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All data in this article is sourced from the Jharkhand Migration Survey 2023, the ILO India Employment Report 2024, Economic and Political Weekly, Humanities and Social Sciences Reviews, GeoJournal, and Outlook India. Sources are cited inline.
Ranchi | March 2026
Giridih district in Jharkhand sends more people out of the state, per hundred households, than almost any other district in the country. Twenty-five return labour migrants for every hundred households surveyed. Bokaro and Jamtara follow closely behind. These are not statistics that emerged from a national census. They came from the Jharkhand Migration Survey, a first-of-its-kind exercise conducted between January and March 2023 across all 24 districts of the state, 10,674 households canvassed, 436 locations covered, following the model the Kerala government pioneered decades ago. The survey was commissioned precisely because for years, nobody in the state government knew exactly how many people were leaving, where they were going, or under what conditions. The COVID-19 pandemic had made that ignorance impossible to sustain. When the lockdown happened in 2020, the State Migrant Control Room in Ranchi received nearly one million calls from Jharkhand workers stranded across the country. The government eventually facilitated the return of 8.5 lakh people. The experience prompted the state to finally count what it had always known was happening.
The number the survey produced was 45 lakh. That is the estimated number of people from Jharkhand who had migrated to other places for livelihoods at the time of the survey in 2023. For a state with a population of approximately 40.6 million, that means roughly one in nine residents was working somewhere else. The survey also estimated that in 2023, Jharkhand received monthly remittances of Rs 2,549 crore from its workers in other states, money that was, as the Economic and Political Weekly noted in its May 2025 analysis of the survey findings, primarily contributing to the subsistence of some of the most marginalised communities in the state. The remittance figure is not an economic success story. It is a measure of how completely the state’s poorest families have come to depend on income earned elsewhere because income is not available at home.
The profile of who is leaving is as specific as the numbers. According to the JMS 2023, the largest single age group among labour migrants out of Jharkhand is the 20 to 24 year bracket, accounting for 23.1 percent of all outmigrants. The 25 to 29 bracket follows at 19.6 percent. Together, these two groups, the core of what any state would want to call its youth workforce, account for more than 42 percent of everyone leaving. Migrants above the age of 40 constitute only 20.4 percent of the outflow. Put plainly: 79.6 percent of people leaving Jharkhand for work are under 40 years old. The state is not losing its elderly. It is losing the generation that would have built it. (Source: JMS 2023, published in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 60, Issue 20, May 17, 2025; IIMAD-hosted JMS 2023 report, iimad.org)
The destinations the migrants choose reveal something important about the scale and nature of the departure. According to the JMS, the top three destination states for Jharkhand labour migrants are Maharashtra at 18 percent, Gujarat at 9.2 percent, and West Bengal at 8.6 percent. Maharashtra and Gujarat are not neighbouring states. Getting there from a village in Gumla or Dumka requires a journey of 24 to 36 hours by train, often without confirmed tickets, often with a contact at the destination who is a relative or a fellow villager who left the previous year. The fact that migrants are travelling this far is evidence that the gap between what Jharkhand offers and what other states offer in terms of employment is not narrow. It is wide enough to justify a 1,500-kilometre journey. (Source: JMS 2023 district-level destination data; Outlook India, “Counting Migrant Workers in Jharkhand,” February 7, 2024)
The reasons are structural, and they are old. The peer-reviewed study published in Humanities and Social Sciences Reviews in March 2024, which conducted a systematic review of 15 research articles on Jharkhand migration patterns, identified lack of employment as the single most prominent driver of out-migration from the state. The study noted that Jharkhand’s employment landscape is characterised by limited opportunities, mainly clustered in specific industrial zones, with virtually nothing available in the rural hinterlands where most of the population lives. Research by Deogharia, cited in multiple academic works on Jharkhand migration, found that in villages of Gumla, Simdega, and Lohardaga, the average number of household members who had migrated for work was 2.3 per family. That is not seasonal or occasional movement. That is a structural feature of how families in these districts survive. (Source: Kumar, S. and Raj, A., “Trends and Patterns of Migration from Jharkhand, India,” Humanities and Social Sciences Reviews, Vol. 12, No. 2, March 2024, mgesjournals.com)
