Assess the problems being faced by India on account of illegal migration into the country. (2010, 40 Marks)
India receives undocumented migrants mainly from Bangladesh, across a 4,096 km border, and in smaller numbers from Myanmar; Nepali movement is lawful under the 1950 Treaty. Assessing the problems means separating the documented from the asserted. Myron Weiner (“Security, Stability, and International Migration”, 1992–93) showed that states see migrants as political, cultural, economic or diplomatic threats, and that a threat perception is a political fact even when its numbers are shaky.
The problems, weighed
| Problem | What is claimed | What the evidence supports |
|---|---|---|
| Security | Infiltration of operatives, insurgent sanctuary | Sanctuary was real until Dhaka’s 2009 crackdown; document fraud is a genuine counter-intelligence problem |
| Crime | Trafficking, cattle and arms smuggling, narcotics, counterfeit currency | Best evidenced, through prosecutions and rescues |
| Demographic | Indigenous peoples becoming minorities | Established in Tripura (tribal share 31.8% in 2011, about half in 1941); partial in Assam’s border belt; unproven nationally |
| Electoral | Migrants turned into vote banks | Individual cases documented; the aggregate claim failed the NRC test |
| Economic | Lost jobs, depressed wages, strained services | Real at the bottom of local labour markets, small nationally |
| Land and environment | Encroachment on forest, grazing and char land | Strong where land defines identity |
Problems of governance
- No reliable count: ministers have cited 10 to 20 million without method, while the 2001 census recorded about three million Bangladesh-born residents, many of them Partition-era arrivals.
- Documents through patronage: Partha Chatterjee’s “political society” (The Politics of the Governed, 2004) explains how undocumented residents acquire ration cards and voter identity through local bargaining, not law.
- Expulsion that cannot happen: Bangladesh accepts returns only after verifying nationality, so Foreigners Tribunals and detention, including the Matia transit camp, produce confinement without removal.
- Burden on citizens: the reversed burden of proof and the Assam NRC (19,06,657 excluded in 2019, never notified) fall hardest on poor citizens, especially women without land or school records, a point Sanjib Baruah presses.
Social, diplomatic and federal problems
- Communal polarisation: the issue is easily fused with India’s Bengali-speaking Muslim minority, a process Sujata Ramachandran describes as the construction of “the illegal Bangladeshi”.
- Exploitation: undocumented status makes migrants cheap and abusable, sustaining the employer demand that pulls them in.
- Bilateral strain: the NRC and the CAA (2019) were read in Dhaka as accusations. Push-ins sent 2,303 people across between May 2025 and January 2026 on Dhaka’s count, 126 of them Indian nationals; Bangladesh pressed the issue at border-force talks in June 2026, and Human Rights Watch documented expulsions of Indian citizens.
- Federal friction: Assam and Tripura press for enforcement while Mizoram shelters Myanmar’s Chin refugees as kin.
Assessment
The gravest problems are not numbers but governance failures: India cannot count the flow, cannot deport, has no refugee law, and lets documents be obtained through patronage. The Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025 raised penalties and reporting duties but still created no refugee category or status procedure. The Supreme Court’s 4:1 ruling upholding Section 6A (October 2024) located the failure in detection, not law. Crime and local demographic stress are serious; the national “invasion” claim is not borne out, and the push-ins show enforcement now generating problems of its own.
Conclusion
Illegal migration poses a moderate, regionally concentrated problem that securitised politics has magnified. Credible enumeration, faster and fairer adjudication, a status-determination law, regulated work permits of the kind Sanjoy Hazarika has proposed, and a readmission protocol with Dhaka would address it better than rhetoric that alarms citizens and alienates neighbours.