Where people move for work

India's largest labour market phenomenon is a journey, and it is measured once a decade.

Internal migration moves tens of millions of workers between states, mostly seasonally, mostly into construction, brick kilns, textiles and agriculture. It is the mechanism by which a drought in one state becomes a labour surplus in another.

The data is thin: a decennial census, a survey module, and administrative traces like railway bookings and remittance flows. Assembling those into one view is imperfect, and the imperfection needs to be shown rather than smoothed over.

What we measure

These are the indicators this topic is built from. Each names its source and the year that source refers to, because an official figure is not the same thing as a current one.

Indicator	Unit	Source and year
Inter-state migrants	count, by origin and destination	Census / PLFS migration moduleData year: Census 2011; PLFS migration module 2020-21
Migrants by sector of work	% of migrants	PLFSData year: 2024-25 annual; quarterly bulletins to 2026
Informal employment	% of workers	PLFSData year: 2024-25 annual; quarterly bulletins to 2026
Unemployment rate	%	PLFSData year: 2024-25 annual; quarterly bulletins to 2026

What we publish

An origin-destination flow map, with the age of each source stated on every figure.

The brief above is written and the sources are identified. What remains is the data build. Until it publishes, no figure for this topic appears anywhere on DataSpeaks — we would rather show nothing than show a placeholder.

Where these numbers come from

How we handle gaps

Where a source has not reported for a recent year, the gap is shown as a gap. We do not interpolate to make a series look continuous or a map look complete. Where two agencies publish different figures for the same thing, both appear and we say which is which.

Reuse

Charts from this topic may be reused with credit to DataSpeaks and to the original source named above. The underlying data remains under its own licence — most Government of India datasets permit reuse with attribution, some survey microdata does not.