The Jantar Mantar protest took over our newsroom too and as we followed the daily reports, we went over the number of times The Migration Story has reported on parents who send money home so that school fees do not get interrupted. Education is seen as an opportunity, for the next generation of farmer, artisan, construction worker, to get out of informal labour and into formal work. One of our first stories was on two sisters transplanted into schools in Kerala from Behrampur, West Bengal, learning the new language, working hard: The learning curve; and another, of a community of teachers and parents backing a boy’s urge to study further: From migrant worker to medical student: A tribal boy from Odisha scripts history. Then listen in to our round-up of migrant voices from Jantar Mantar, on how they viewed the protests, and why they wanted it to succeed, by Sajid Ali, New Delhi-based journalist.

Move on to stories of the impacts, or potential impacts, of government policy: the announcement of a law acknowledging women’s unpaid labour on the farm, which would be the beginning of useful action if, and only if, it translates into accessible schemes of credit, subsidies, childcare etc, that would improve women farmers’ productive output. Also, on the upward change in fees in passport renewals and its impact on blue-collar workers in the Gulf.

Then, migration in literature, and literature in the telling, by a migrant worker in China. The loss of trees, as experienced by warkaris on their 21-day pilgrimage on foot, and spotlight on reminiscences of home in staff lunches.

Impacts of the rising cost of passport renewals on workers in the Gulf: At 4.5 million residents, Gulf countries are home to the largest overseas Indian community in the world. The majority are not highly paid professionals; they are workers whose monthly earnings fall between 800 to 3,000 Emirati dirhams. Inflation has risen faster than pay and the money they send home is used for education, medical bills, housing loans, and everyday expenses…every dirham already has a purpose, even before the month begins.

So when the government raised the cost of passport renewals, this July, by nearly 57%, it was a blow, calculated in terms of savings eroded, remittances affected. The workers’ questions to the government are: Why should the same pricing structure apply equally to a software engineer earning several thousand dirhams a month and to a construction worker earning 1,700 dirhams? Why wasn’t an affordability assessment conducted for low-income migrants before the revised fees were approved? And why should there be such a difference between the cost of a passport at home and abroad—at four times the cost? The hidden financial burden of passport renewals for Indian workers in the Gulf

K. T. Abdurabb, Gulf-based journalist

Acknowledging women’s unpaid labour: Arindam Banerjee and Bhargabi Ghosh of Policy and Development Advisory Group recommend what is feasible, via policy action, to alleviate the distress of climate-induced migration for women who migrate, and for those who stay behind and shoulder all adult responsibility on farm and home. The practicalities they recommend are gender-disaggregated data in the Census, entitlements that travel with women, childcare infrastructure, secure land rights and credit for women who stay back to farm, and acknowledgment of the unpaid labour of elected women representatives who, currently, do this governance work informally.

The need for migration policies to address women’s mounting work. More on this, in the co-authored policy brief from PDAG and Institute for What Works to Advance Gender Equality (IWWAGE) on ‘Migration, Climate Change and Gender’.

Elsewhere, Maharashtra’s Women Farmers Empowerment Law now legally recognises the fact of women as farmers, not just helpers. This is an acknowledgement of women taking charge of farm and household, unsupported, in face of acute male out-migration, agrarian distress and farmer suicides in Maharashtra in the last three decades. This law is a milestone in the history of farming in India.

The next step is to take this intentionality to its logical conclusion by making government schemes—for credit, insurance, subsidies etc, normally tied to land records— accessible to women farmers, alongside nutrition support, worksite crèches and community care services to reduce women’s unpaid care burden and enable them to participate more fully in agriculture. As a strategic investment in the productive potential of women, not as a welfare measure. Beyond recognition, the way forward for Maharashtra’s women farmers.

By Seema Kulkarni, Senior Fellow, SOPPECOM, and MAKAAM affiliation.

Combine this with one from our archives, on how women in Odisha, in cognizance of their separate lived experiences, are choosing to vote differently from their peripatetic menfolk—asserting their local governance and support requirements over patriarchal habits in vote casting. Free and fair.

Aishwarya Mohanty, Special Correspondent, The Migration Story

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There used to be shade: July calls warkaris—mainly farmers and laboureres—pilgrims, from wherever they are, to the 21-day pilgrimage, wari, undertaken on foot, along 305 km from Dehu to the Vitthal temple in the town of Pandharpur. The experience demands that arrangements be made for young children to be looked after while mothers undertake this journey, leave without pay taken for the month. The journey is long and arduous in the heat, the spirit of it is carnival, of community, of devotion and singing of abhangs and bharuds of Sant Tukaram and Sant Dnyaneshwar. A recounting of the experience of returning to the wari every year, for the cleansing experience and, with sadness, of the memory of big old trees on both sides of the road, all along the journey, now disappeared. Migrant workers on the wari trail tackle heat, loss of green cover

Varsha Torgalkar, freelance reporter from Pune

Going away, coming home: We, at The Migration Story, are celebrating Amitav Ghosh’s 70th, recalling the themes of displacements in The Hungry Tide, The Shadow Lines, in The Great Derangement, and of course at the end of the Sea of Poppies with the girmitiyas on a boat headed southwest on the Indian Ocean. Giving migration a human face, backed by an academic understanding on the socio-economic, political, environmental contexts of the period.

Listen in to academician and author, Amrita Bhalla, jamming with her once-upon-a-time-student, now independent journalist, Zainab Qazi, on their reading of The Shadow Lines: Beyond the Shadow Lines: Borders, memory and belonging.

Here is an excerpt from the podcast, cherry picked for reference to displacement:

And before this, a ditty, to set the mood:

Panchhi, dariya, hawa ka jhaunka
Koi sarhad na unhe roka
Sarhad kewal insaanon ke liye hai
Tumne aur maine kya paaya insaan hokar?

A bird, the sea, the wind
Know no borders
Borders are for humans
What have we gained by being human?

The migration spotlight

Food as memory: Food does not make its way directly to the stomach, it stops at the heart. Or wait, where exactly is memory stored? Eating staff lunch in a basement in Bengaluru, a dish of ridge gourd evokes memories of hills and fields for three young people from Assam, Nagaland and Bihar, who have now spent some years away from home.

