Have people returned to cities post-COVID? Are Tier II towns attracting more migrants from rural areas? Is marriage still the dominant reason for women’s migration?
The statistics ministry may soon have answers to these questions. Starting in 2026, it plans to include migration statistics in its Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), sources told Moneycontrol.
The last such effort was undertaken in 2020–21, which helped researchers gauge the devastating impact of the pandemic on migration and the subsequent return of people to rural areas.
The upcoming initiative is expected to become an annual exercise, helping track migration trends as India develops.
“We will incorporate migration data from 2026, along with the annual Periodic Labour Force Survey,” said a person aware of the developments.
The move is part of a broader revamp of the PLFS, which will also include information on people not in employment, education or training (NEET).
Currently, the ministry releases a monthly PLFS bulletin, which tracks employment and labour force participation trends. It also publishes a more detailed annual bulletin covering employment, wages, and hours worked, disaggregated by gender, caste, and religion.
The monthly PLFS bulletins, introduced in May, are a new addition. They now include both rural and urban data, whereas quarterly releases were earlier limited to urban areas.
Migration Patterns
Although no new migration data has been released recently, the 2020–21 PLFS showed that 28.9 percent of India’s population had migrated. Among women, this figure was nearly 48 percent, according to the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI).
Inter-state migration was more common in urban areas, with one in five people reporting the trend, while intra-state migration dominated among the rural population.
Among women, marriage was the primary reason for migration—accounting for 87 percent of cases. Among men, employment was the most common reason, followed by the migration of a parent or earning family member.
Only 1.6 percent of men reported migrating post-retirement.
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