Maharashtra’s Maha-Migrant Tracking System (Maha-MTS)

Policy Update
Gargi Bisht

Seasonal migration is not only a transfer of labor; for vulnerable groups, it can also lead to the temporary deprivation of many services such as nutrition, immunization, education, health, and child-protection systems. Maharashtra’s Maharashtra Migration Tracking System (Maha-MTS) is an innovative response to this challenge because it attempts to provide migrant-friendly services rather than trying to stop migrations.

Maharashtra’s Maha-MTS was launched as a pilot project in 2021 and officially started its operations in 2022. It was initiated by the Maharashtra Department of Women and Child Development (DWCD) to tackle the challenge of tracking vulnerable seasonal migrant children, pregnant women, and lactating mothers by utilizing identification and destination-based service portability systems (The Indian Express, 2022). The framework focuses on gender-sensitive data, education, labor, and child-protection protocols around the entire migrant household rather than treating women solely as vectors for child benefits.It was reported that Maharashtra has become the first state in India to develop a website that tracks seasonal migrants and facilitates the portability of Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS).

This project is vital for migrant families because it tries to resolve the paradox of a welfare state by recognizing the right of migrants to receive services in their destination regardless of their migration status. In other words, the idea of Maha-MTS aims to bridge the gap between the government’s social security programs and the informal economy by making services more accessible to seasonal workers and their families. It becomes apparent that the significance of Maharashtra’s initiative stems from its ability to shift the paradigm of migrant integration from preventing movements to making services available regardless of location.

Background

For decades, Maharashtra has witnessed seasonal out-migration from drought-affected and economically backward regions like Marathwada and parts of Vidarbha and northern Maharashtra. Households migrated after the monsoon and returned after sowing season, working in sugarcane, brick kilns, construction, and other industries. An IIPS-UNICEF study on Jalna reveals that seasonal migration was particularly acute among landless and marginal farmers and adversely affected children’s education, nutrition, health, and protection (IIPS India, 2022).

The vulnerability was evident in immunisation coverage too. A study on routine immunisation in rural Maharashtra observed that fully immunised children from seasonal sugarcane migrant households were 70.5%, as compared to 89.5% for non-migrant children. The primary reason was a lack of clarity on where and when to get vaccinated, and vaccination services were not available at workplaces (Pakhare et al., 2014). Migration created an administrative discontinuity. The child may be registered with an Anganwadi centre (AWC) in his home village, but he may be away for six months and have no access to services there. The situation was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Functioning

At the source, Anganwadi workers and supervisors identify potential migrant beneficiaries and collect details such as their name, mobile number, reason for migration, and destination. It assigns them a unique migrant ID and creates a migration record in the system. Upon reaching the destination, the supervisor there can view the migrant beneficiary and accept them by allocating an AWC. The services provided at the destination can then be uploaded, and the beneficiary can be marked as returned. It is a form of a progressive entitlement model, which builds on the existing ICDS framework. It was initially piloted in six districts – Amravati, Chandrapur, Palghar, Nandurbar, Jalna, and one block in Gadchiroli – and eventually scaled up to all 36 districts.

The transition from Version 1.0 to Version 2.0 is also noteworthy. It shifted from rural to rural-urban migration, web-based to mobile application (with offline sync), tracking ICDS/ICPS beneficiaries to tracking all household members, and outward migration to inward and return migration. The system’s architecture also promotes convergence, and the government has identified potential areas such as education, public health, MGNREGA, labour, food and civil supplies, and the Maharashtra State Rural Livelihoods Mission. Significantly, it was a low-cost innovation. According to documentation, the total project cost was around ₹7 lakh, and the software development was done by UNICEF-Maharashtra, with the DWCD retaining the copyright (MCRHRDI).

Performance

The first significant achievement of the Maha-MTS system is that it produces an administrative view of seasonal migration in Maharashtra. During the pilot phase, it identified 36,761 potential migrant beneficiaries and recorded 23,487 actual migrant beneficiaries. It also highlights the migration corridors as 36,761 beneficiaries from Gadchiroli migrated to Telangana, while 23,487 from Palghar and Nandurbar migrated to Gujarat. Meanwhile, Chandrapur and Jalna recorded a significant outflow to Karnataka (The Indian Express, 2022). More importantly, it begins to show entitlement retention rates. The pilot data reveals that out of 25,260 beneficiaries who migrated, 17,337 received services (The Indian Express, 2024).