Enjoy this serving. ‘We cook this differently back home’: What staff meals reveal about migration in Bengaluru’s restaurants

By Pratima Chabbi, Bengaluru-based writer who has also written The MTR Story: A Labour of Love

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Who says spreading your wings means flying high?

Low Flight is a collection of poems by Wang Jibing, who found time between odd jobs to pen poems on scraps of paper. He is not the first literary blue-collar worker in China, there have been others before him who have turned to philosophy, waxed lyrical, taken a pause from the daily pressures to talk and observe, write down their impressions.

Wang Jibing dropped out of school as a teenager because he was too poor to continue. He took on work in construction, scavenging for waste and selling things at a street stall, before he became a food deliveryman. His conversations and surveys with about 200 fellow gig workers resulted in a book of verse called Man in a Hurry, published in 2023, and Low Flight, released in 2024, which won him the Lu Xun Literary Prize, named after the father of modern Chinese literature.

‘Who says spreading your wings means flying high? Flying low is also flying,’ goes one of the lines in his poems.

Koh Ewe reports for the BBC in Food delivery rider wins China’s top literary prize

This newsletter has been produced by Meetu Grover and Vipul Kumar.

The migrant in the room

This month we place the migrant in different settings: in his tightly packed home; in a sweltering factory, sewing garments by the clock, or churning out jaggery in non-stop shifts; negotiating pay in a foreign city; or, entering the screens in our drawing rooms from the FIFA football fields and in films.

In other words, think of the hajar kos travelled by those who made it, when you sweeten your payasam or coffee with jaggery; remember the antecedents of the players, when you watch the beautiful game being battled in Mexico, the USA and Canada; when you find it difficult to watch Do Beegha Zamin, or Main Vaapas Aaunga, or empathize with a character in Shape of Momo, remember the nameless faceless migrant, embedded in our every day.

In airless rooms, the weak fight of Delhi’s poorest against TB: India had pledged to eliminate TB by 2025 but, as of 2024, we contributed to 25% of the world’s TB-infected population. The National Strategic Plan to End TB views migrants as a high risk group. Why?

Urban planning that does not include migrants or the very poor, forces them to live in tightly packed, overcrowded slums, with little sunlight or breeze filtering in. TB, once diagnosed, requires prolonged treatment. In a congested setting, this gives the infecting bacterium ample opportunity to jump from one family member to another.

Swati Thapa, freelance journalist from Uttarakhand

Gas leak exposes more than safety violations: No alarms went off at the time of the ammonia gas leak at the seafood processing facility in Tiruvallur, where Jajanika Jaunja and her sisters worked. Jajanika is alive because she went to the canteen, about 20 meters away from the leak site; her cousin, Deepanjali, was not so lucky. She was in the women workers’ residence, located right next to the pipe leaking ammonia. There was no distinction between work and living spaces, in the overcrowded quarters managed by the company.

About 200 migrant workers from Odisha, Jharkhand and Assam were employed at the plant, where 16 workers lost their lives to an ammonia gas leak recently. Among the dead was a 15-year old worker, and Deepanjali, who belonged to the Juang Adivasi community of Odisha, classified as a particularly vulnerable tribal group. They had no social security cover and were not registered on the eShram government portal for migrant workers. The facility is under scrutiny for violating child labour codes and other violations.

Sara Abraham with TMS Special Correspondent, Aishwarya Mohanty

Women with salaries: Priyanka and Kamalpreet Kaur. Two young women in their twenties. One from Gurdaspur, one from Sangrur district in Punjab, left home for the first time, when they took up jobs in an e-commerce warehouse in Bilaspur Kalan, about 60 km from Delhi. They had arrived here after their skills training under the Deen Dayal Upadhyay Grameen Kaushalya Yojana, which is free and provides women a daily stipend to commute. Within a month of joining work, Kamalpreet, who said she burst into tears any time anybody told her off, left the job and went back to her village, returning to join another warehouse in the same area in a few weeks.

According to Skill Development Secretary, Debashree Mukherjee, placement is not enough; mentorship, support, a safe place to stay and workplace safety are important to retain women at work. Support is what Priyanka and Kamalpreet found in each other.

In their three years together, the two women have managed to borrow from each other’s village dialects till they do not sound the same to their families back home, learnt to articulate what they like and do not like about different employers, discovered brands, discovered their idea of self, and respect at home, where they send back part of their earnings. I now send money home, a podcast by Sanskriti Talwar.

Combine this with a reading of Beyond jobs: What it takes to keep young, rural women in formal employment, by Dr Isha Gupta, research lead for the skills vertical at the JustJobs Network. The article cites a survey of new women recruits, conducted three months after they joined work, finding that only a quarter of women remained in their jobs. What could have helped the 75% who left?

How migrants power the jaggery mills of Maharashtra: Marathwada region in Maharashtra, is the second largest producer of sugar in the country. About 300,000 farmers grow sugarcane, 2,00,000 workers are employed in the factories, and 15,00,000 seasonal workers cross ek hajar kos: one thousand miles, from UP and MP, to work here for 4-5 months in harvesting and transplanting the cane.

An account from Jalna, Aurangabad and Beed, on the short period of jaggery-making season, in which every hour counts.

Shivaji Thorat

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Seeing reality through cinema: Borrowed these words from Namrata Joshi, film journalist, who was part of a panel on how storytelling might build a nuanced narrative on migration. How, for instance, a Malayalam film, Njan Prakashan, about the aspirations of a wannabe migrant, portrays migrants and migration without actually using those words—just showing workers singing a Bengali song while harvesting paddy in Kerala; menu at the eatery in Bengali and Malayalam. And indeed, this is art that borrows from life: for in reality, cinemas in Perumbavoor, Ernakulam screen Odia and Bengali films on Sundays. Watch the panel discussion that took place at Groundswell, Uttarakhand, here.

