Context: Drought, declining agricultural livelihoods and shrinking rural employment are pushing families towards sugarcane fields, brick kilns and construction sites, disrupting children's education.
- Scale of the problem: The last Census recorded 9.29 crore migrant children in India; however, the current number of out-of-school migrant children is not reliably known.
- NITI Aayog report: School Education System in India: Temporal Analysis and Policy Roadmap for Quality Enhancement highlights educational exclusion, with migration-related schooling disruptions often lasting five to six months.
Challenges Faced by Migrant Children
- Interrupted education: Frequent movement between source and destination locations causes learning loss, irregular attendance and increased dropout risks.
- Learning and social gaps: Discontinuity weakens foundational literacy and numeracy, peer relationships, emotional well-being and children's sense of belonging in school.
- Risk of child labour: Economic distress and accompanying parents to worksites can push children into work, compromising their education and development.
- Inadequate educational support: Enrolment-focused interventions often fail to provide remedial teaching, academic continuity, mental-health support and individualised learning assistance.
- Teacher preparedness: Conventional teacher-education programmes largely assume stable residence and continuous schooling, leaving teachers insufficiently prepared for mobile learners and sociocultural inequalities.
Existing Government Initiatives
- Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (2001): Expanded school access and promoted alternative educational models, including seasonal hostels, residential schools, basti shalas, sakhar shalas (sugarcane schools), tent schools at construction sites and transit education centres.
- Right to Education Act, 2009: Provides free and compulsory elementary education for children aged 6–14 years, establishing a statutory foundation for educational inclusion.
- National Education Policy (NEP), 2020: Emphasises equitable and inclusive education, recognising the need to address the barriers faced by socioeconomically disadvantaged and migrant children.
- NITI Aayog recommendations: Include migration-responsive schooling, bridge learning centres, portable school records, inter-State transfer mechanisms and tracking systems to maintain educational continuity.
Way Forward
- Ensure learning continuity: Establish flexible admission, portable academic records and coordinated inter-State student-transfer systems to prevent children from losing educational progress during migration.
- Strengthen bridge education: Provide bridge courses, foundational literacy and numeracy support, remedial teaching and age-appropriate learning assessments at both source and destination locations.
- Expand context-specific schooling: Adapt seasonal hostels, mobile learning centres and worksite schools to local migration patterns, ensuring trained teachers, learning materials and adequate infrastructure.
- Reorient teacher education: Integrate migration-responsive pedagogy, multilingual teaching, sociological understanding and inclusive classroom practices into teacher-training programmes.
- Provide holistic support: Link education with nutrition, child protection, counselling, mental-health support and monitoring to reduce dropout and prevent child labour.
- Improve institutional coordination: Strengthen cooperation among source- and destination-State governments, schools, local bodies and civil society organisations to track children and ensure uninterrupted entitlements.
Conclusion: An inclusive education system must move beyond enrolment to meaningful learning. Migration-responsive schooling, pedagogical flexibility and institutional coordination can ensure that mobility does not determine a child's educational future.