The later evaluation offers a nuanced perspective on the performance of the system. It examined the data of 69,195 potential migrant beneficiaries and found that 21,472 of them had actually migrated. Out of these, 10,161 were accepted at the destination (Geneva Health Forum Cartography, 2024). It highlights the difference between enumeration and entitlement. While the migrant information system (MIS) seems to be performing well in finding beneficiaries, it has only retained a little more than half of them.

It should be noted that the acceptance rate varied across categories of migrants. Pregnant women had the highest acceptance rate at 49%, followed by children at 46% and nursing mothers at 43% (Geneva Health Forum Cartography). The data implies that the largest challenge for the Maha-MTS system lies not in the source but in the destination, where another administrative system is required to ensure that migrants receive the services to which they are entitled.

Impact

Seasonal migrants have traditionally been caught in between, with neither the source nor the destination willing to assume responsibility for their welfare. To a large extent, that has been the situation in Maharashtra as well. As the Indian Express noted during the pilot phase, the state “had no mechanism in place to systematically enumerate this vulnerable group of seasonal migrant workers” (The Indian Express, 2022). Maha-MTS begins to address that capability gap, as it helps the state see the seasonal migrant workforce with more clarity.

That can have implications for policymaking. For instance, if government officials identify which villages primarily feed into which sugar mills, brick kilns, or districts, welfare planning can be more nuanced, both in terms of anticipating needs at the destination and building capacity at the source. For instance, the Maha-MTS system can enable targeted anganwadi worker recruitment, organised vaccination camps, supplementary nutrition provisions, and other services.

As the 2024 evaluation report observed, “89% of seasonal migration recorded in the Maha-MTS was intra-state with 6% going to Gujarat and 4.6% to Karnataka (Geneva Health Forum Cartography). Meanwhile, the data on entitlements highlights gaps in service delivery. The findings show that while 81% of pregnant women, 72.5% of nursing mothers, and 66.7% of children received entitlements at the destination, many were denied entitlements there. These insights can help the state refine its welfare strategies in the future.

Finally, there is a question of portability of entitlements. Ideally, the migrant worker should not have to navigate multiple systems but should be able to easily transfer his entitlements from the source to the destination. The fact that MTS migration management software is being developed at the state level suggests that the state aims to make that happen. After all, the software is designed to promote administrative convergence. It is a recognition that the problem of seasonal migrant workers is not one of eligibility but of implementation. The migrant worker in Maharashtra, for instance, should not have to reapply for anganwadi services at the destination when he has already been registered at the source.

Emerging Issues

During the early pilot, Palghar recorded 6,462 registered migrants; 1,711 could not be located and another 2,553 were still being traced (The Indian Express, 2022) This exposes a structural problem: migrants often work in informal, temporary and geographically dispersed locations. An app cannot locate a family if the destination itself is unstable or if workers move between worksites.

The initial system was particularly dependent on rural Anganwadi networks. Officials acknowledged that staff shortages made tracing migrants in large cities such as Mumbai difficult. (The Indian Express, 2022). The subsequent shift towards rural and urban tracking is therefore important, but urban portability requires much stronger coordination with municipal bodies and destination-level institutions.

Maha-MTS rightly focuses on pregnant and lactating women and children because these groups face particularly acute health and nutrition risks. Yet this design also means that adult migrant workers themselves are not the principal beneficiaries being tracked. The gender dimension is particularly important. Rajput and Jatav (2025) argue that female seasonal migrants experience multiple and overlapping vulnerabilities rooted in gender norms and that gender-sensitive migration data is necessary for equitable social protection. Thus, the system should not treat women simply as vectors through which child benefits are delivered. Migration data should also capture women’s occupational conditions, access to reproductive healthcare, safety and social-security needs.

The current Maha-MTS dashboard itself warns that its data are provisional and subject to reconciliation with offline data synchronisation from the mobile application (Mahamts). Seasonal migrants are precisely the population most likely to experience unstable connectivity, changing phone numbers and weak digital access. The offline functionality introduced in Version 2.0 is therefore essential, but it also creates the need for strong data-validation mechanisms.

Maha-MTS handles potentially sensitive information concerning children, pregnancy, health and migration destinations. Its functioning has historically involved identity documents and mobile numbers. India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, 2025 now establish requirements around clear notice, specified purposes and informed consent for applicable processing. Consequently, the future of Maha-MTS should include explicit safeguards on data minimisation, access controls, retention periods, interdepartmental sharing and grievance redressal. The more departments that gain access to the system, the greater the need to ensure that data collected for welfare portability does not gradually become a general-purpose surveillance database.

Way Forward

First, Maharashtra should shift the primary performance metric from “migrants tracked” to “entitlements successfully delivered.” A district dashboard should hence report the number identified, migrated, accepted, services actually received and beneficiaries successfully restored to the source system.

Second, destination-side institutions need to be strengthened. The weakest link in the current architecture appears to be acceptance and service delivery at destinations. Formal migration corridors, with named destination Anganwadi Centres, nodal officers and inter-state protocols could reduce this gap.

Third, Maha-MTS should become genuinely multi-sectoral. Its existing architecture already envisages convergence with education, health, labour, MGNREGA and food distribution. The next stage should integrate these systems around the migrant household rather than merely exchanging information between departments.

Fourth, the system needs a stronger child-protection layer. IIPS-UNICEF research in Jalna found that seasonal migration creates risks of disrupted education, abuse, neglect and early marriage, particularly for girls (IIPS India). Tracking children therefore cannot stop at nutrition; it must trigger educational continuity and protection interventions.

Finally, privacy should be designed into the system rather than treated as a compliance exercise. Data collected should be proportionate to the welfare objective, access should be role-based, and beneficiaries should be informed about what is collected and why.

Conclusion

The greatest achievement of MAHA MTS is therefore not the creation of an app. It is the recognition that seasonal migration requires welfare administration to become portable. Evidence from the pilot and subsequent assessments demonstrates meaningful progress in enumeration, migration mapping and continuity of ICDS services. At the same time, the gap between potential migrants, actual migrants, destination acceptance and successful service delivery shows that technology has not eliminated the institutional barriers facing mobile populations.

The next phase of Maha-MTS should consequently be judged less by how many migrants it can track and more by whether a child who leaves Jalna for a sugarcane field in another district can receive the same entitlement there that she would have received at home. That is the real test of portability and ultimately, of whether Maha-MTS can transform migrant visibility into migrant rights.

Reference

ICDS Project. Migration Tracking System Maharashtra State. https://mahamts.in/index?
Kumar, P., Wadhwani Institute of Technology and Policy, Wadhwani Foundation, Das, K., & Aggarwal, S. (2021). Creating jobs. Changing lives introduction to data driven decision making & AI for good governance.https://mcrhrdi.gov.in/splfc2023/week5/Dr%20MCR%20HRD%20Institute%20-%20WITP.pdf
Chakraborty, R. (2022). “In a first, Maharashtra app maps workers’ migration for portability of ICDS scheme.” The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/governance/maharashtra-app-maps-workers-migration-for-portability-of-icds-scheme-7868345
Chakraborty, R. (2022). “Of 25,260 beneficiaries who migrated, all services under ICDS provided to 17,337 through Maha MTS” The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/maharashtra-women-child-development-interview-migrants-8279706/lite/
Sankhe, T., & Bendrikar-Shinde, D. (2024). “Mitigating Vulnerabilities of Seasonal Migration: Case of Maharashtra Migration Tracking System.” Geneva Health Forum 2024. https://cartography.genevahealthforum.com/images/posters/posters_2024_pdf/sankhe_tiksha.pdf
Rajput, K., & Jatav, M. (2025). “Seasonal Migration, Gender, and the Maharashtra Migration Tracking System.” Economic & Political Weekly, 60(36). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/397473517_Seasonal_Migration_Gender_and_the_Maharashtra_Migration_Tracking_System

About the Contributor

Gargi Bisht is a history postgraduate from Miranda House, specializing in medieval history. Her interest lies at the intersection of history, research, and public policy, exploring issues related to governance, society, development, and international relations.

Acknowledgement

The author would like to express sincere gratitude to the IMPRI team for providing this valuable opportunity and for facilitating a platform to engage in and contribute to research and policy discourse, and also the reviewers Nivedya Murali and Anooran Bordoloi

Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.