Reaching into our archives we find a small haul of filmic storytelling on migration. Fading stories of struggles on celluloid that comments on the surprisingly meagre crop of films portraying the condition of the migrant during the COVID lockdown despite the strength of emotions that period produced: just Bheed and Lockdown India, to be joined later by Homebound. Listen to the journalist, Basharat Peer, on whose article the film is based: The story behind ‘Homebound’. The persuasive cinema of exodus curates a whole list of cinema around migration in the international film circuit, featuring Mahdi Fleifel’s To A Land Unknown; Oh, Canada; Viet and Nam; Mongrel; All We Imagine as Light… And then, the old Indian classics—in film and lyrics—portraying ideas of city from a migrant perspective: The migrant on celluloid. Read, listen to these articles, podcast, for a balcony seat view on what puts a human face to migration.

The migration spotlight

Shape of Momo: Migration, memory, and the myth of homecoming: Shape of Momo is a coming-of-age story set in a small town in Sikkim. The protagonist, a migrant woman named Bishnu, returns home from the metropolis to find that it has either ‘…undergone a major change while she was away, or perhaps all this time, remained the same while she evolved.’

The telling of this tale is best left to the director of the film, Tribeni Ray, who seeks to show (not tell) how migration, memory, gender and class overlap, how patriarchal themes continue to play out in an all-women household, where Bishnu is a daughter ‘raised like a son’. An excerpt from an interview with Tribeny Rai,:

“Whether we move for education, work, love, or survival, almost everyone is a migrant somewhere. I was interested in exploring the emotional consequences of leaving home, such as longing, displacement, and the search for belonging.

I think this is one of the reasons the film has resonated with audiences across different places and cultures. While the story is rooted in a specific context, the experience of searching for home is universal. More than anything, I hope the film encourages empathy and reminds us that every migrant carries a deeply human story.”

Zainab S Qazi, independent writer, researcher, and filmmaker

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The partition that wasn’t: One morning the 95-year-old Sikh protagonist of Imtiaz Ali’s Main Vaapas Aaunga wakes up in a city in north India and tells his driver to drive to Sargodha in present day Pakistan. It’s across the border, his driver tells him. What border, is the response from the Sikh.

There is migration and then there is migration. People move from villages to cities to even different countries in search of a better future. But the door to the native land is always open. For Imtiaz Ali’s protagonist, as for the about 15 million people who packed their bags and left their homes and homeland after the partition of India, thinking it was temporary, there has been no going back.

How do you yearn for a homeland that is lost to you? You bury it in silence, refusing to remember. What happens when the long-buried trauma surfaces? In a world where large-scale migration and displacement continues globally, where people rarely leave home out of choice, Imtiaz Ali peels away the layers of grief over a beloved and a homeland to reveal the deep-buried trauma in this film. Probably his best yet.

Monica Bathija, TMS reader

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On the game that fuels dreams by Jo Adetunji, Editor, The Conversation UK

How migration became a key to World Cup success: The 2026 World Cup will feature more foreign-born players than any previous edition. Nearly a quarter of the 1,248 players selected for national teams were born in a different country from the one they will represent.

In some squads, the proportions are far higher than this – 96% of Curaçao’s players were born abroad, as were 85% of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s and 73% of Morocco’s. Overall, foreign-born players make up the majority of footballers in eight of the tournament’s 48 squads.

Team this up with World Cup 2026: the real story of the resilient African migrants reshaping global football.

This newsletter has been produced by Meetu Grover and Vipul Kumar.

When we talk about migration, the picture is usually of men braving new geographies to explore livelihood options, security, apprenticeship, learning and so on. But women have made these choices too. In this Dispatch, we showcase women on the move, shouldering responsibility as provider and seeker of a better life. Continuing with how women experience migration, this month’s Spotlight shines on a woman’s account of her long-distance relationship with her away-to-earn husband, its tender-tough aspects.

In other reportage: we know enough to be able to take measures to adapt or mitigate impacts of war, unpredictable climate, crop loss, rising fuel prices, policy transitions etc. But we are still behind the curve on implementation. What are we not seeing?

Continuing coverage on the labour protests across the country, asking for ‘living wages’, an update on the aftermath of speaking out, speaking up for themselves by Rakhi Sehgal, independent labour researcher: The losses workers are counting after Noida protests.

Besides what we published, our first solutions-seeking community convening on migration, Groundswell, took place in Dehradun in the first three days of June. Sound bites from founders, Anuradha Nagaraj and Roli Srivastava, who have just returned from the event: “…. whirlwind… did just what we had imagined it would… new friendships…conversations carried on way past the allocated time… this was the very reason Roli and I had wanted to go beyond the newsroom and build a community through this convening.”

In short, Groundswell is something we are already looking forward to repeating again. The event encouraged shared learnings and mainstreamed migration in unique ways. People embraced the space as their own, used it to better understand policy and tackle their most pressing challenges. Catch a flavour of it here. You will read more on the event’s outcomes in days to come.

An early onset—of heat and migration: Ballia district in UP reports a change in migration pattern in step with higher temperatures, earlier in the year, earlier in the cropping cycle.

This year, the April temperature was five degrees higher than normal at 47.5° C. According to one farmer-turned-seasonal-migrant-labourer, summer now arrives 22 days earlier and ends 18 days later. Men who used to migrate in the third week of June now leave in April. Other districts, too, report a phenomenon of atypically early migration, which disrupts children’s education and leaves old people to fend for themselves.

The State Disaster Management Authority’s mandated Heat Action Plans move at a much slower pace, or not at all. Sowing times, farming practices, MNREGA schedules demand a review, sometimes capital-intensive. While these responses must be put together, migrant-to-be, Ramavatar Manjhi, of Banda, hoists a sack on his shoulder and says: “Whether the government takes action or not, we at least must save our own lives.” And so, to cities as hot, or hotter, but with prospects of employment relief. ‘Raining fire’: Untimely heat forces early migration from Uttar Pradesh.

Ayush Krishna Tripathi, journalist, researcher, documentary photographer, New Delhi

Do Heat Action Plans pass the labour test? Heatwaves are not yet classified as a notified disaster in India’s Disaster Management Act and it is summer again.

