NITI's state-led emigration roadmap faces questions over law, execution

Experts back stronger state participation in overseas skilling, worker support. Emigration remains a Central topic, requiring clear legal boundaries, institutional capacity, Centre-state coordination

For decades, India has been among the world's largest sources of migrant labour, sending millions of workers overseas every year across construction, caregiving, healthcare, and information technology. With ageing populations and shrinking workforces driving demand for foreign labour in several developed economies, government think tank NITI Aayog has now proposed that states take on a bigger role in preparing and placing workers for overseas jobs — a shift that experts say is economically sound but legally and administratively untested.

 

The idea of states leading the way comes even as out-migration has seen a slight dip. In 2024, the government issued Emigration Clearance (EC) to 387,067 prospective emigrants, down from 398,317 in 2023, according to a Rajya Sabha reply by the Ministry of External Affairs in December 2025. In 2024, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had the highest number of workers to whom ECs were granted, followed by Kuwait and Oman, the data showed.

 

In its May 2026 report titled 'States’ Framework: Advancing International Mobility for Skilled Workers', NITI Aayog recommended that states build dedicated migration ecosystems, encompassing destination-specific skilling, language training, employer partnerships, migrant databases, and worker support systems. The idea is to shift outward migration away from being an individual, informal pursuit towards an institutionally-backed pathway to employment.

 

And while the idea of a states-led emigration architecture may seem attractive, given growing demand for workers in ageing economies, the bigger question is not whether India has people to send abroad, but whether it can build the institutional architecture needed to prepare, protect and place them at scale.

 

India's remittance inflows and its demographic advantage over ageing economies such as Germany and Japan make a strong case for scaling up overseas placements, said Sanjay Shetty, chief business officer at Quess Corp. India remained the world’s largest recipient of foreign remittance inflows in 2024, according to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals Report, 2026.

 

Balasubramanian A, senior vice-president at TeamLease Services, said labour exports were likely to remain India's most viable option in the near term, given that its manufacturing base still lagged China and several Southeast Asian economies.

 

Since India’s regulations, rules, and processes governing the creation and maintenance of such soft and hard infrastructure are largely under the ambit of state or municipal administration, state governments are much closer to the ground level needs of a skills supply pipeline, according to Laveesh Bhandari, president and senior fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP).

 

However, the proposal runs up against the basic Constitutional structure wherein emigration is a Central subject, and states currently have no legal authority to regulate it in any way. Emigration is administered centrally by the Ministry of External Affairs under the Emigration Act, 1983, which governs the registration of recruiting agents, emigration clearance, and the protection of emigrants.

 

Ankit Rajgarhia, partner at Bahuguna Law Associates, said states had considerable administrative and developmental space, but not independent regulatory authority over emigration. At best, states can establish overseas employment cells, run skilling and language programmes, and build migrant welfare services, but can't act as independent regulators of international migration, he pointed out.

 

“If the state's participation increases it may lead to questions regarding division of regulatory responsibilities, coordination with the existing licensing framework, and consistency in implementation. The expansion of state responsibilities would need to be carefully aligned with the existing framework to avoid overlap and maintain a clear division of functions,” Rajgarhia added.

 

The distinction between facilitation and regulation is likely to determine how far states can go in their efforts to promote emigration. While training, counselling and welfare fall comfortably within their administrative domain, activities that touch overseas recruitment or licensing raise questions over jurisdiction and the boundaries of existing legislation.

 

Rishabh Gandhi, founder of Rishabh Gandhi and Advocates, took a similar view but he cautioned that the biggest challenge would be maintaining a clear distinction between facilitation and regulation, warning that state-run recruitment systems could create jurisdictional conflicts with the Centre's licensing framework, raise questions over accountability for recruitment practices and worker grievances, and lead to fragmented standards and compliance uncertainty for foreign employers.

 

“State initiatives must function within a coordinated national framework rather than through independent international engagement. If implemented through integration with the Centre's eMigrate platform, common operating standards and clearly defined institutional roles, the NITI Aayog model can significantly enhance international worker mobility while remaining legally consistent with the existing statutory framework,” said Gandhi.

