Labour Bureau to release report of pan-India surveys of migrant & domestic workers soon

There will soon be a pan-India headcount of migrant workers and domestic workers, paving the way for the government to introduce a targeted policy interventions to provide social security and other benefits to these workers.

Interventions, wherever needed, could come in through a dedicated policy or tweaking in the existing laws, or the Labour Codes, a senior official told ET.

The Labour Bureau, under the Ministry of Labour and Employment, has completed field work for the two surveys, started in April 2021, and is in the process of compiling the reports.


"The field surveys were completed in January this year and the bureau will soon come up with the report across the two surveys," the official said.

The survey findings will create a comprehensive database for the total number of employment in these sectors, data for which is scattered so far.

About 120,000 households have been covered, both in rural and urban India, under the survey on migrant workers while 150,000 households have been covered under the survey on domestic workers.

The labour ministry had earlier set the target of completing the surveys by October 2022 but the field surveys were delayed due to operational inefficiencies, resulting in over a year long delay in completion of the surveys.

While the survey on migrant workers will help to understand the kind of employment related migration undertaken by workers as well as the living and working conditions of these migrants across the country, the survey on domestic workers will help in estimating the number of domestic workers in the country, incidence and characteristics of households with domestic workers, and the average number of domestic workers engaged by different types of households.

The labour ministry had adopted a stratified multi-stage design for its all India surveys. Under this, the first stage units (FSU) have been picked up from the 2011 census villages in the rural sector and Urban Frame Survey (UFS) blocks as per the latest phase of UFS in the urban sector. The ultimate stage units (USU) were households in both rural and urban India.