There has been a beginning: a few states have notified heat as a state-specific disaster and unlocked State Disaster Relief Funds for heat-related mitigation activities, and financial compensations to heat-affected casualties. This regulatory versus advisory stance, an institutionalized, accountability-driven approach to heat management, is needed for better prepared, better designed cities and towns as the planet heats up. Especially for informal workers whose health, productivity and wages are most affected by extreme heat and who cannot be advised (as they have been, in a Heat Advisory) to ‘stay indoors’ and miss the day’s work. That, truly, would be stepping from the frying pan into the fire, for them.

Aishwarya Mohanty, special correspondent with The Migration Story

The need to address what is broken in the new rural employment guarantee programme: It hasn’t helped that the transition from MNREGA to Viksit Bharat–Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) (VB-GRAM G), has taken place at the time of the Gulf war, LPG crisis and the resulting reverse exodus home, minus work. The basket of livelihood opportunities that had sustained the men and women of rural India has suddenly depleted.

The lag in VB-GRAM G implementation has hurt the people who need it most. Reasons for non-implementation vary from inability to mark digital attendance due to app not loading, due to poor internet connectivity; KYC being outdated; uncertainty on names on muster rolls; to the bigger uncertainty within implementing bodies regarding budgets for making payments under the scheme.

A sound bite from an applicant to rural employment guarantee: “First, we didn’t know MGNREGA existed and by the time we became familiar with it, there was a digital update. Most of us do not even have smartphones. It took us a while to understand [the app] and now there is something new [the VB-GRAM G]…” In rural Rajasthan, women wait for work and wage

Aishwarya Mohanty, special correspondent with The Migration Story

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In the uncharted territory of domestic employment abroad: Migration to the Gulf, for women of Kerala who seek this option to ‘solve our life problems’, is not for the faint of heart. While the women leave of their own free will, they have no way of knowing the future that waits for them at the other end of the plane ride. In the end, the quality of their employment, as domestic labour in private households, depends on the employer they serve. It is a test of endurance. Isolated in culture, language and kin, the physicality of the work, lack of nutrition and the strain of familial responsibilities back home, which they continue to carry, impacts their health. Leaving them ill, anxious, exhausted.

And when they return home, it is not to the same place they had left. Another set of challenges awaits them. Missing narratives: The women Gulf migrants from Kerala

Story by Fathima Rena

Nursing—a Kerala export that goes way back, to post-war Germany: An online digital archive, Who Cared, recounts stories of nurses from Kerala who migrated to a Germany that was severely depleted of caregivers, post WW2. The archive takes us back almost 50 years, outlining the trajectories of women who were, fascinatingly, more emancipated in the choices they made, than the European woman of that time, whose place in society was boundaried by home.

Racism was dealt with quietly. Thresiamma, who arrived in Germany when she was sixteen and a half, said,

“I know I’m Indian. I have a homeland somewhere else. So when people were mean, I told myself, ‘They don’t know any better.’ I looked the other way because I was here to work. I thought I’d go back eventually.” Thresiamma just celebrated her 50 years stay in Germany.

Her 34-year old son, Abhilash, is less accepting of discrimination:

“Our generation simply has a different sense of belonging. We belong here. So when someone says something racist to us, we take it differently. We don’t want to brush it off with a smile,” he says.

This archive will eventually also chronicle stories of caregivers from the Philippines and South Korea. Oral histories, pictures chronicle Kerala nurse’s forgotten care work…

Nimish Sawant, Berlin-based independent journalist

The migration spotlight

Debt, distance and desire: The dynamics of marriage in a migrant household Seeking to understand the emotional and physical dimensions of a marriage suspended indefinitely in time, Dharini Mishra, scholar at Azim Premji University, speaks to stay-behind wife, Meena, who manages home, finances and children in Namapur village, Varanasi, while her husband works on a powerloom in Surat, Gujarat.

Excerpted from the article:

The feel of marriage was marked by a shy distance, rare for a relationship spanning two decades, in which the rhythms of daily intimacy in a shared life remained disrupted and slow to return. “Now, when he comes back, I feel shy talking to him for the first 2-3 days upon his return home. It feels weird. It takes some time to return to normalcy.”

She (Meena) framed their separation as a form of helplessness, a matter of compulsion... “I miss him the most on special occasions, on festivals, when we cook something special,” Meena said. She acknowledged how hard her husband’s life was in Surat, who had to cook and manage all aspects of life, along with earning a livelihood. “Had we lived together, at least he would not have to do my share of responsibilities, and I would not have to take on his share of responsibilities,” she said.

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How changing weather is forcing Himachal’s tourism workers to migrate: The livelihoods of about three lakh people, in Himachal Pradesh, depends on tourism. But “…the snowfall, snow-capped peaks and meadows that once defined Shimla’s identity have disappeared,” says a tourist-photographer of 48 years. And with this have disappeared tourists, and livelihoods related to the tourist industry.

‘The migration driven by… changing weather can no longer be viewed as a natural or economic problem. It is an emerging policy question, at the centre of which are thousands of workers forced to leave their home state every year simply to survive.’

Rohit Prashar reports in Down to Earth

This newsletter has been produced by Meetu Grover and Vipul Kumar.

Workers found themselves at the heart of breaking news throughout April. Leading up to International Labour Day on May 1, workers have protested to assert their rights at the workplace, while being driven to the edge of hunger and despair by the extreme cost of cooking gas following the West Asian conflict. In this edition of TMS Dispatch, we follow stories of resolve, protest, leisure, and the effects of climate change on vulnerable livelihoods.

Fire in the belly: poetry as political memory: With labour protests in recent news, we arrived on International Workers Day on 1 May. Its origin story? Workers organizing themselves to demand labour laws in 1886, starting with an eight-hour work day. More than a century later, we have just approved 12-hour shifts for the competitive advantage of industry. This Labour Day, we bring you voices of rights, resistance and refusal to accept injustice, in poetry anchored in social realism, tracing back to the 1940s and onward. Featuring the words of Mallika Sengupta, Mohanachand Patil, Namdev Dhasal, Sukanta Bhattacharya, Avtar Singh Sandhu ‘Pash’ and Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

Migrant after-hours: Who are workers when they are not working? We took the ‘work’ out of ‘worker’ to capture the innocence of relaxation: Rest, leisure and laughter after long shifts. Here, the camera captures the joie de vivre of Instagrammer, Sabitri Yadav, at her place of work.