 

The legal concerns, however, are only one side of the debate. Recruiters and staffing firms, many of whom already work with state governments on overseas placements, argue that the proposal is workable provided responsibilities are clearly delineated between the Centre, states and private agencies.

 

Shetty proposed what he called an "SSC" framework: ‘Strategy’ with the Centre, ‘Sourcing’ with states, and ‘Connecting’ workers to jobs with private recruiters.

 

“Otherwise it becomes sort of a complicated extra layer which might confuse different stakeholders and might cause unnecessary competition because the government has its own specialty and focus,” he added.

 

According to Shetty, the Centre should focus on negotiating government-to-government labour mobility arrangements, setting worker protection standards, and maintaining national technology platforms. States, in turn, should concentrate on mapping talent at the district level, building worker databases, and providing destination-specific skilling and language training. Private recruiters, for their part, can handle employer engagement, compliance with destination-country regulations, and overseas placements.

 

He also argued that state governments should incorporate safeguards against worker exploitation into their migration frameworks, including clear rules for recruiters, blacklisting of violators, and maintaining verified databases of authorised agencies.

 

Industry sees the proposal less as a government-led recruitment programme and more as a coordinated ecosystem in which different stakeholders perform distinct functions. Such a model, recruiters argue, would allow states to focus on expanding the talent pool while leaving overseas employer engagement and compliance to specialised agencies.

 

Balasubramanian described the Centre as the "demand aggregator" that negotiates trade agreements with labour mobility clauses, with states owning the supply side, but noted that different states were likely to follow inconsistent processes in the initial years, since there is currently no uniform template to work from.

 

Even if such a framework is adopted, implementation is unlikely to be uniform. As things stand, only a couple of states have institutional experience in facilitating overseas employment, while most will have to build the required systems from scratch.

 

Kerala's Overseas Development and Employment Promotion Consultants and Telangana's Overseas Manpower Company are frequently cited as templates, but Bhandari cautioned that Kerala's success is closely tied to the state's pre-existing depth in nursing education — an alignment that other states may not be able to replicate simply by copying the institutional structure.

 

He also warned that generic cells housed within labour or skill development departments, without adequate resources and autonomy, tend to underperform, and that overly centralised, bureaucratic institutions lose the flexibility early movers need. Implementation, he added, would require significant capacity and institutional ability that are not uniformly available across all states.

 

Apart from legal constraints and mandate-sharing concerns, capacity is also a major bottleneck.

 

Balasubramanian said India's existing network of Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) is designed for domestic labour requirements, not international placements, and that training infrastructure for overseas-bound workers has to be physical and purpose-built for specific job profiles — from right-hand-drive orientation for prospective truck drivers to clinical adaptation for healthcare workers that cannot be delivered digitally.

 

“The training agency should not also be the certifier because then there will be a vested interest. The assessment has to be done by someone who did not train them. The central government will of course play a role in ensuring that the documentation of these people are also taken care of in an expedited manner because of the mission critical nature of the kind of jobs that these people will be fulfilling there,” he said.

 

Yet, even a well-designed institutional framework may not be enough. Experts caution that India's overseas mobility strategy still rests on incomplete information about international labour demand and the country's own skill base.

 

Abhay Tilak, director and secretary at the Indian School of Political Economy, said India does not even have proper understanding of the domestic labour market, let alone the skill and technology requirements of the countries it hopes to send workers to.

 

“We do not even have a detailed or nuanced understanding of our own market, which is why we have such high unemployment. There is high structural unemployment wherein we have a mismatch between training and employment. We need to better understand the composition of the market in other countries along with the kind of skills and technology used over there,” Tilak said.

 

He also flagged headwinds beyond India's control such as rising anti-immigration sentiment across several developed economies, and the growing use of artificial intelligence and automation by Western economies to partly reduce their dependence on migrant labour.

 

“Capital has no caste, class,or culture, which is why it is the most mobile and everyone wants to import it," he said. "The same cannot be said for labour."