The ILO’s India Employment Report 2024, one of the most comprehensive assessments of youth employment conditions across Indian states, placed Jharkhand among the states where youth fare most poorly on composite employment outcome indicators. Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Assam, Odisha, and West Bengal were all identified at the bottom of the employment outcomes index, and the report noted they had been at the bottom in 2005 and remained there in 2022, a period of 17 years during which the national economy grew substantially but the employment conditions in these states did not improve in relative terms. (Source: ILO India Employment Report 2024, Chapter 2, Figure 2.1, ilo.org)
The particular cruelty of Jharkhand’s situation is that education has not provided the escape route it was supposed to provide. The India Employment Report 2024 documented a paradox that applies directly to states like Jharkhand: the more educated a young person is, the more likely they are to be unemployed. Educated unemployment in Bihar and Jharkhand has been estimated to exceed 35 percent. The report found that 65.7 percent of India’s unemployed youth in 2022 had completed secondary education or above, compared to 54.2 percent in 2000. In Ranchi, surveys have found a high propensity for education among youth but an equally high propensity to leave after completing that education, because the jobs they are qualified for do not exist in the state. The average waiting period for a first job among educated youth in India was found to be more than a year. In a state with Jharkhand’s limited formal employment base, the wait is often longer and the ultimate destination is often another state. (Source: ILO India Employment Report 2024; Insights IAS analysis of India Employment Report, insightsonindia.com, October 2025)
The tribal dimension of this migration crisis is not incidental. It is central. According to the 2011 Census, 26.2 percent of Jharkhand’s population belongs to 34 tribal communities whose lives and livelihoods have historically been organised around land, forest, and natural resources. Over the last century, that relationship has been systematically disrupted. Large dams, mining projects, and development infrastructure were built on tribal lands, displacing communities without adequate rehabilitation. The research documented in the JMS 2023 found that among Scheduled Castes in rural Jharkhand, the migration rate was 73 per 1,000 persons. Among Scheduled Tribes, temporary migration rates are the highest in the country among any social group. The ILO’s national data shows that Scheduled Tribes have the highest temporary labour migration rate in India, at 45 per 1,000 persons, compared to 12 per 1,000 among the general category. The pattern is not coincidental. It reflects a century of displacement, first by colonial-era plantations that recruited tribal workers under what researchers have described as conditions reminiscent of indentured labour, then by the post-independence development state that built its infrastructure on their land and sent them elsewhere to find work. (Source: JMS 2023; Kumar and Raj 2024; Irudaya Rajan et al., IIMAD, iimad.org)
The mining sector, which ought to be Jharkhand’s economic anchor given that the state sits on some of the richest coal, iron ore, and bauxite reserves in the country, has in practice been a driver of displacement rather than employment for local communities. GeoJournal’s 2023 study on migration patterns in Jharkhand found that while mining attracted labour from outside the state, it simultaneously led to environmental degradation, deforestation, and water contamination that made local agriculture unviable. The communities most affected were tribal ones with the deepest historical ties to the land. When the land becomes unusable, and when the mining operations bring in machines rather than local workers, the people who lived there leave. They go to Maharashtra and Gujarat and West Bengal and do work that has nothing to do with the land they came from. (Source: GeoJournal, “Patterns and Drivers of Internal Migration: Insights from Jharkhand, India,” Springer Nature, June 2023, link.springer.com)
The COVID-19 pandemic momentarily reversed this flow and made visible what had been invisible. When nearly a million Jharkhand workers called the state control room from different cities asking how to get home, and when the government eventually had to facilitate the return of 8.5 lakh people, including airlifting 60 workers stranded in Leh, the scale of the state’s dependence on out-migration as a coping mechanism became impossible to deny. A survey of 4.56 lakh of those returning workers found that 3.06 lakh were skilled, primarily in agriculture and animal husbandry. They had skills. Jharkhand simply did not have the economic structure to absorb them. Many returned to the same cities within months. (Source: Outlook India, February 2024; India Migration Now analysis, Medium, February 2023)
The districts sending the most migrants tell their own story. Giridih, with 25 return labour migrants per 100 households, is a coal-belt district where the promise of mining employment has long since given way to mechanisation. Bokaro is a steel town whose public sector employment peaked decades ago and has not grown since. Jamtara, which became nationally known for its cyber fraud networks, now features prominently in migration data as well, sending young people both to other states for labour and, in a smaller number of documented cases, recruiting them into digital crime as an alternative to legitimate employment. Palamu and Garhwa in the south, Hazaribagh and Godda in the north, all appear consistently in migration data as high-outflow districts with limited local employment and a long history of sending workers elsewhere. (Source: JMS 2023 district data; India Migration Now, Medium, February 2023)