Of heat and heated protests: The Noida protests have been framed as economic grievances—of shorter work hours and break rights. But two climate researchers looked at the protests from the lens of heat and occupational safety. The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, which came into effect in November 2025, expanded permissible shift hours from eight to 12 in a day, while scrapping workplace regulation of wellbeing-related temperature standards. So, this summer, workers had to endure longer shifts, in hotter conditions, with weaker legal protection. But studies show that productivity, health, earnings and behaviour are affected by heat. The heat nobody counted: Why Noida protests were not ‘just’ a wages story.

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‘Our wages were stolen and we forced a correction’: The labour protests that we had reported on last month have been followed by more protests in UP and Haryana. Here too (reference to earlier-in-the-year refinery protests), it continues to be contractual workers who have struck work. Demands have been similar across sites—better and on-time pay; acknowledgement and compensation for overtime; and basic amenities like rest breaks, water, toilets. In short, demand for dignity, especially in light of the ignominy of not being able to afford even one square meal because of the increasingly steep LPG prices in the informal market.

The NOIDA (UP) and Manesar (Haryana) labour protests have ended with the UP and Haryana governments acceding to worker demand for better pay. But this change in minimum wages has happened after 2012 in UP, and after eleven years in Haryana. The gap between minimum wage revisions is supposed to be only five years. So, the base from which these revisions have been made are still far behind the cost-of-living index of today.

Unpacking the economics behind the worker protests: Dharmendra Kumar, Founding Secretary of Janpahal, who works on labour and trade issues, and Namrata Raju, labour and public policy researcher, trace the historical assumptions that underpinned the determination of minimum wages by industry, and the drift to the extractive impulse that they have become today.

They suggest a model ‘…premised on considering our workforce as…asset as opposed to a disposable input to industry.’

Related coverage on worker rights:

• From our archives: The anatomy of a protest: Why workers across refineries in India are striking work. And on workers as a supply chain commodity: ‘You are not my employee’.

• Also, Anuradha Nagaraj, co-founder, The Migration Story, in conversation with Manisha Pande of Newslaundry, on the striking workers.

LPG crisis strikes migrant workers harder: The promise of 2-minute noodles was never so persuasive. Migrants get their LPG cylinders, minus subsidy and stability of supply, from the informal market. The benefit of the government distribution system for cooking gas, is left for family back home, attached to place of residence on identity papers. This exposes migrants to the volatility and opportunistic price rises of the black market, as is currently the case with the West Asian conflict’s impact manifesting here. Impacting what migrants consume, and their forced journey homeward for a fair meal.

Related reading:

• India’s LPG crunch sends migrants packing to uncertain future back home

• The LPG crisis burning through Delhi’s migrant settlements

• How the war risks derailing India’s push for clean cooking

The migration spotlight

Salt is currency, but the weather is playing spoilsport: The Agariyas are traditional salt farmers of Gujarat who spend eight out of 12 months in the flats of the Little Rann of Kutch, preparing the salty desert for crystallisation. They know they have a good quality yield when the salt pans are so white it hurts the eyes to even look at them for more than a few minutes. This year the salt turned brown just before harvest, due to rain and sand deposited by high desert winds.

The Agariya do not fall under the ambit of welfare schemes, designed more for sedentary livelihoods; they do not own the land on which they turn salt; they are not insured. And with climate change, the western coast is getting more and more prone to unseasonal rains and cyclone events. When the salt turns brown: Freak rains batter livelihoods in India’s Little Rann of Kutch

Author speak

Simit Bhagat, founder of The Bidesia Project, which documents the history of indentured labour through folk music, spoke to Manmeet Bedi, who has written a children’s book called Where the Mustard Fields Meet the Southern Cross, about a journey from Punjab to Australia, begun five generations ago.

Excerpted from the podcast:

“…technically in Australia, unless you’re a First Nations person, someone who’s Indigenous, every person here is a migrant. So I would say the whole story of Australia is a migrant story.”

“…we didn’t come here yesterday. We’ve been here for a very long time. We’re not guests here. We’re founders. And…have just as much of a right to be here as anyone else. And the reason why I actually put it into the narrative of a children’s book is to make sure that the next generation understands that.”

Listen to the entire podcast here.

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Women’s participation in gig work is not entirely equal to men even if AI itself might be stated to be gender agnostic. In failing to factor the role of women as caregivers, who balance home and paid work, who also need to factor in safety in selection of routes and timing, it puts women at a disadvantage because it is designed to reward constant, uninterrupted availability. How do the women gig workers rally around this? Algorithms don’t care: how AI worsens the double burden for Indonesia’s female gig workers

The Migration Story will flag off its first Groundswell in June this year.

Groundswell has been conceived of as an annual event that will give migrants a platform to directly tell their stories, negotiate the change they want, while giving other participants—government, non-government, thinktanks, policy makers, practitioners, journalists—an opportunity to gain fresh perspectives.

Click here for more information and to register for the event.

This newsletter has been produced by Meetu Grover and Vipul Kumar.

The remaining, mostly blue-collar migrants, find themselves trapped as much by the ongoing war as by economic precarity.

What we find is that the memory of the disruption of global mobility during COVID-19 is still fresh. The stories at that instance were of loss of jobs, outstanding pay, outstanding debt and an unwelcoming lack of reintegration into work back home. This is another disruption, and this time low-income migrants are hedging their bets and staying put.

We bring you an analysis on the uncertainties that are reshaping economies, the labour market, and play a role in the decision to stay rather than return, even at risk to life. Also, stories of those, in India, who had one foot on a plane, ready to depart to the Gulf, when 28 February happened.

Impacts of war on the home front: ‘Waiting for flights to resume’: Gulf-bound Indian workers in limbo as war disrupts travel

“Ek message aya, carpenter ki want ayi thi Bahrain me [A message was posted, saying carpenters were required in Bahrain]… “so I applied.” Kushwaha’s flight of 28 February got cancelled because of the war in West Asia, but he had already left his job and taken a loan to cover expenses for his overseas employment...

