As India rapidly expands its network of Free Trade Agreements — now covering more than 50 countries, including the pact concluded with New Zealand in December 2025 — a less visible but strategically important opportunity is taking shape. Beyond trade in goods and services, these agreements are opening channels for labour mobility, allowing India to emerge as a key supplier of skilled and semi-skilled workers to ageing economies facing acute workforce shortages. Demography is on India’s side. Policy preparedness is not.
Why labour mobility now matters to India’s growth story
From healthcare professionals and technicians to IT specialists and skilled trades, demand for Indian workers is rising across developed economies. Shrinking working-age populations in Europe, East Asia, and parts of the Gulf are colliding with sustained demand for services and infrastructure. For India, this creates a rare alignment: surplus labour at home and structural shortages abroad. Managed well, labour mobility can boost remittances, upgrade skills, and integrate India more deeply into global value chains.
An emigration regime stuck in another era
India’s outward migration is still governed largely by the “”, designed for a time when overseas employment was concentrated in West Asia and recruitment was dominated by physical agents and paper contracts. The law mandates emigration clearance for workers categorised as Emigration Check Required through a limited number of Protector of Emigrants offices.
While the intent was protection, the outcome four decades later is a cumbersome and uneven system that does not reflect modern labour markets. Digital hiring platforms, cross-border staffing firms, and informal brokers now coexist, but regulation remains control-heavy and fragmented. Migrants are treated more as administrative risks than as economic contributors.
Mobility without a national strategy
Recent legislative efforts such as the Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025 may strengthen border management and enforcement. But migration governance is more than policing entry and exit. Outbound labour migration is currently handled through the India Centre for Migration under the Ministry of External Affairs, supported by grievance portals like MADAD and Samadhan.
These mechanisms are useful, but siloed. India lacks a unified national migration framework that integrates skill certification, bilateral labour agreements, overseas worker protections, and reintegration pathways into a single policy architecture. Internal migration is even more diffusely addressed, with welfare schemes providing partial relief but no comprehensive, rights-based framework for portability of social security and labour protections.
Supplying labour in a closed-citizenship world
India is now the world’s largest source of international migrants, with a diaspora of about 35.4 million, including citizens and persons of Indian origin. Ageing economies increasingly depend on migrant labour while remaining reluctant to extend long-term political or citizenship rights. This contradiction is stark in Gulf Cooperation Council countries and in hubs such as Singapore and Japan, where migrants sustain economies without social or political identity.
The risks are growing. In 2025 alone, over 3,200 Indian nationals were deported by the United States, the highest annual figure so far. Student migration has also surged, with Indians becoming the largest source country for universities in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and Germany. Much of this migration is self-financed, exposing families to high financial and emotional risk amid limited policy oversight.
Remittances mask governance gaps
India has remained the world’s largest recipient of remittances for over a decade, with inflows exceeding $135 billion in 2024–25. These flows support household consumption and stabilise the balance of payments, but they cannot substitute for robust governance. Migration continues because economic incentives are overwhelming. According to the “”, corridors such as India–US, India–UAE, and India–Saudi Arabia are among the largest globally.
Multilateral frameworks like the World Trade Organization’s General Agreement on Trade in Services provide only broad principles. In practice, access and protections depend on bilateral labour agreements, where India’s coverage and enforcement remain uneven.
What a modern migration policy must do
India is at a turning point. As FTAs expand and global demand for labour intensifies, migration must be treated as an economic enabler, not an administrative inconvenience. The failure is not mobility itself, but institutions that have not adapted to it.
A credible national migration framework must:
- Integrate overseas mobility with domestic skill certification and global demand
- Strengthen bilateral labour agreements with enforceable worker protections
- Ensure full portability of social security and welfare benefits
- Reduce bureaucratic burdens on low-skilled and less-educated workers while expanding institutional support
What to note for Prelims?
- Emigration Act, 1983 governs overseas employment of Indian workers
- India is the world’s largest recipient of remittances
- India Centre for Migration functions under the Ministry of External Affairs
- GATS provides a multilateral framework for services trade, including labour mobility
What to note for Mains?
- Analyse how FTAs can facilitate labour mobility beyond trade in goods
- Discuss limitations of India’s current emigration framework
- Examine the risks faced by Indian migrant workers in ageing economies
- Evaluate the need for a comprehensive national migration policy
India’s demographic dividend will not realise itself automatically. In a world that wants Indian labour but hesitates to absorb Indian people fully, mobility must be governed with foresight, dignity, and economic logic. Updating four-decade-old laws is no longer optional — it is central to turning migration into a durable national advantage.
