NITI Aayog has launched the National Migration Survey 2026 for public consultation, marking the first such comprehensive survey of internal migration in India since the 2007-08 National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) round. The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) is the nodal implementing agency for the survey.
India is estimated to have approximately 40 crore internal migrants — people who have moved within the country from one state, district, or region to another for purposes including employment, education, marriage, and family reasons. Despite this enormous population, the data and policy frameworks governing internal migrants have remained significantly outdated, making the new survey a critical undertaking.
The public consultation phase, which opened in November 2025, has a deadline of November 30 to receive inputs from experts, civil society organizations, state governments, and the general public. The survey aims to capture detailed information on migration patterns, causes, destinations, socio-economic characteristics of migrants, and their access to government services and welfare schemes.
The findings of the National Migration Survey 2026 are expected to directly feed into urban planning frameworks, since a large portion of internal migrants move toward urban centres. It will also inform labour mobility policies, enabling better portability of social security benefits, improved access to healthcare and education for migrant workers, and more equitable resource allocation between source and destination states.
The survey addresses a significant policy blind spot: internal migrants often fall outside the coverage of state-specific welfare programmes because their domicile remains in the state of origin. Better data is the first step toward resolving this governance gap.