Chair at The International Institute of Migration and Development (IIMAD), Thiruvananthapuram, S. Irudaya Rajan, writing about the effects of disruption, cites the 2023 Kerala Migration Survey’s study of remittance-use patterns: the largest part of remittances from the Gulf are used to repay outstanding debts, including loans taken to cover recruitment intermediaries and processes, followed by other more personal expenditure. Reverse migration linked to war would leave many with outstanding debt. Read about the precarity of leaving, in India’s Gulf migration model faces a new test. Co-authored with Rakesh Ranjan Kumar, senior research fellow at IIMAD. By Invitation from The Migration Story.

Migration as a means of escape: Manipur’s ethnic conflict, in 2023, displaced the local Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities. Local economies collapsed—small businesses were destroyed, fields were burned, and local markets shut down. “We did not plan to leave. But after the conflict [started], there was nothing left…”

Artisans (not) marooned: Gulle means migration and gudda means hillock, in Kannada. The town of Gulledgudda, in North Karnataka, got its name because it attracted migrant weavers who came, settled and made it famous for the cloth called khana, woven no place else in the country. The name is still not a misnomer, though the migration has changed direction. Find out why the elders are letting younger folk move away....

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Do the labour codes work for the Indian economy? Labour and Public Policy Researcher, Namrata Raju, interviewed development economist, Dr Santosh Mehrotra, Lead Research Fellow at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow, to understand the structural faults that underlie the implementation of labour codes, which circumnavigate 85% non-farm enterprises because they are classified as ‘unorganised sector’, that is, unregistered, and out of the purview of monitoring and governance mechanisms set by the state.

The migration spotlight

The anatomy of a protest: Why workers across refineries in India are striking work Workers at the Indian Oil Corporation’s Panipat refinery went on strike in February, after an on-site accident injured a worker. The work underway is for expanding refinery capacity at a capital expenditure of 32,946 crore rupees.

Workers, who earn 540 rupees/day if unskilled and 760-780 rupees a day if skilled, and who have a workday of 8am to 8-9pm, with no overtime recorded, made the following demands: Payment of wages before the 7th of every month; 26 work days a month; medical insurance in case of accidents. Elsewhere, as appeasement in another protest, workers were granted additional mobile toilets and drinking water. Reasonable demands?

Author speak

“Even though I had read that the Panipat refinery and petrochemicals complex was one of Indian Oil’s largest refineries, I was surprised at the scale of operations when I stood facing the complex, spread over more than 350 acres, the work of expanding the refinery capacity by 60 per cent distributed among more than 1,000 sub-contractors. I also did not know that fuel for Delhi-NCR comes from here.

Despite being this vital node for India’s capital, it struck me that the men and women building and cleaning the complex mentioned the ‘kharchi’—a system of advances in which the contractor pays workers small amounts weekly, on which they can sustain themselves. This is a system I have reported on for more than a decade in the context of the brick kilns sector. It is very ad-hoc, and in brick kilns, workers say it keeps them in debt while contractors complain that workers take advantage of it and run away with advances sometimes. To find the same system in a modern refinery set-up was unexpected…even here, workers felt they were not getting paid their full dues and that wage amounts were unfairly deducted.”

Anumeha Yadav, on reporting The anatomy of a protest.

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A ground report on the precarity of staying: Missiles above, debt below: Why migrant workers cannot run away from the war, wherein Rejimon Kuttappan captures the grim realities of the workers stuck in the GCC countries for The Polity. An excerpt:

They stay because they cannot afford to leave. They stay because the debts are unpaid and the agents are owed. They stay because the kafala system has made their legal existence contingent on an employer’s goodwill.

They stay because India’s labour market has no room for a 50-year-old returning from the Gulf with no savings and no skills that the domestic economy values. They stay because the last time they went home in a crisis, nobody was waiting with a plan.

…. And in the calculus of survival, a missile in the sky is a probability. Poverty at home is a certainty.

A stone-faced deity: Two hundred craftspersons from Rajasthan were contracted to work in New Jersey, USA to carve stone for the Akshardham temple. Over the seven years of work, respiratory problems, related to silica dust, started showing up (they were screened for illnesses before they joined work): some developed silicosis, two died; others were diagnosed with TB and chronic bronchitis. But silicosis is preventable. So, what went wrong? The Guardian reports on the workers who carved the largest modern Hindu temple in the west.

This newsletter has been produced by Meetu Grover and Vipul Kumar.

The basis on which a policy is formulated, and its implementation, decides whether it meets the objectives it had set out to meet. In this month’s Dispatch, we present conversations on policies, schemes and governance guidelines that have a direct bearing on migrant lives, and that have been in the news recently.

Will it, won’t it? The VB-GRAMG in action: The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) promoted a bottom-up approach to manual-work-related planning and execution, empowering local communities to contextualize work as per local development needs. Therefore, when the illegal mines in Hospet shut down 15 years ago, and all economic opportunities disappeared overnight, the women channeled MGNREGA to clean up water bodies polluted by mining, clear lands used as mine dumps, widened roads destroyed by the mining trucks... MGNREGA helped families stay and cope. They did not have to migrate.

MGNREGA’s replacement by the Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgaar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin)(VB-GRAMG) has created anxiety. How will the execution of the new scheme with prescriptive schedules following an agrarian calendar, altered Centre-state funding, the need for digital inputs, translate on ground? The article, here. Top this with a conversation with author, Bhanumathi Kalluri of Dhaatri, in Labour Adda Episode 2: From MGNREGA to VB-GRAM: What changes for women workers?

Between idea and execution: The complex fabric of a Just Transitions implementation: In the contestation between coal-related jobs and the environment, there is acceptance that the transition to a cleaner energy system should be just and protect worker livelihoods. Dr Sandeep Pai, Senior Lead, International Energy Transitions, at Duke University, talks with labour and public policy researcher, Namrata Raju about the need to expand this forward and backward so that it encompasses the coal supply chain, or the ecosystem that made it viable: workers, community and the region, and to look at options beyond alternative energy sources for a viable solution that addresses socio-economic and environmental needs. Listen to this discussion here; the research paper on which this conversation is based, here. For further listening, our July ‘25 L is for Labour, with Namrata: From dust to just: Indian coal and just transitions, where we contextualize ‘just transitions’ from India’s informal coal worker perspective.

