Citizens Who Move, Entitlements That Do Not

Pritiraj BrahmaFounding Partner, Pritiraj & Partners · 12 March 2026

India built a portable ration card and stopped there. A migrant worker still cannot vote, see a doctor, enrol a child or claim a pension where they actually live — and for roughly eight crore people, on the Union’s own submission to the Supreme Court, there is no card to make portable at all.

ProvenancePublished 12 March 2026; revised 28 August 2026 to add two findings, two figures and a concession on measurement. Coverage is as fixed by section 9 of the National Food Security Act, 2013 on Census 2011. The eight-crore figure is from the Union’s affidavit to the Supreme Court of August 2023, derived from matching Ministry of Labour e-Shram registrations against Department of Food and Public Distribution records; the Court’s directions are of April 2023 and earlier. This essay does not state a figure for the internal migrant population: the last enumerated migration data is from Census 2011, survey estimates vary with the definition used, and circular migrants are under-captured by all of them.

India’s internal migrant is a full citizen at origin and a partial one at destination. One entitlement — subsidised grain — was made portable, and it works at national scale. Nothing else was. And for roughly eight crore people, on the Union’s own submission to the Supreme Court, there is no card to make portable in the first place: the statutory ceiling was computed on a census taken before they entered the workforce.

Tens of millions of Indians work in a state other than the one whose registers list them. They build the cities, staff the factories and harvest the crops of destination states, and they hold their claims on the state in the district they came from. That mismatch is one of the most consequential unaddressed problems in Indian governance, and it became briefly visible in 2020 before returning to the background.

Six findings anchor this analysis:

1. One Nation One Ration Card proved portability is technically solvable. Under the National Food Security Act, it allows a beneficiary to draw entitled grain from any fair price shop in the country through Aadhaar-authenticated point-of-sale devices. It works, it operates at national scale, and it demonstrates that biometric authentication plus a central register can decouple an entitlement from a location.
2. Almost nothing else was made portable. Health entitlements, school admission, maternity benefit, construction-worker welfare board registration, pension contributions and — decisively — the electoral roll remain anchored to a home address. Solving one entitlement demonstrated the method and did not generalise it.
3. The prior failure is coverage, and it is documented in the government’s own submissions. Coverage under the Act is fixed as a share of the population determined from the last published census, giving a national ceiling of 81.35 crore computed on Census 2011. In August 2023 the Union told the Supreme Court that comparing e-Shram registrations against distribution records identified approximately eight crore people holding no ration card at all. In April 2023 the Court had directed that cards be issued to migrant and unorganised workers registered on e-Shram who lacked them, having earlier directed the Union to devise a formula under which benefits would not remain restricted to 2011 figures; the Union’s position was that expanding coverage would require legislative amendment.
4. The registers can find the nearly-counted and structurally cannot find the uncounted. The e-Shram exercise located eight crore uncovered people by cross-matching two administrative registers — a real capability, and a bounded one. Every person it found had already transacted with the state by registering. A circular migrant who has registered for nothing is invisible to both databases simultaneously, and remains the population neither instrument reaches.
5. The vote is the entitlement that matters politically, and it is the least portable. A voter is enrolled at one address. A migrant who registers at destination is removed at origin; one who does not must travel, often across the country, at their own cost. Most do neither. The predictable result is that migrant workers are a low-priority constituency in both places — invisible at destination, absent at origin.
6. Destination states carry the cost and origin states hold the representation. A destination city funds the schooling, water, sanitation and health care of a population that does not appear in its own political arithmetic, while delimitation reallocates parliamentary weight toward the states those workers left. The incentive to serve migrants well is weak on both sides.

The prior problem: holding the entitlement at all

This changes the shape of the usual argument. One Nation One Ration Card decoupled an entitlement from a location, which is a genuine achievement and should be said so. It did nothing for a worker who was never issued the card, because the national ceiling was computed on a population count taken before he entered the workforce. For the internal migrant the two defects compound: the entitlement is capped by a stale denominator and anchored to an address he has left. Portability solves the second and is silent on the first.

Labour protection specific to inter-state migrants now sits inside the consolidated code architecture, whose state rules — as this Review has recorded — remain unevenly notified across jurisdictions. A worker whose protections depend on which state he is standing in, and whose food entitlement depends on a fifteen-year-old population count, is not a citizen with a portability problem alone.

What was made portable, and what was not

The trap is self-reinforcing. Because migrants cannot vote where they live, no local politician builds a platform around them. Because no platform exists, migrant housing, worksite safety and access to schooling stay unaddressed. Because conditions stay poor, migration stays circular and temporary rather than settled — and a circular migrant is even harder to enrol, register or serve.

The economic cost is equally direct. Labour mobility is the primary mechanism by which a developing economy raises productivity: workers move from low-productivity agriculture to higher-productivity manufacturing and services. India taxes that movement — not in rupees, but in the loss of entitlements, the cost of dual residence, and the risk of having no claim on any state during a shock. Any tax on mobility is a tax on productivity growth.

The counter-case, honestly stated

Three objections deserve answering, and the third is against our own emphasis.

First, federalism. Entitlements are largely state-funded, and a state may reasonably ask why it should fund a person another state counts as its own. That is a real fiscal question, and the answer is a settlement mechanism — inter-state reimbursement on an authenticated transaction, exactly as the grain scheme already does — not a denial of the claim.

Second, verification. Portability invites duplication, and the fear of double-dipping is not irrational. But India has spent a decade building the authentication infrastructure that resolves precisely this, and the working scheme is the proof that the fear is manageable.

Third, against ourselves: this essay does not know how many internal migrants there are. It says “tens of millions” because the honest range is wide — the last enumerated migration data is from Census 2011, survey-based estimates vary substantially with the definition of migration used, and circular migrants are systematically under-captured by all of them. An essay arguing that the state cannot see this population must concede that it cannot see it either, and that every recommendation below is therefore sized by inference rather than by measurement. That is an argument for the census question design, not against the reforms.

What we would do

1. Fix coverage before extending portability. Where a statute fixes coverage as a share of population, the operative population should be the best current official estimate rather than the last completed census. Eight crore people holding no card is a larger failure than the non-portability of the card, and it was created by drafting rather than by decision.
2. Extend the proven method entitlement by entitlement. Health, maternity benefit and school admission first — the three that most affect whether a family can migrate together rather than leaving children behind. The architecture exists; what is missing is the inter-state settlement rule.
3. Solve the vote, and treat it as the priority. Remote voting for internal migrants has been proposed and piloted in concept; the objections are procedural and solvable. Until a migrant can vote where they live or vote remotely where they are enrolled, every other reform lacks a political constituency to demand it.
4. Make destination registration free and consequence-free, and build the settlement mechanism in public. A migrant should be able to register at destination without losing anything at origin; today registration is a choice between two incomplete citizenships, so most choose neither. A destination state serving a migrant should recover the cost from the origin state on an authenticated claim, and the published flows would produce, for the first time, a reliable measure of internal migration.
5. Design the 2027 census migration questions for circular migration specifically. The census is the only national instrument that captures this population, and the standard last-residence question misses the worker who returns home each season. The question design will determine whether India can plan for its migrants for the following decade, and it is being settled now.

A nation is judged by what reaches its last home. For tens of millions of Indians the state’s provision reaches a home they no longer live in — and for roughly eight crore, on the state’s own count, it reaches no home at all. India built the machine that makes an entitlement follow a citizen. It has used it once.