New Delhi: With large number of migrant workers walking on foot to reach their destinations, the union home ministry came up with online portal for States to coordinate their movement using buses and special trains. The dashboard namely, National Migrant Information System (NMIS) has been developed by National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) and is available on the existing NDMA-GIS portal for states.

After 21 days of lockdown was announced on April 21, migrant workers were forced to walk thousand miles to reach their destination as most of them were left with little or no earnings by the time first phase of lockdown ended. “The portal will maintain a central repository and help the sending as well as receiving State and district to ask for and give their acceptance in an online format seamlessly. This system will help in speedy communication between states without creating additional work at the level of the field officers,” the home ministry said in a communication to States.

Officials said the portal has additional advantages like contact tracing, which may be useful in overall COVID response work. States can upload batch file of individual data on the portal. As many States have already collected migrant data, this can be integrated through Application Programming Interface (API). So far, it is expected that about 3.5 lakh migrant workers have been moved in 350 trains.

On the newly launched dashboard, the States will be required to provide details of each migrant worker including name, age, mobile number, originating destination district, date of travel. This will further help the States to keep a track on number of people going out from where and how many are reaching destination states, said an official adding that the mobile numbers of people can be used for contact tracing and movement monitoring during COVlD-19.

“The portal helps generate a unique ID for each migrant, which can be used for all transactions. The IDs of people moving by a particular train will be given to Railways by the Origin State, when giving the requisition of trains. In this way the data will be visible to destination states too and can be used for further monitoring. In case of return journeys by such workers in near future, this application will act as a ready database or planning such return in a systematic manner. States can upload individual data on the portal using the application provided to them,” NDMA stated.

The state governments are required to depute of a nodal officer for this purpose at State and district level, ensure smooth flow of the data from the states to NMIS portal in the requisite data formats and share data using online portals, through API in cases where, the States have their own online platform, officials added.