Millions of children follow their parents across state lines every year to brick kilns, sugar-cane fields, and construction sites. When they arrive, the school system has no record of them — and when they leave, it has no memory of them either.
Dr Meenakshi Rajan | Researcher in child rights and mobile populations, based in Pune
In the sugarcane belt of western Maharashtra, the harvest season runs from October to March. During those months, roughly half a million labourers move from drought-prone districts of Marathwada and Vidarbha to the cutting fields near Kolhapur and Solapur. They bring their children. The children board the bullock carts or the contract trucks, and they leave their schools behind — sometimes with a Transfer Certificate, sometimes without one, and very often without their teachers or parents fully understanding what the interruption will cost them.
India has no reliable national count of how many children are caught inside seasonal migration cycles at any given moment. Estimates from civil society organisations working in brick kilns, construction sites, and agricultural zones suggest the number is in the millions. Research on migration patterns in sugarcane, rice, and tobacco-growing regions consistently finds that children who migrate seasonally miss between four and five months of school per year. In a standard 220-day school year, that is more than a fifth of all instructional time, every single year.
The damage is not only about missed content. Schooling builds relationships — with teachers who know a child’s name, with classmates who save a seat, with a particular desk near the window. A child who loses those relationships twice a year, year after year, receives a powerful message: you do not fully belong anywhere. The evidence on socio-emotional development in mobile populations is consistent: repeated rupture of school-based relationships raises the risk of disengagement, low self-efficacy, and eventual dropout.
The Right to Education Act, 2009, is clear that any child between the ages of 6 and 14 has the right to be admitted to an age-appropriate class in a neighbourhood school, without the requirement of a Transfer Certificate. Yet on the ground, the gap between this legal guarantee and Tuesday-morning reality remains wide. A child arriving at a new school mid-year, speaking a different dialect, having missed months of content, and likely carrying trauma from the upheaval, often finds a harried teacher with 45 other children and no additional support.
Several states have made serious attempts at systemic response. The Government of Maharashtra’s Seasonal Hostels programme, which provides residential accommodation to children of migrant labourers so that they can remain behind in their home districts during the harvest season, has been studied by researchers at Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Early evidence from these hostels suggests improvements in continuity and learning outcomes. Gujarat has experimented with similar models. But these programmes are unevenly funded and implemented.
The problem is also one of data. There is currently no national mechanism that follows a child across state lines when her family migrates. UDISE+ data, the Ministry of Education’s main information system, is school-based: it tracks what happens in schools, not what happens to children who have left them. A child who drops out of a school in Latur and never enrolls in the destination school near Kolhapur simply disappears from the official record. No one is looking for her.
A child who loses their school relationships twice a year, year after year, receives a powerful message: you do not fully belong anywhere.
The most promising frameworks treat migration not as an exception to be managed but as a feature of certain families’ lives that the school system must actively accommodate. Several elements recur in the literature and in programmes that show results.
First, reliable identification at the source. Home-district schools need protocols for identifying children of migrant households before the migration happens, rather than scrambling after they have left. This means teachers and headmasters being in regular contact with the community throughout the year, not only during enrolment drives.
Second, continuity of learning materials. Maharashtra’s migrant education research has shown that providing children with a structured learning kit — covering foundational literacy and numeracy at the child’s actual level, not the grade level — allows learning to continue even in transit and in the destination location, where formal schooling may not be available.
Third, bridge enrolment at the destination. The RTE Act’s no-rejection provision needs active promotion among destination-school teachers and administrators. Research from organisations like Aga Khan Foundation and Pratham, which have run destination-school programmes, shows that a warm, explicit welcome significantly reduces the risk of the child remaining out of school for the duration of the stay.
Fourth, seamless re-enrolment at the source. When a migrant family returns, the home-district school should be ready to receive the child without demanding documentation the family cannot produce. Several high-performing districts have achieved this through simple community registers maintained by Anganwadi workers or local ASHAs.
Fifth, careful monitoring of learning levels at re-entry. A child who has missed several months of school should not simply be dropped back into the regular stream. Bridge programmes — short, intensive, and run by a teacher who can identify the specific gaps this specific child has — have shown consistent results in multiple contexts, including Pratham’s Learning Enhancement Programme work in high-migration districts.
None of this requires a new ministry or a new scheme. It requires the existing system to treat migrant children as real children with real names, rather than as statistical absences to be explained away.
WHAT TO DO ON MONDAY
- In the first week of October, identify every child in your class whose family is involved in seasonal agricultural or construction work — ask directly and record it — so you know who may leave before the harvest ends.
- Prepare a ‘continuity kit’ for any child who may migrate: a small exercise book at the child’s actual level, not the official grade level, with a note to the destination teacher explaining where the child is in their learning.
- If a child returns after a long absence, sit with them privately for 15 minutes in the first week to find out what they remember — do not assume they are where the curriculum says they should be.
- Find out from your District Education Officer whether your district has any seasonal hostel or bridge-enrolment programme for migrant children — and if it does, share that information actively with migrant families at the start of each school year.
- Keep a simple register, separate from official records, of any child who has left mid-year and not returned: review it monthly and ask your block resource coordinator for help if a child has been gone more than eight weeks.
