India's Minister of State for External Affairs Kirti Vardhan Singh on 8 May 2025 highlighted how India's holistic approach to emigration, backed by digital innovation, covers every stage of overseas employment — from hiring and pre-departure preparation to safe transit, dignified employment, and eventual return and reintegration. Speaking at a side event of the Second International Migration Review Forum at the United Nations, Singh said digital technologies are no longer mere enablers but are "reshaping governance itself".

What the eMigrate Platform Does

The event, organised by India's UN Mission on the theme "Leveraging Digital Innovation in Migration Governance", spotlighted India's eMigrate system as a comprehensive digital governance tool. Singh explained that the platform begins by vetting employers and recruiters, bringing transparency to the hiring process and allowing prospective workers to verify credentials and avoid fraud.

"Currently, we have around 2,98,000 registered foreign employers and 2,457 active recruiting agents registered on the eMigrate portal," Singh said. Beyond employer verification, the platform integrates with skilling, employment, documentation, and service delivery systems, offering multilingual interfaces, online grievance redressal, and payment transfers — all at no cost to workers.

India's Open-Source Commitment to the Global South

India's Permanent Representative P. Harish underscored the country's commitment to South-South cooperation, noting that India has deliberately kept its digital public platforms free and open-source. "We have not patented these digital public platforms. We have made it available for free, put it on the net in an open source format, made available to our friends and partners so that they can adapt it according to their needs and requirements," he said.

Harish added that sharing these tools is "very much a part not only of our bilateral but also of our UN-mediated South-South cooperation frameworks" for assisting partners in the Global South. He also stressed that the distinction between refugees and migrants must be maintained in international discourse.

International Response and Endorsements

The event drew strong praise from multilateral and bilateral partners. International Organisation for Migration (IOM) Senior Director Kim Eling said India is "demonstrating how technology can be used, not simply to modernise systems, but to better protect people", calling the scale of eMigrate operations "amazing".

Ecuador's Vice Minister of Human Mobility, Saul Pacurucu, noted that Ecuador has moved 100 per cent of its consular services online and expressed intent to learn from India's experience in coordinating interoperability of digital platforms across the labour migration cycle.

Saudi Arabia's Permanent Representative Abdulaziz Alwasil highlighted that the Kingdom hosts over 10 million foreign workers and has undertaken wide-ranging reforms under its national transformation agenda. He pointed to Saudi Arabia's Qiwa platform — which handles contract authentication, job mobility, visa issuance, and compliance monitoring — as a comparable effort linking workers, employers, and regulators through a unified digital ecosystem.

Broader Significance for Labour Migration Governance

The event comes at a time when global migration governance frameworks are under renewed scrutiny, with the Second International Migration Review Forum serving as a key multilateral checkpoint. India's eMigrate model is increasingly being cited as a replicable template for developing nations grappling with informal recruitment channels, worker exploitation, and fragmented documentation systems.

With India being one of the world's largest sources of overseas labour, the governance architecture underpinning emigration has direct consequences for millions of workers in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Southeast Asia, and beyond. As more nations express interest in adapting the platform, the coming months will test whether eMigrate's open-source model can achieve meaningful multilateral uptake.