Counting Mobility

India’s next census will confront a dilemma that numbers alone cannot resolve. It is not merely about where people live on a given night, but about how a society built on mobility can be counted using tools designed for settlement. Migration in India is rarely a one-way journey. Most workers who leave their villages, towns or home cities do not sever ties with them. They retain property, inherit land or houses, support families left behind, and plan – implicitly or explicitly ~ to return. Their place of work, by contrast, is often temporary, rented, and uncertain. This is true across social classes.

A mason moving from one construction site to another, a driver switching neighbourhoods based on where employment emerges, or a nurse relocating near a hospital posting ~ all share the same condition of impermanence. Even highly paid professionals in metropolitan cities live on rent close to their offices, not because they lack attachment elsewhere, but because ownership in large cities has become financially unreachable and daily commuting physically exhausting. Work determines location. Property determines belonging. India’s labour economy therefore runs on circulation, not migration in the classical sense. People move repeatedly between origin and destination, sometimes annually, sometimes seasonally, sometimes across decades ~ yet rarely do they fully transfer their economic roots. This is where the census encounters friction.

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Enumeration captures physical presence. But governance, welfare design and political representation are shaped by assumptions of stable residence. The result is a mismatch between how Indians live and how institutions imagine them. At the same time, their home regions remain economically relevant to them. Assets lie there. Parents live there. Inheritance awaits there. Old age will likely return them there. Their political and economic stakes therefore continue to rest where they are counted as “residents,” even if they are physically absent for much of the year. This does not mean the census system is broken. It means the system is outdated. India is neither fully rural nor fully urban. It is a country in motion, where employment flows faster than housing, infrastructure, or affordability.

Treating migrants as people who must eventually choose one place over another misunderstands how Indian households distribute risk. The real question for the census, therefore, is not where migrants should belong, but how the state should govern mobility itself. How should cities plan services for populations that fluctuate but never settle? How should welfare portability function when residence changes but economic roots do not? How should development funds be allocated when people live in one place, earn in another and retire in a third? Census 2027 will not answer these questions by counting alone. But it can force policymakers to acknowledge a simple truth: India’s future will not be shaped by permanent settlement, but by permanent movement. To govern such a country, the challenge is not to make people choose where they belong ~ but to design institutions that recognise that many Indians belong to more than one place at once.