Why migrant children disappear from India’s school records, twice a year, every year

Seasonal migration and school dropout in Maharashtra’s sugarcane belt, and what the RTE Act promises but rarely delivers

Dr Meenakshi Rajan | Researcher in child rights and mobile populations, based in Pune

Millions of children follow their parents across state lines every year, to brick kilns, sugarcane fields, and construction sites. When they arrive, the school system has no record of them. When they leave, it has no memory of them either.

Key facts

• The sugarcane harvest in western Maharashtra runs from October to March. Roughly half a million labourers migrate from the drought-prone districts of Marathwada and Vidarbha to the cutting fields near Kolhapur and Solapur each season, children in tow.
• Research on sugarcane, rice, and tobacco migration corridors finds that children who move with their families miss four to five months of school a year, more than a fifth of a standard 220-day school year.
• The Right to Education Act, 2009 gives any child between 6 and 14 the right to be admitted to an age-appropriate class in a neighbourhood school. No Transfer Certificate is required.
• UDISE+, the Ministry of Education’s main data system, tracks schools, not children. A child who leaves one school and never enrols in another simply disappears from the record. No one is looking for her.

The scale nobody has counted

India has no reliable national count of how many children are caught inside seasonal migration cycles at any given time. Civil society organisations working in brick kilns, construction sites, and farmland put the number in the millions, though estimates vary widely by state and by season. What is not in dispute is the size of the loss: four to five months of school a year, repeated across a child’s entire primary and middle-school years, in the corridors researchers have studied closely.

What a child loses when the classroom disappears

The damage runs deeper than missed lessons. School is where a child has a teacher who knows her name, a classmate who saves her a seat, a particular desk near the window. Lose that twice a year, year after year, and the message a child absorbs is simple and corrosive: you do not fully belong anywhere. Studies of socio-emotional development in mobile populations are consistent on this point. Repeated rupture of school relationships raises the risk of disengagement, low self-efficacy, and eventual dropout, sometimes years before a family notices the child has quietly stopped trying.

A child who loses their school relationships twice a year, year after year, receives a powerful message: you do not fully belong anywhere.

A law that promises more than the classroom delivers

The Right to Education Act is unambiguous. Any child aged 6 to 14 has the right to admission in an age-appropriate class at a neighbourhood school, and a school cannot demand a Transfer Certificate as a condition of entry. On paper, a migrant child should never be out of school for a single day.

On the ground, the gap between that guarantee and a Tuesday morning in a real classroom stays wide. A child arrives mid-year, speaking a different dialect, months behind in the syllabus, likely still unsettled from the move itself. She meets a teacher managing 45 other children, with no extra support and no time to work out exactly where this new arrival’s learning has stalled.

What states have tried

A few states have built systems meant to close this gap rather than just legislate it away. Maharashtra’s Seasonal Hostels programme houses the children of migrant labourers in their home districts through the harvest months, so they can stay in school while their parents travel for work. Researchers at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences have studied the programme, and early findings point to real gains in continuity and learning outcomes. Gujarat has tried comparable models. Neither state has managed to fund or staff these programmes at anything close to the scale of the problem.

The blind spot no one is looking into

Part of the reason migrant children stay invisible is structural. UDISE+, the Ministry of Education’s core information system, is built around schools, not children: it records what happens inside a school’s walls, not what happens to a child once she walks out of them for good. A student who drops out of a school in Latur and never turns up at a school near Kolhapur simply stops existing in the data. There is no flag, no alert, no file that follows her across the state line.

A five-part framework that already works

What follows does not need new legislation or a new central scheme. It needs schools to treat migration as a known, recurring feature of certain families’ lives, planned for in advance, rather than a disruption discovered after it happens. Five elements recur across the programmes and research that already show results.

1. Identify migrant households before they leave, not after. Home-district schools need a working relationship with the community year-round, so teachers know which families are likely to travel before the bullock carts and contractor trucks arrive, not weeks after the classroom has already emptied out.

2. Send children off with learning materials, not just goodwill. Maharashtra’s migrant education research points to structured learning kits, pitched at the child’s actual level rather than her grade level, as the one intervention that keeps learning going in transit and at the destination, where formal schooling is often unavailable.

3. Make destination schools actively welcome migrant children, not merely permit them. The RTE Act’s no-rejection rule needs to be common knowledge among the teachers and administrators who receive these children, not a clause buried in a circular. Destination-school programmes run by organisations like the Aga Khan Foundation and Pratham show that a genuinely warm welcome cuts the odds of a child staying out of school for the whole migration season.

4. Take children back without demanding paperwork the family cannot produce. When a migrant family returns, the home-district school should be ready to receive the child on the spot. Districts that manage this well tend to rely on something simple: a community register kept by Anganwadi workers or local ASHAs, updated as families leave and return.

5. Check where the child actually is, before deciding where she belongs. A child back after months away should not be dropped straight into the regular stream on the assumption she is exactly where the syllabus says she should be. Short, intensive bridge programmes, run by a teacher who takes the time to find this specific child’s specific gaps, have produced consistent results, including in Pratham’s Learning Enhancement Programme work across high-migration districts.

None of this asks for a new ministry. It asks the system already in place to treat migrant children as children with names and classrooms of their own, rather than statistical absences someone will eventually explain away.

Frequently asked questions

How many children in India are affected by seasonal migration? There is no official national figure. Civil society estimates covering brick kilns, construction sites, and farmland put the number in the millions, though nobody tracks it closely, because India’s school data system is built around institutions, not individual children.

How much school do migrant children typically miss? Research from sugarcane, rice, and tobacco migration corridors finds four to five months a year, over a fifth of a standard 220-day school year, repeated in most years a family continues to migrate.

Does the RTE Act require a Transfer Certificate for admission? No. The Right to Education Act, 2009 gives any child aged 6 to 14 the right to admission in an age-appropriate class at a neighbourhood school, and a Transfer Certificate cannot be made a condition of entry.

What is Maharashtra’s Seasonal Hostels programme? It is a residential scheme that houses children of migrant agricultural labourers in their home districts during the harvest season, so they can keep attending school instead of travelling with their parents. The Tata Institute of Social Sciences has studied it, with early evidence of improved continuity and learning outcomes.

Why doesn’t UDISE+ catch children who drop out during migration? UDISE+ is a school-based data system. It records enrolment and attendance inside individual schools, not what happens to a child after she leaves one school and before, or if, she reaches another. A child who never enrols at the destination simply disappears from the record, with no cross-state mechanism to flag her absence.

What to do:

• In the first week of October, identify every child in your class whose family works in seasonal agriculture or construction. Ask directly, and write it down, so you know who is likely to leave before the harvest ends.
• Build a continuity kit for any child who may migrate: a small exercise book pitched at her actual learning level, with a note to whichever teacher receives her, explaining exactly where she has got to.
• When a child returns after a long absence, sit with her privately for fifteen minutes in her first week back. Find out what she actually remembers. Don’t assume she is where the curriculum says she should be.
• Ask your District Education Officer whether your district runs a seasonal hostel or bridge-enrolment programme for migrant children. If it does, tell migrant families about it at the start of every school year, not only when they ask.
• Keep a separate register, outside the official records, of any child who has left mid-year and not come back. Review it every month, and if a child has been gone more than eight weeks, take it to your block resource coordinator.