Rights, responsibility and ownership: Of participatory management of forest commons: The Forest Rights Act is a chapter in India’s executive administration of forest conservation that recognizes the role of forest dwelling communities in maintaining the health of the forest, while deriving sustenance from it. One of the ways the FRA is enacted (historically, with administrative trepidation) is through the Community Forest Resource Rights. And how has that played out?

These rights changed how we thought…earlier, the forest was something we feared entering. After CFRR, it became our responsibility.

We are working so our children don’t have to leave because of poverty. If they go (to cities), it should be because they want to, not because they are forced to…

This is also the story of Shivram Usendi, who found a livelihood and a way of living right here, after 2022, in his hamlet of 85 Adivasi households in Khamdodgi, Chhattisgarh. ‘I now sleep in my own house…’

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Faultlines? The disconnect between skilling programmes and jobs: The literature on migration presents the desire to move to the city as universal and uni-directional. However, for youth in Raichur, Karnataka, the cost of living in the city defeats the purpose of moving to it. This is not helped by the mismatch between the government skilling programmes they attend, and the actual available jobs, locally, or in cities. It is important to see this as illustrative because policies and investments imagine cities as the drivers of India’s development. A circular loop: Rural-urban-rural migration in a north Karnataka district.

The missing link: Why India’s climate and migration policies keep talking past each other: Out of 94 state interventions reviewed by the Indian Institute of Human Settlements, only five explicitly address both climate change and migration. Maybe because the idea of India is fixed, rather than of a country on the move?

As climate stress pushes people out of rural areas, migration increasingly becomes a necessity rather than a choice. Yet, once in cities, migrants are often pushed to the margins, living in informal settlements prone to flooding or heat stress, and working in sectors with minimal protections. Despite their scale and vulnerability, migrants remain almost invisible in policies meant to protect them from economic and climate shocks.

Editor speak

Ask us anything at the end of two years of The Migration Story. Founders, Roli Srivastava and Anuradha Nagraj answer reader questions, in the process, sharing how The Migration Story got shipped and shaped. If you are curious about how we find our stories, how they get made, write in with your questions and comments at writetous@themigrationstory.com and we will address them in our next episode of Ask us anything, which we publish every few months.

The migration spotlight

An article on environmental dominoes in AI processes, since the India AI Impact Summit 2026 has been in the news. How AI impacts obliquely: AI’s hidden thirst: The water and power cost of data centres.

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Thousands leave India chasing work in Southeast Asia, unaware they are stepping into an organised system of deception and coercion that spans borders and thrives online.

The Hindu newspaper’s investigative reporting on the environment that helps scamming sweat shops thrive in the no man’s zone between law and lawlessness across Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia. Creating two kinds of victims—the person being scammed online, and the person being forced to perpetrate that scam. Forced to fraud: Inside cyber crime factories trapping Indians in Southeast Asia.

This newsletter has been produced by Meetu Grover and Vipul Kumar.

One story, many lives: Have you ever had that feeling of déjà vu when you look at a headline? The story is familiar, but the names of the places and the people are different? Migration often appears as an isolated headline: may be a policy announcement, or an incident in a particular state. Focusing on migration related news gives The Migration Story a bird’s eye view on the broader patterns of vulnerabilities and opportunities that become visible when we place these headlines side by side. So, we begin 2026 with a new monthly series, where we look beyond the headlines to contextualise developments on migration from across the country and the world. Welcome to Labour Adda, Episode 1. Our first episode illuminates the one narrative that is currently repeating itself across India and the world. Listen in.

Ten minutes later: Rethinking quick deliveries in India: The labour ministry recently directed quick-commerce companies to stop promoting themselves as a ten-minute service. But systemically, delivery ‘partners’ are paid commissions based on a hierarchy of incentives which link volume of deliveries in as little time as possible to better earnings. Without the safety net of a basic salary. Listen in on what an economist, a gig worker, customers and a spokesperson of the gig workers’ association, GIGWA, have to say about actual implementation and what might help delivery agents feel more secure.

Also see our Recommendations section below, for a fictional account of how a gig worker might be at the mercy of a 10-minute-delivery app.

The importance of migrant language in awareness programmes: In Valparai, tea estates are nestled along the Anamalai Tiger Reserve, with worker settlements barely a few metres from active wildlife corridors. Co-existence with wildlife is important and the Forest Department holds awareness programmes on animal behaviour and potential human-wildlife conflict. In the local language, Tamil. But many of the workers now are from the Hindi-conversant North…they came in to fill the gaps left by younger local generations who migrated outside of tea estates. Amid growing child deaths in wildlife encounters, migrants labour on in Tamil Nadu’s forested tea estates

The perils of travelling abroad in India: Ramnarayan Baghel weighed the Rs 850/- a day wages he would earn in Kerala versus the Rs 500/- in Delhi, and his own district’s Rs 300/- a day and opted to travel the 2000 km from Chattisgarh to Kerala. He wanted money to complete the roof of the house he had started constructing under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana. He was beaten to death within five days of arriving in Kerala. On charge of being a thief and a Bangladeshi. Read about Baghel’s one-way journey here.

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Recruited into a conflict zone: Adarsh Behera was happy to get a well-paying job as Chief Machine Operator in Al Fashir, Sudan. Within three months, he found himself in the middle of the Sudanese civil war. He was abducted by the Rapid Support Force militia who thought he was with the army—the side they were fighting against. Watch this episode on The Migration Story video series to find out how Behera made his way back home.

Once upon a time in Alang: The commercial activity around one of the biggest ship-recycling yards in the world has slowed down, thanks to the rising operational cost of safety and environmental compliances in one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, and the geopolitics of war and maritime piracy post 2008-2011. What has this decommissioning meant for the town of Alang, on Gujarat’s coast, which had grown on the strength of migrant labour from all across India since the 1980s? And how has it impacted migrants? Why a dying port town is still a migrant destination.

