Citizens Who Move, Entitlements That Do Not
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.
India's internal migrant is a full citizen at origin and a partial one at destination. Almost every entitlement the state provides is tied to a place the migrant has left.
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.
Four findings anchor this analysis:
- One Nation One Ration Card proved portability is technically solvable. Under the National Food Security Act, ONORC allows a beneficiary to draw entitled grain from any fair price shop in the country through Aadhaar-authenticated ePoS. It works, it operates at national scale, and it demonstrates that biometric authentication plus a central register can decouple an entitlement from a location.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Why this compounds
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
Two objections deserve answering. 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 ONORC already does for grain — 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 ONORC is the working proof that the fear is manageable.
What we would do
- Extend the ONORC 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.
- 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.
- Make destination registration free and consequence-free. 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.
- Build an inter-state settlement mechanism, and publish the flows. A destination state serving a migrant should be able to recover the cost from the origin state on an authenticated claim. Published flows would also produce, for the first time, a reliable measure of internal migration.
- Count migrants in the 2027 census properly. Migration questions in the census are the only national instrument that captures this population. The design of those questions in 2027 will determine whether India can plan for its migrants for the following decade.
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 the citizen standing in a different city is served by nobody at all.