Migrants in India comprise 37 per cent of the Indian population and are estimated to be 45 crore individuals. The bulk of this is people migrating, along with their families, to different states or districts in search of work. They face harsh circumstances and conditions including the lack of access to healthcare, fair wages, government entitlements, housing, all amidst the language and cultural barriers.

There is an opportunity to bring creativity and innovation to solve the many challenges faced by migrants. We invite you and your team to solve one or more of these problems:

1. How to help migrant workers calculate wages?

   Presently most migrant workers blindly trust their contractor to give them the wage that they were promised. While they know their per hour or per piece rate - calculating the total is challenging with limited access to smartphones, levels of literacy and understanding of calculation.

Things to think about when designing a solution*:***

• Migrant workers are most comfortable in vernacular languages.
• Migrant workers may not be aware of minimum wage entitlements.

1. How to enable migrant workers to find a house when they migrate?

   Workers migrating to tier-1 and tier -2 cities for employment have found housing to be a huge challenge.  This challenge has attempted to be addressed by the government by several schemes. However, often migrants are unaware of housing projects, these houses are situated far away from their place of employment. Further, most reliable information sources for housing is usually through networks within the migrant community and is not accessible to all.

   Things to think about when designing a solution*:***

   • Housing needs depend on who has migrated. There are three broad categories: single male migrant workers, a couple - husband and wife (they are paid together), and a family.
   • Migrants often rent houses close to their place of work. Choice of house is determined by cost and distance from place of work.

2. What can be used by migrant workers to record their attendance at work?

   There is no formal mechanism to record attendance by workers who are usually paid as per a daily rate - workers payment is contingent on the honesty of the employers. Attendance registers even though mandated are seldom up to date.  Currently migrants are advised to maintain a register of their own attendance on a piece of paper. However, these are often lost, not maintained and are not in a condition to be relied on.

   Things to think about when designing a solution*:***

   • Any solution must record attendance in a manner that would permit it to be used as evidence in formal disputes raised by the worker.
   • There are existing attendance trackers that are not reaching people on the ground.

3. How to ensure vaccinations are provided to children of migrant workers?

   When families migrate across states with their families for work - vaccinations for their children between the ages of 0-6 years are often missed. This is caused due to a variety of factors - language (the destination state Anganwadi workers speak a different language), lack of awareness of the Universal Immunisation Programme (UIP) by the government as well as limited knowledge about where to obtain vaccines.

4. Can you think of any other service to provide migrant workers?

   If there is a solution you have in mind which addresses a problem other than those highlighted above - start there, design a solution, build and test a prototype, and present it! The only thing you must keep in mind is that it must be a solution designed for migrants.

   You could build any solution for migrants - right from a low-tech job portal for migrant workers (to bridge information asymmetry between jobs at destination and worker at origin), to health insurance products for workers - sky's the limit.

Guidelines for building the Solution:

1. Teams are expected to work on any one of the above problem statements and build a first basic working version of the solution.
2. This working first version of the product (called a Minimum Viable Product in startup language) should be such that a small group of migrants could actually play around with and use it. A MVP engages your core community (in your case migrants) and generates real learning about what the shape of the eventual solution should be. It is often skeletal and militates against your perfectionism! You can read more about how to build an MVP here.
3. To ensure that the assumptions on the basis of which the eventual MVP has been built are valid, teams will need to test them through methods such as surveys, interviews/secondary research, and prototyping. The more assumptions you test, the more informed your final solution will be.
4. While the eventual MVP is also a kind of prototype that allows you to learn about the eventual solution, teams are encouraged to create early prototypes that may not have inherent value to migrant workers (for example, something that just simulates what a product could feel like) but will help teams understand how to improve their solutions.
5. Here is a data set of 2943 Migrant Workers in India - providing their age, gender, level of literacy, family members, documents possessed, income, access to smartphones etc. This data can be used as a sample - to understand the existing position of migrants, resources available to them as well as their constraints. It should help answer questions about feasibility as well as what can be used by migrants.
6. Your solutions need not be only technological solutions; use technology, data, human capital, and whatever other resources, as appropriate, to create the best solutions.

Indicative Timeline for Building your Solution