PDAG's labour migration research for the ILO India Country Office, commissioned under the ILO's work on promoting safe employment pathways and fair recruitment practices, delivered a rapid baseline mapping of international labour migration trends from Indian states. The baseline mapping assessed how state-level institutions, policies and delivery systems for labour migration have evolved across India, and how governance maturity differs from state to state.

PDAG's policy research team built a maturity index applying an Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) matrix, to score and rank all states by migration maturity — arriving at a final set of 15 states, with eight (8) classified as "mature" and seven (7) classified as "emergent". For each state, the team further mapped in-detail migration stocks and flows, principal destination countries, and the relative maturity of state-level governance and support systems for outbound workers, drawing on secondary data spanning 2015 to 2026.

State-level briefs prepared as an outcome of the exercise will be used by ILO India Country Office as evidence base for sequencing where to invest programming effort and resources on safe migration and fair recruitment across India's diverse and unevenly documented migration corridors.