Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act, 1979

The Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1979 was enacted by the Parliament of India to address the exploitation of workers recruited in one state for deployment in another, principally through the agency of intermediaries known as sardars or khatadars. Its legislative origins lie in the report of a 1977 committee constituted by the Government of Gujarat following exposure of the dadan labour system in Odisha, under which contractors advanced lump-sum payments to impoverished rural workers and then transported them to distant states for construction and infrastructure work under coercive conditions. The Act received presidential assent on 11 June 1979 and drew on Article 23 of the Constitution, which prohibits forced labour and trafficking, alongside the Directive Principles in Articles 39 and 43 mandating just and humane conditions of work. It complemented the existing Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970 by extending comparable protections specifically to the inter-state dimension of migration.

The Act applies to every establishment and to every contractor employing five or more inter-state migrant workmen on any day of the preceding twelve months. Its procedural architecture rests on a dual registration-and-licensing regime. Every principal employer of an establishment within the Act's coverage must obtain a certificate of registration from a registering officer appointed by the appropriate government. Separately, every contractor who recruits or employs inter-state migrant workmen must secure a licence from a licensing officer; the licence specifies the terms and conditions of employment, including wages, hours, and amenities. A contractor operating without a licence, or a principal employer engaging an unlicensed contractor, contravenes the statute. The appropriate government—Union or state, depending on the nature of the establishment—administers these functions, and registers must be maintained recording the names, addresses, and home states of every migrant workman.

Beyond licensing, the Act confers a distinctive bundle of substantive entitlements absent from earlier labour legislation. A displacement allowance equal to fifty per cent of the monthly wages or seventy-five rupees, whichever is higher, must be paid at the time of recruitment to compensate for the dislocation of leaving one's home state. A separate journey allowance covers the fare for outward and return travel, and wages must be paid for the period of the journey itself. The contractor must ensure wages no lower than those fixed under the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, provide suitable residential accommodation, prescribed medical facilities, and protective clothing, and issue each workman a passbook recording particulars of employment and wage payments. Equal treatment with local workmen on comparable work, regular and timely wage disbursement, and reporting of fatal accidents to authorities in both the home and host states are mandated.

Enforcement in practice has been uneven across India's industrial states. Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Karnataka, and Delhi—principal destination jurisdictions for migrants from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, and West Bengal—have recorded persistently low registration rates relative to estimated migrant populations. The Standing Committee on Labour and successive reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General noted thin inspectorate staffing and minimal prosecutions. The Act's deficiencies were thrown into sharp relief during the COVID-19 lockdown announced on 24 March 2020, when millions of undocumented migrant workers, invisible to the registration system the law presumed, were stranded without wages or transport. The Supreme Court, in In Re: Problems and Miseries of Migrant Labourers (2020), took suo motu cognisance and directed states to register migrants and operationalise welfare measures, exposing how comprehensively the 1979 framework had failed in implementation.

The Act must be distinguished from the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970, which governs contract labour generally without regard to inter-state recruitment and which can lead to abolition of contract labour in particular operations; the 1979 Act presupposes the migrant relationship and adds displacement-specific protections rather than abolition. It is likewise distinct from the Building and Other Construction Workers Act, 1996, which is sector-specific, and from the Unorganised Workers' Social Security Act, 2008. The 1979 Act's trigger is the act of recruitment in one state for work in another through a contractor, not the sector of employment or the worker's organisational status.

A defining controversy concerns the law's reliance on contractor-mediated recruitment as its regulatory hook: workers who migrate independently, or who are recruited informally without a formal contractor relationship, fall outside its protective net entirely, leaving the majority of India's internal migrants uncovered. This structural gap motivated the repeal and consolidation of the Act under the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020, which received assent on 28 September 2020 as one of four codes rationalising twenty-nine central labour laws. The OSH Code subsumes the 1979 Act, redefines an inter-state migrant worker to include those who migrate on their own and earn below a notified wage ceiling, raises the coverage threshold to ten workers, and introduces portability of benefits and a national database. The Code's rules and commencement date remained pending notification through 2024, leaving the 1979 Act formally operative in the interim.

For the working practitioner—whether a UPSC aspirant preparing GS Paper 1 on demography and migration, a labour-desk officer, or a policy researcher—the Act remains a foundational reference point for understanding India's internal migration governance and its enduring implementation deficit. It illustrates the gap between statutory entitlement and administrative capacity, the politics of source-state versus destination-state responsibility, and the methodological problem of governing populations the state cannot count. Its impending replacement by the OSH Code makes mastery of both instruments essential for analysing contemporary labour reform.