What has changed in the most recent data is the nature of migration among women. The JMS 2023 found that females constitute only 10.3 percent of Jharkhand’s labour migrants, but within that group, one in five female labour migrants is between 15 and 19 years old. Young women in this age bracket are leaving, often through informal recruitment networks, often to work as domestic helpers or in garment factories, often without the family or legal protection that male migrants who travel in groups have. The peer-reviewed research on this has consistently flagged the exploitation risk this population faces, including what Kumar and Raj’s 2024 study described as problems relating to health, marriage prospects on return, and exploitation by middlemen. The state government’s SRMI initiative specifically identified gender as a critical variable in its survey design, acknowledging that the government did not have adequate visibility into what was happening to young women who were part of this outflow. (Source: JMS 2023; Kumar and Raj 2024; India Migration Now, February 2023)
The Safe and Responsible Migration Initiative that the Jharkhand government launched in late 2021 represents the most serious institutional response to this crisis the state has yet produced. It created migration centres in high-burden districts, established labour consulates in destination states including Ladakh and Kerala, mandated systematic registration of migrant workers, and commissioned the JMS 2023 as its evidence base. The initiative acknowledges that migration is not going to stop and that the state’s role is to make it safer, more documented, and less exploitative. It does not claim to have solved the underlying problem. The underlying problem is that Jharkhand is one of India’s most resource-rich states, sitting on coal and iron ore and bauxite that has made others wealthy, while its own young people buy train tickets to Gujarat with money borrowed from relatives because there is no job at home that pays enough to stay. (Source: Outlook India, February 2024; NewsClick, “Jharkhand Govt Aspires to Formulate Targeted Policies for Migrant Workers,” newsclick.in; India Migration Now, February 2023)
That contradiction has defined Jharkhand since before it became a separate state in 2000. The movement for statehood was itself, in part, a response to the experience of Jharkhand’s communities watching their resources extracted by industries and their workers recruited as cheap labour, while political and economic decisions were made in Patna by people who had no connection to the plateau. Twenty-five years after statehood, the resource extraction continues. The monthly remittance figure continues to grow. And the 20 to 24 year olds of Giridih and Dumka and Palamu continue to get on trains headed to Maharashtra, carrying the labour that Jharkhand cannot use at home to states whose economies are built partly on the fact that Jharkhand keeps sending it.
SOURCE LOG
Jharkhand Migration Survey 2023, 45 lakh figure, Rs 2,549 crore monthly remittance: Economic and Political Weekly, “Unravelling Labour Migration from Jharkhand,” Vol. 60, Issue 20, May 17, 2025 (epw.in); IIMAD JMS 2023 full report (iimad.org)
Age profile: 23.1% aged 20-24, 19.6% aged 25-29, 79.6% under 40: JMS 2023 data tables, IIMAD report; EPW May 2025
Top destinations Maharashtra 18%, Gujarat 9.2%, West Bengal 8.6%: JMS 2023 destination data, IIMAD report; Outlook India, February 7, 2024 (outlookindia.com)
Giridih 25 RLMs per 100 households, Bokaro 19, Jamtara 17: JMS 2023 district data, IIMAD report; India Migration Now, Medium, February 2023 (medium.com/@indiamigration)
Lack of employment as primary driver, 2.3 migrants per household in Gumla, Simdega, Lohardaga: Kumar, S. and Raj, A., “Trends and Patterns of Migration from Jharkhand, India,” Humanities and Social Sciences Reviews, Vol. 12, No. 2, March 19, 2024 (mgesjournals.com/hssr)
ILO India Employment Report 2024, Jharkhand youth employment outcomes: ILO India Employment Report 2024, published by ILO and Institute for Human Development (ilo.org)
Educated unemployment in Jharkhand exceeding 35%: Insights IAS, “Educated Unemployment in India 2025,” insightsonindia.com, October 2025
SC migration rate 73 per 1,000; ST temporary migration rate 45 per 1,000: Kumar and Raj 2024; Irudaya Rajan et al., JMS 2023, IIMAD
Mining-driven displacement, environmental degradation: GeoJournal, “Patterns and Drivers of Internal Migration: Insights from Jharkhand, India,” Springer Nature, June 2023 (link.springer.com)
8.5 lakh COVID returnees, 1 million calls to control room, 4.56 lakh skilled workers surveyed: Outlook India, “Counting Migrant Workers in Jharkhand,” February 7, 2024 (outlookindia.com); NewsClick (newsclick.in)
Female migrants: 10.3% of total, one in five aged 15-19: JMS 2023; Kumar and Raj 2024
SRMI, migration centres, labour consulates in Ladakh and Kerala: Outlook India, February 2024; India Migration Now, Medium, February 2023; NewsClick
