How ‘Pravasi’ erases India’s migrant workers

Retire Pravasi — a term steeped in ceremonial nationalism, and blind to exploitation. Instead, adopt ‘migrant worker’ — a term rooted in law, rights, and lived reality

For nearly two decades, labour migration has been my reporting beat across the Arab Gulf. Years have been spent covering labour camps, in rural recruitment hubs across India where workers sink into debt before their journey even begins, and in domestic workers’ shelters tucked into the shadows of Gulf cities, where women arrive bruised, starved, and terrified.

Wage thefts have been documented, so have heat deaths, unlawful detentions, and every shade of exploitation that the labour market in West Asia produces — and that which India quietly absorbs.

Yet through all these years, one word is seen everywhere — from press notes and embassy briefings to ministerial speeches and diaspora functions: Pravasi. A word the Indian State uses with pride. A word that applies to a billionaire investor in Dubai and a scaffolding worker in Riyadh at the same time.

In India’s political vocabulary, Pravasi has become a convenient umbrella — a celebratory diaspora label centred on remittances, prestige, and ‘soft power’. It honours the affluent and globally mobile, not the millions of Indian workers who build, clean, and survive under structurally violent labour systems.

And therein lies the political failure.

By calling labour migrants Pravasi, the State performs a linguistic erasure — collapsing the brutal realities of migrant labour into a glossy, feel-good narrative of the ‘global Indian’. Pravasi evokes pride; migrant workers demand protection. One term celebrates, the other demands accountability.

This distinction matters. Gulf governments may promise a cleaner, more worker-friendly Kafala system, but passport confiscations continue, wage theft remains rampant, heat deaths rise, and forced-labour indicators persist. Yet India still views its citizens abroad through the prism of diaspora prestige, rather than labour rights.

The gap between rhetoric and reality is not accidental — it is political. India celebrates its diaspora because it brings remittances. But it avoids the term migrant worker because it brings responsibility.

Responsibility means facing hard truths: millions migrate not by choice but because unemployment, caste discrimination, and economic desperation leave them no alternative; recruitment is riddled with corruption; wage theft is rampant and rarely resolved; grievance-redress systems are weak; and a multi-billion-dollar migration economy runs with almost no oversight.

By refusing to call its citizens migrant workers, India distances itself from global rights frameworks. Pravasi has no standing in international law, no link to ILO protections, no relevance in trafficking or forced-labour discussions. Migrant worker does — and that is exactly why the term is politically inconvenient.

Recognising Indians abroad as migrant workers would force the State to strengthen welfare systems, curb recruitment corruption, negotiate stronger protections, support wage-theft cases, and modernise emigration laws — shifting focus from Pravasi Bharatiya Divas-style spectacle to the daily violence workers endure.

It would also expose a truth India has long masked: wealthy NRIs are never called migrant workers; exploited workers are never called NRIs. But both are conveniently lumped together as Pravasi, burying the suffering of one beneath the prestige of the other.

Even the word itself sanitises reality. Pravasi literally means ‘traveller’ — someone who leaves briefly, returns with gifts, and resumes normal life. That imagery is harmless, even celebratory. But it is dangerously misleading. A migrant worker is not a traveller. He is a construction worker in Riyadh who hasn’t been paid for months. She is a domestic worker in Kuwait whose passport was confiscated at the airport. They are factory workers in the UAE, sleeping in overcrowded rooms with mounting recruitment debt.

By calling them Pravasi, the State strips away the vulnerability inherent in their lives and replaces it with a hollow symbol of remittance pride.

In international negotiations, the term offers no leverage. The UN Convention on the Protection of Migrant Workers, the ILO’s Forced Labour Protocols, anti-trafficking frameworks, wage-theft mechanisms, and bilateral labour agreements — all operate under one recognised category: migrant worker. Diplomacy collapses when India insists on using a ceremonial identity instead of a legal one.

The word Pravasi successfully disguised a massive policy vacuum. Now, as India signs new labour mobility pathways with European countries, and as Gulf Kafala reforms remain uncertain, this moment demands clarity — not sentiment. India cannot negotiate worker protections using a term rooted in culture and diaspora nostalgia rather than labour rights and legal obligations.

If we continue calling them Pravasi, we will continue designing diaspora events instead of protection systems. The next tragedy — another heat death, another mass wage theft, another warehouse fire trapping workers — will again be treated as an isolated incident rather than the predictable outcome of political neglect. What we call our people determines how we treat them.

India must choose: Pride over protection, or protection over pride? Retire Pravasi — a term steeped in ceremonial nationalism, blind to exploitation. Adopt migrant worker — a term rooted in law, rights, and lived reality.

A country that relies so heavily on its migrant workforce owes them this clarity.
Their labour powers our economy. Their remittances sustain entire states. Their deaths — quiet, uncounted, unacknowledged — demand accountability.

Naming them correctly is not wordplay. It is the first step toward protecting them meaningfully.

Rejimon Kuttappan is a migrant rights activist, and author of Undocumented. X: @rejitweets. 

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH)