically dispersed at the time of voting and therefore possess little organised lobbying power in either their home or host constituencies.

The Code on Social Security and its unfulfilled promise

The 2020 Code on Social Security, one of four labour codes passed by Parliament but not yet fully implemented by all states as of the mid-2020s, included provisions for a national database of unorganised and migrant workers intended to make benefits like insurance and provident fund contributions portable across employers and locations. The database, e-Shram, has registered a very large number of workers since its 2021 launch, but registration alone does not create the interoperable benefit delivery system the code envisioned, and implementation has been slowed by the same federal coordination challenges that complicate every scheme requiring uniform state-level cooperation, since labour remains a concurrent subject and states have moved at sharply different paces adopting the new codes.

Portability as the right frame

The strongest argument against a full portability agenda is a fiscal federalism one: states that invest in health, education and welfare infrastructure for their resident populations have some reasonable claim to prioritise those residents, and destination states absorbing large migrant inflows without commensurate central transfers may resist extending full local benefits to non-domiciled workers. This is a genuine tension, not a dismissible objection, and it argues for stronger central funding formulas tied to migrant inflows rather than for abandoning portability altogether. India's internal migrants are not foreign workers seeking rights in someone else's country; they are citizens moving within their own, doing work the destination economy depends on. A federal welfare architecture that treats crossing a state border as functionally equivalent to crossing a national one has fallen behind the economy it is meant to serve, and One Nation One Ration Card, for all its gaps, at least shows what catching up could look like.