Tribal Migration in India: Causes, Problems, and the COVID-19 Impact

Every winter, thousands of tribal families in states like Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Odisha pack up and leave home in search of work. Some go for a few months, some never really come back. This movement isn’t new. It stretches back to colonial-era tea gardens and continues today on construction sites, brick kilns, and factory floors across India. Understanding why tribal communities migrate, and what happens to them once they do, tells us a lot about inequality, identity, and survival in modern India.

The colonial roots of tribal migration to Assam 🔗

Large-scale tribal migration in India can be traced to the 19th century, when the British began developing tea plantations in Assam and North Bengal. Local labour was scarce, so colonial planters recruited indentured workers from the Chotanagpur plateau and surrounding regions, mainly present-day Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, and Andhra Pradesh. Communities like the Oraon, Santhal, Munda, and Ho were brought in under harsh indenture contracts to clear forests and work the gardens. A smaller number were also sent to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands for unskilled labour.

The “tea tribes” and an unresolved identity crisis 🔗

Generations later, the descendants of these migrant workers are known in Assam as the Tea Tribes or chah jonogoshti. They now make up roughly 20 percent of Assam’s population, spread across the state’s tea estates. Communities such as the Santhals, Mundas, Oraons, and Gonds are officially listed as Scheduled Tribes in their states of origin. In Assam, however, they are classified as Other Backward Classes rather than Scheduled Tribes. This distinction is not just bureaucratic. It means the community misses out on reservation benefits, political representation, and constitutional safeguards available to Scheduled Tribes elsewhere. As one Adivasi resident of Assam put it, communities like the Kharia, Oraon, Munda, Ho, and Santhal are recognised as tribals everywhere else in India, so being labelled a “Tea Tribe” instead feels like a denial of their own identity. Decades of petitions and a 2019 bill in the Rajya Sabha have not yet resolved the matter, leaving the community caught between historic contribution and continued marginalisation.

The rise of organised migration through contractors 🔗

While the colonial tea-garden migration was largely permanent settlement, a newer and more troubling pattern has emerged in recent decades: organised, contractor-driven migration. Tribal workers from Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and West Bengal are now recruited by labour contractors and middlemen who supply them to brick kilns, construction sites, and industrial units across India, often far from their home states.

What pushes tribal families out 🔗

Several overlapping pressures force tribal households to send members away for work:

Poverty and food insecurity leave little cushion when crops fail or wages at home are too low to survive on.
Land alienation and displacement caused by mining, dams, and industrial projects strip tribal families of the agricultural land they once depended on.
Deforestation reduces access to forest produce that traditionally supplemented tribal incomes.
Natural disasters such as droughts and floods can wipe out a season’s earnings overnight.

What pulls them toward the cities 🔗

On the other side, migration is also driven by the promise of a better life. Contractors offer advance payments and the prospect of steady wages in towns, cities, and tea gardens. For a household with no land and no local employment, even risky, informal work in a brick kiln or on a construction site can look like the only realistic option for income.

Life on the move: how tribal migration actually works 🔗

Tribal labour migration is overwhelmingly informal. There are rarely written contracts, guaranteed wages, or access to social security. Migration itself takes two broad forms: temporary or seasonal movement, where workers return home after a harvest season or a few months of construction work, and permanent migration, where entire families relocate for good.

Where tribal migrants end up working 🔗

Migrant tribal labour is heavily concentrated in a handful of sectors: agricultural farms, tea and other plantations, brick kilns, construction, small-scale industries, and mining or quarrying operations. Brick kiln work in particular has drawn scrutiny; the sector employs millions of migrant workers across states such as Bihar, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal, frequently under exploitative, piece-rate arrangements with poor access to clean water and sanitation.

Exploitation and cultural erosion 🔗

Because this migration happens outside formal labour protections, workers commonly face low wages, long working hours, and unsafe living conditions. Economic exploitation by employers and contractors is common, and women and girls face heightened risk of sexual exploitation and harassment, especially when isolated from family and community support networks in an unfamiliar city.

There’s also a slower, quieter cost. Tribal youth who migrate to urban areas for extended periods often begin to adopt urban lifestyles, gradually loosening ties to traditional customs, languages, and community practices. Over a generation or two, this can weaken the cultural fabric that once held these communities together, even as it opens up new economic opportunities.