Author speak

Independent journalist, Anuja, talks about the making of Ten minutes later: Rethinking quick deliveries in India…

In this podcast episode, we reported from the ground to ensure that we included voices of all stakeholders. In a newsy and conversational style. One aspect that stayed with me long after my reporting got over is how much language matters when it comes to gig work and labour. I learnt that ‘ten-minute deliveries’ are not just about fulfilling orders in a given time frame, or a marketing hook. The phrase determines how both delivery riders and consumers engage with the quick commerce platforms, and that focusing on the promise alone is unlikely to bring any large-scale institutional reforms.

The migration spotlight

The Special Intensive Revision in Bihar caused voters who had migrated to hustle homeward at speed, spending earnings, losing pay and leave. There is a replay of this in West Bengal, which is seeing massive return of workers fearing disenfranchisement. As SIR prepares to unroll across nine states and three union territories, we revisit our ground report on the challenges of adhering to the requirements of the SIR process for migrant workers: SIR’s impact on Bihari migrant workers. One migrant interviewee explains why it is so necessary to ensure they are on the electoral rolls in The cost of staying on the list:

Agar voter list se vanchit rah jayenge to sarkari yojnaon ka laabh bhi nahi milega...humara astitva hi khatm ho jayega (If we are left out of the voter list, we will not get the benefit of government schemes…our existence will be over).

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What does it mean to be interfacing with an aggregator app? For the customer and the delivery ‘partner’? Meet Manas, his wife, son, daughter and ailing mother, in the movie, Zwigato, by Nandita Das. A thought-provoking tale on gig work and workers, made heart-warming by the dignity the characters bring to their roles. Available on Amazon Prime.

Two years ago, on January 7, 2024, The Migration Story embarked on a simple but important journey: to bring you closer to the lives of migrant workers who quietly sustain our cities and communities every day. Since then, through stories, videos and podcasts, we have explored their journeys—why they move, how they live, and the resilience they show in the face of uncertainty.

As we grow alongside our readers and supporters, this monthly Dispatch brings together some of the most thoughtful and important conversations from the world of migration, continuing our commitment to listen, learn, and amplify voices that deserve to be heard.

Here is wishing you a grand new year with our first issue on the diverse food that migrants bring with them to a city. From simple recipes that adapt to the market produce available locally, to the street food that is everybody’s favourite, dip into the best of The Migration Story’s reportage over two years on ingredients, recipes and family favourites.

The kitchens that migrated: Hear the slap-slap of a woman beating a jolada rotti into existence in this story of khanavalis, which serve traditional north Karnataka cuisine to an appreciative clientele.

Born out of migration, drought, and displacement, these kitchens offer more than just food, they preserve memory, identity, and the taste of home for thousands who moved from districts like Bidar, Kalaburagi, and Dharwad.

A nine-minute video on how migration, memory and meals come together.

Anywhere in India: Khatta meetha? The story of panipuri was TMS’ second podcast, released in March of 2024. Listen to this 30-minute episode for the story of the men who bring us our favourite spicy street treat: called gol guppe in Delhi, puchka in Bihar, pani puri in Maharashtra, pani ke batashe in UP, phulki in MP.

Fishing for livelihoods in Mumbai: Migrants from the country’s interior, men who have never seen the sea, rush to fill the gaps left by the Koli fishermen of Mumbai who, disheartened by the dwindling fish catch they have been witnessing over the years, are abandoning their traditional livelihood on the seas.

Meandering in deep waters, their boats half empty. Also, this video on fishing demographics and what it means for what the average Mumbaikar can expect at the marketplace.

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The drought that spawned an ice cream industry: End of winter, Gangapur prepares hectically for a trip that will keep its men away for nine months. The mobile ice cream-selling business has birthed an entire industry geared towards the making and selling of ice cream: from remodelling mini trucks to ice cream vans, to making syrups, to printing posters for ice cream flavours. In the process, yielding the rarest of all commodities: jobs.

Inside Delhi’s alleys: The momo’s journey to the city’s humblest and poshest begins in Chirag Dilli, every morning at 6 a.m.

Or maybe it begins even before that. In Darjeeling, maybe, or Sikkim. “It is the migrant network, where one person invites another, strengthening community ties, that has transformed Chirag Dilli into a hub for momo manufacturing…” Inside Delhi’s momo capital

Migrant after-hours: For the ‘footloose’ workforce in one of India’s most vulnerable states, Jharkand, the subsidised meals provided at state-run canteens are often the only wholesome meals they can afford…Urban Eats: How community kitchens serve workers on the move

Author speak

When Aishwarya Mohanty tried to unpack themes and layers beyond recipes in reporting on food, she discovered women speaking of swaraj, self-sufficiency, in their practice of sun-drying vegetables in Banswara, Rajasthan...

… there is a very interesting way in which labour, memory and food come together…

Food for thought, in the 35-minute podcast, More than a meal, where authors, Niyati Shah, Amoolya Rajappa and Mohanty, talk of how they arrived at their food stories.

The migration spotlight

From the field: The stories behind the stories: We ended 2025 with a roundtable on the challenges, delights and moral dilemmas of reporting on migrant lives. Do anecdotal experiences of migrants tell a larger story? How to report beyond what is visible to the eye? What were the questions the reporters got asked that they couldn’t answer? Three reporters talk about their practice, and recommendations on reads, films and, of course, eats!

Five people who brought cheer in 2025: Carrying forward a small representative sample of cheer and hope into the new year. Five short stories about the people who make the country.

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Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral victory put a rare focus on food outlets (non-Michelin, no celebrity patrons and no YouTubers holding their forks affirmatively at the camera) in the streets of the world’s largest economy.

This story on food being at the centre of Mamdani’s outreach and appeal in the New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/dining/zohran-mamdani-nyc-mayor-food.html referenced the biryani, cardamom chai and chevdo Mamdani preferred, which to us at The Migration Story reflected the diversity of flavours available in cities, that tell of migration stories from takeout windows.