COVID-19 and the reverse migration crisis 🔗

The nationwide lockdown imposed in March 2020 turned a chronic, largely invisible problem into a visible national emergency. When economic activity abruptly stopped, tribal and other informal migrant workers lost their incomes overnight, with no savings, no formal employer obligations, and no safety net to fall back on. Faced with the prospect of starvation in the cities, large numbers of workers chose to walk back to their home states, often over hundreds of kilometres, because no transport was available.

This mass reverse migration exposed just how little reliable data existed on migrant workers and their movements. As one review of the crisis notes, the pandemic forced workers into reverse migration as a coping strategy against the sudden loss of livelihood, food shortages, and loss of shelter in the cities where they had been working. For tribal migrants specifically, this meant returning to villages with no immediate source of income and, in many cases, no clear plan for how to earn a living once they got there.

Ironically, the pandemic also worsened conditions for those who stayed on. Facing labour shortages, several states relaxed labour law protections during this period, extending working hours from eight to twelve hours a day without provision for overtime pay, further exposing how thin the legal protections for informal migrant labour really are.

Building a response: the National Tribal Migration Support Portal 🔗

The COVID-19 crisis made one gap impossible to ignore: the government simply didn’t have reliable, real-time data on where tribal migrants were, what work they did, or what support they needed. In response, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs developed the National Tribal Migration Support Portal, also known as Shram Shakti, as a digital data solution to track migrant tribal workers.

The portal captures information across four segments: demographic profile, livelihood, skill mapping, and migration pattern, including details such as duration and season of migration, destination, sector of employment, income, and access to basic services like healthcare and food security while migrating. This data is meant to be visible through dashboards at the village, block, district, state, and national levels, giving different tiers of government the information they need to act.

According to the ministry’s own background note on the initiative, the absence of migrant-specific, real-time data had made it difficult for the government to design effective, beneficiary-friendly schemes or provide immediate support for tribal migrant workers in cities for safer, more productive migration. The broader goal is to use this database to strengthen local livelihood opportunities so that fewer families feel compelled to migrate out of sheer necessity in the first place, while making migration itself safer for those who do choose to move.

The portal was formally launched in January 2021, alongside related initiatives like a migrant training manual and dedicated migration support cells in states that receive large numbers of tribal workers. It reflects a shift in policy thinking, from treating tribal migration as an invisible, unmanaged phenomenon to trying to actively track and support migrant workers through their journey.

Why this history still matters 🔗

Tribal migration in India isn’t a single story; it’s layered across two centuries, from colonial tea gardens to today’s brick kilns and construction sites. What connects the Tea Tribes of Assam to a Santhal family working a Punjab brick kiln today is the same underlying pattern: economic necessity pushing people out of their land and into informal, insecure work, often with little legal protection and real risk of exploitation. The COVID-19 crisis simply made this pattern impossible to look away from.

Whether tools like the National Tribal Migration Support Portal can genuinely close the gap between policy and lived reality will depend on how well the data collected translates into actual protections and local opportunities.

What do you think? Why do you think the Tea Tribes of Assam have still not received Scheduled Tribe status despite nearly two centuries of presence in the state? Do you think a data-driven portal like Shram Shakti can meaningfully reduce distress migration among tribal communities, or does the deeper problem lie elsewhere?

References

1. https://themigrationstory.com/post/the-identity-battle-brewing-in-assams-tea-gardens/
2. https://www.outlookindia.com/national/we-are-tribals-not-tea-tribes-a-struggle-for-identity-and-rights-in-assam
3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5854725/
4. https://www.ideasforindia.in/topics/macroeconomics/covid-19-mitigating-the-risk-from-reverse-migration
5. https://www.epw.in/journal/2025/23/commentary/coping-shocks-covid-19-through-reverse-migration.html
6. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590291121000267
7. https://www.india.gov.in/national-tribal-migration-support-portal?page=1
8. https://shramshakti.tribal.gov.in/Docs/Tribal%20Migration%20Portal%20Background%20note%20docx.pdf
9. https://pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetailm.aspx?PRID=1691237